More than 5,600 people with previously disqualifying medical conditions have been allowed to enlist in the military without having to get a waiver under a pilot program, a defense official said.
The Medical Accession Records Pilot, or MARP, is meant to “address the changing health landscape,” said Lin H. St. Clair, the Pentagon’s deputy director of accessions policy.
“MARP is a procedural change to medical accession standards and not a change to the underlying medical accessions regulation,” St. Clair told Task & Purpose.
Since its inception, the number of ailments covered by the program has grown from 38 to 51, St. Clair said. Under the most recent additions to the medical conditions covered by the program, recruits can enlist without a waiver if they have not been treated for dyslexia and other learning disorders in the past year, and if they have not been treated for airway hyperresponsiveness, including asthma, in the past four years.
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Between July 2022 and August 2024, the program medically qualified more than 9,900 applicants, of which 57% ultimately enlisted, St, Clair said.
About 60% of the recruits who processed under MARP conditions had a history of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, St. Clair said. The pilot program allows people with ADHD to join without a waiver if they have not been treated for the ailment in the past year.
Stars and Stripes first reported the changes on Tuesday.
Only about 23% of young Americans are eligible to enlist in the military without some sort of waiver, Dr. Katie Helland, the Pentagon’s director of military accession policy, told reporters on Wednesday.
Initial results from the program have been positive, Helland said at a Pentagon news briefing.
“We’ll continue to monitor the data, so ultimately, again, to make that decision about these conditions and whether we can build them into our standards instruction,” Helland said.
One of the top recruiting problems that the military faces is that the MHS Genesis system, which uses private medical records of potential recruits at Military Entrance Processing Stations, requires recruits to get waivers for relatively minor health issues, said Katherine Kuzminski, director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C.
By eliminating the need for recruits to get waivers for 51 medical conditions, the Defense Department is recognizing that the waiver process is taking too long and that most of those recruits who apply for such waivers get them in the end, Kuzminski told Task & Purpose.
The pilot program also allows the Defense Department to see if it can allow people to enlist who have medical conditions that the military is prepared to treat if service members develop them after joining, Kuzminski said.
“I have a feeling this limited group of 51 conditions are probably things that there’s already infrastructure within the military services and the military health system when it occurs in service,” Kuzminski said.