Pentagon turns to Mike Rowe to reenergize skilled trades training | Headlines

The Army scrapped its height and weight tables and tape test in favor of a semi-annual waist-to-height measurement

The service announced Tuesday. The new assessment will measure a service member's waistline at the naval

and divide that circumference by the person's height in inches to formulate a ratio

Soldiers must have a ratio below 0.55, the Army said. The move follows a January Pentagon directive introducing the standard

Soldiers with a ratio exceeding 0.55 will be subject to a confirmation test

formally flagged and enrolled in the Army Body Composition Program, in an attempt to get the service member back to meeting the standard

The Army has initiated a 180-day assessment period, and no soldiers will be separated for failing the new test during that time

Commanders may test a soldier's waist-to-height ratio if they think the soldier does not meet the standard at any time

The Pentagon's memorandum said that service members who excel at fitness tests

might be given exceptions to the new requirements, but the Army's statement does not include any mention of allowances

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly criticized the armed forces' fitness standards

The new War Department golden rule is this. Do onto your unit as you would have done onto your own child's unit

Would you want him serving with fat or unfit or undertrained troops

Or alongside people who can't meet basic standards? Or in a unit where standards were lowered so certain types of troops could make it in

In a unit where leaders were promoted for reasons other than merit, performance, and war fighting

The answer is not just no, it's hell no. Frankly, it's tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation

and see fat troops. Likewise it completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world It a bad look It is bad and it not who we are So whether you

an airborne ranger or a chair-borne ranger, a brand-new private or a four-star general

you need to meet the height and weight standards and pass your PT test. Alongside changes to physical fitness, Hegseth has also reinstated stricter grooming standards

and pushed for soldiers in frontline roles to meet, quote, the highest mail standard only

The U.S. Army took a new step recently in the realm of autonomous mine laying

During May demonstrations at Camp Grayling, Michigan, soldiers remotely fired the autonomous volcano for the first time

before later having it lay two separate minefields without human assistance. The feat was achieved by pairing the service's decades-old volcano mine dispenser

with a driverless palletized load system truck, an upgrade designed to keep combat engineers out of danger

The system also automatically logs mine locations and uploads it to the Army's shared battlefield map or common operating picture

Soldiers from 4th Engineering Battalion remotely fired inert mine canisters from the dispenser in the demonstration's first live-fire scenario

Then, the system autonomously and simultaneously emplaced two minefields. When mounted to a vehicle, the volcano dispenser can blanket roughly 32 acres

with up to 960 mines. The test represents the Army's latest move to modernize legacy equipment

systems tactics, and munitions with emerging technology. In the combat engineering world

the service is experimenting with using unmanned aerial systems to drop grappling hooks

and it is trying to send drones, instead of humans, into the breach

The Army has also tested autonomous vehicles for mortar resupply and autonomous boats for information gathering

The Pentagon last week presented a check for $10 million to TV presenter Mike Rowe as part of an initiative

to foster the uptake of skilled trades in American workers Rowe is the CEO of a foundation aimed at re interest in trades such as welding plumbing and electrical work

The funding comes through the Pentagon's Build Freedom Initiative, a workforce development program created to improve the U.S. defense industrial base

and was granted to Rowe at a ceremony on July 2nd. We're launching Build Freedom, which has already scaled to 70-plus programs

hundreds of millions of dollars of additional spend and incredible visibility across the country

These projects that we're uniting and that we're supporting with Build Freedom do their heavy

lifting from Honolulu Community College to Danville, Virginia, from the Gulf Coast of Michigan and

everywhere in between. With more things happening every single week, the team's got an amazing set

of ideas. So we're going to go ahead and take this forward here. We're not just building careers for

today. As Mike laid out in the video, we're talking about building careers for the future

AI-proof, six-figure jobs, the ability to work across the country, and to really meet a demand for the future that is at the heart of everything we're trying to do with re-industrializing the country and scaling the industrial base for the future

Throughout our history, the industrial strength of the United States has proven to be decisive in our ability to maintain military advantage

whether it's the Ford Motor Company that was producing a bomber, a B-24 bomber every 63 minutes

from off a mile-long assembly line to the precision weapons of today

American industry and the workforce and the personnel that go in every day

and take their share of defending the nation is critical to the defense of our freedoms

I went to Congress 15 years ago and testified before some committee. It was Rockefeller, I believe, was chairing it

And I said look fellas I not an expert and I don have a crystal ball but I pretty sure if we don close this skills gap if we don get in front of this now and make a more persuasive case for all these open jobs if we don do something to counteract

the narrative that the best path for the most people is a four-year degree and anybody who

doesn't take that path is somehow going to get a vocational consolation prize, if we

don't challenge all of that in a meaningful way, the gap is going to continue to widen

student debt is going to continue to grow and we are going to wind up with a workforce that's

dangerously out of balance and they all agreed to and people on both sides of the aisle called

Mary said we ought to do something we said we're standing by and you know how it goes 15 years

later you called and that's why we blew you off the first time and no it is a matter of national

security. I can't overstate it. Not a day goes by where Mary doesn't get a call from some leader

of some consequential industry in our country who is freaking out. They've done the math

They know that for every five trades people that retire, two come in. It's been that way

for nearly 12 years. The math is not on our side. The stigmas, stereotypes, myths, and

misperceptions that we deal with every day, those can be confronted, those can be changed. This

campaign is an attempt to do that. Every penny of this check goes to work ethic scholarships

for men and women in the dip. But since the cameras are pointed at us, I should also say

that if we're smart, we'll use this as a catalyst. And we will spread the word. And we're going to

disseminate this exact photo that's being taken right now. And I'm going to ask the leaders of

every consequential company in our country. Maybe not to quite match it, but you get the idea

If we can get a significant amount of money standing by, guaranteed to trade men and women in a trade

then the rest, I believe, will fall into place