Yeah, I get that you were addressing my army reserve time in a condescending way.
Didn't you say your background was in boxing, Phantom? As a semi-pro or something?
Imagine I said to you - "Unless you fight Tyson Fury, you have no business commenting on a fight?"
Same idea.
No such thing as semi-pro in boxing; that's just something losers say. Obviously I don't agree with Donny that you should go and fight, lol, but a more accurate comparison would be if he said, 'why are you asking about boxing? Go get in the ring and fight if you want to know', and you then replied with 'I don't need to do that. I've already hit the bag in the gym on weekends.'
Anyway, I think we've laboured this enough.
What I can say honestly is that at age 41, I am in better physical condition than the average Canadian Forces soldier today.
I'm not sure how it is in Sweden...but in Canada, they have been consistently reducing the physical fitness standards and other standards for the sake of "diversity". IMO, such a standard is passable during peacetime, but show its flaws if Russia and China ever ally together to take on NATO.
Then we will all see how well some blue-haired tattooed fat-ass demanding to have their pronouns respected will fare in an ACTUAL war.
But Canada keeps doing it.
The physical fitness standard is now so low that an out of shape 50-year-old can pass it [they used to require 40 push-ups for men in 2000, and 20 for women - now it may not even include push-ups at all, but I'd have to ask one of my active duty friends].
And despite that, Canada STILL can't get sufficient numbers of personnel.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/caf-new-dress-instructions-1.6510961
This part I agree with, and it's embarrassing, but there's reasons for that. The first one being, most people outside of the US don't fall for the propaganda these days. It's no longer easy to get people to join up and participate in what the public now largely recognize as illegal wars of aggression.
In recognizing the push-back that came from Iraq and Afghanistan (see, e.g. David Cameron losing a UK parliamentary vote on military action in Syria), the government opted to focus more on funding private contractors and clandestine units because there's not much of a public outcry when these people are killed, and no one hears about it in the first place (you can read this argument in House of Commons papers).
In the UK, and I'm sure elsewhere, some of our units are not subject to any form of external parliamentary oversight. The reason given is to ensure the safety of operators, but in reality it's because it allows us to carry out interventions that are questionable under international law, and to deny the existence of a UK presence. We send small teams of 'advisors' in and they coordinate things and provide targets while the host nation's military carries it out.
Further to that, the nature of warfare has changed. Since around 2015, a huge amount of money has been invested into things like drone technology, Space technology, and small, well-trained units. We don't really need huge numbers of military personnel like we used to. Numbers are still too low, so they also relax standards and let all sorts of mongs join, but those people generally aren't running around the Falklands with 150lbs on their backs. The blue-haired fatsos are all sat in ops rooms with games consoles.
Ukraine is interesting in some ways because we can now observe how well this plan plays out in reality.