The United States Coast Guard is the only military service of the United States Armed Forces that does not require mandatory physical training or fitness testing for all of its members. As a result, there is a huge divide between those who favor mandatory training and fitness testing and those who oppose it. Anecdotally, someone might conclude that without mandatory physical training and testing, your force's fitness and weight levels will be negatively affected. But is it that simple? Would mandatory fitness training and testing improve the U.S. Coast Guard's weight and fitness compliance standards? We must first decide what exactly we are looking for. A force that presents a sharp military appearance? A fighting force in shape? For the sake of this discussion, we want a combination of the two, a tailored fighting force that presents a sharp military appearance. So now we need to determine where we are today in order to determine what we need to do to get where we want to go. As noted above, the U.S. Coast Guard does not have a physical fitness standard but, like all Department of Defense (DoD) services (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines), the U.S. Coast Guard has a maximum weight allowed and body fat percentage. compliance standard described below. For nearly thirty years, the U.S. Coast Guard has relied on a complex algorithm of height, weight, neck and wrist size, gender, and age to determine standards for maximum allowable weight and body weight percentage. body fat. In 2009, the U.S. Coast Guard implemented the Body Mass Index (BMI) instrument used by the DoD as a monitoring tool for maximum allowable weight and body fat percentage standards. Basically...... middle of paper ......n Income cutters. (nd). On Wikipedia. Accessed March 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_ten_Revenue_Service_cuttersSame as above, interesting but not very useful.Alexander Hamilton (nd) Citizendium, The Citizens' Compendium. Retrieved from http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton Not a credible source reporting the following warning itself. “Any unapproved Citizendium articles may contain errors of fact, bias, grammar, etc. An article is not approved unless it is marked as approved with a dedicated green template at the top of the page, such as in the biology article. Approved articles are expected to contain virtually no errors. The Citizendium Foundation, the Tides Center, and the Citizendium Project participants make no representations as to the reliability of Citizendium articles or, generally, their suitability for any purpose..“.