The Pentagon is using a pilot program to shed a longstanding list of medical conditions that have prevented individuals from joining the military for decades.
The program, launched in 2022, has seen 6,000 service members enlist who were previously disqualified for medical conditions, officials said. At that time, the list included 38 conditions. That number has since risen to 51.
The move could help the military services build upon their recent success in meeting recruiting and retention goals. This past fiscal year, which ended in September, marked the first time in at least two years that all the services met their recruiting marks, Military Times previously reported.
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But the branches remain far from seeing pre-COVID 19 levels of recruitment, which still saw declining trends from previous years.
While the pilot program hasn’t entirely eliminated all those conditions as disqualifying factors, the Defense Department has reduced restrictions for select conditions such as attention deficient hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, Lin St. Clair, deputy director of the Pentagon’s accession policy directorate, told Stars and Stripes Wednesday.
ADHD diagnoses make up more than half of the conditions of enlistees in the pilot program, officials said.
Defense Department staff at military entrance processing stations completed 312,000 medical exams over the previous fiscal year. Medical professionals disqualified more than one-third of applicants during their initial exam, St. Clair said.
But that figure fell to about one in five after service medical waivers were applied.
Some of the listed conditions could be overcome with a medical waiver, but the pilot program removes this necessity, which eases the enlistment process.
The program provides guidelines noting when a potential recruit last received treatment or experienced symptoms of their medical condition. Regarding ADHD, those guidelines move treatment time wait periods from three years to one, allowing recent high school graduates with the condition, for example, to enlist in a year rather than waiting the previously required three.
“High school students who have some type of learning accommodation, an individual education program or are on medication — once you graduate high school, you don’t need that anymore,” St. Clair said. “By lowering it to a year, that’s allowed [the military] to pick up a whole bunch of folks.”
The second most common disqualifying condition, meanwhile, is childhood asthma.
Slightly more than one in 10 pilot program enlistees have the condition. Now, individuals who haven’t used an inhaler in the past four years will not need a medical waiver.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
