> I don't know if this is part of the "healthy at any size" thing or what.

It’s not, that’s silly.

It turns out that it’s kind of hard to establish uniform physical fitness standards at scale! They have to be cheap to implement and easy to execute in a wide range of environments.

No one can agree on how much fitness a soldier needs to be minimally effective, but you know for sure every stakeholder has a strong and incorrect opinion on it. Oh, and if you raise the bar too high, you won’t meet your enlistment goals, and readiness suffers.