Dexter Filkins
speaker
521 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 16 Sep
Dexter Filkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think the moment we're in right now, 2025, if you kind of look at the history of the 20th century, to me looks, you know, more and more like 1938. every day. There's all these authoritarian powers, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, who increasingly are working together. They're North Korean troops fighting for Russia against Ukraine. They're all cooperating with one another.
And they are in the kind of classic sense, revisionist powers. They do not support the status quo. They don't support International law as we know it, which is, you know, basically the edifice of kind of world order for the past 75 years. They're pushing against that. They ignore these things all the time. You see the Chinese ships that are suspected of cutting the undersea cables.
They're pushing everywhere. The most obvious places are Ukraine, where, you know, Russia has been at war there for three years, and Taiwan, where, you know, the Chinese... refuse to recognize the sovereignty of Taiwan, which is an American ally, a vibrant democracy, and one of the world's most important economies.
And so it's a really big question, you know, what do we need to kind of hold all that together? And is it just up to us? But I think the international order as we know it, you know, such as it is, is under more stress than it's been at any time, I think, in the last 75 years.
The Navy has definitely had to lower the requirements. I think what the future soldier training course represents is kind of a – it's like a pre-boot camp preparation course. So, yeah, there's all these young people, 19, 20 years old, and they want to enlist. But then I went down to Fort Jackson and you kind of see it.
And, you know, I started reporting the story thinking it was going to be mostly about the military. But for me, it ended up being mostly about America. You know, America has like what, like a 40% obesity rate. Well, you can see it there at Fort Jackson. And America's got a lot of failing schools. You can see that at Fort Jackson. And so Fort Jackson is sort of the place where the U.S.
military comes face to face with America's youth, such as it is in 2025. For instance, yeah, they're overweight. And so the military's got pretty strict weight standards. They're not really onerous. You know, you don't have to be super ripped to be in the military. It helps. But they're strict about making them. So if you come in and you're, I think it's if you're less than 10% overweight,
You can get into this course, and they'll try to take the weight off of you. And so you have three months to basically lose the weight to get under the Army standard. And the same goes with the aptitude test. So, like, you go to these classes, and they're basically, you know, I hate to say it, but they're basically teaching the test.
So, you know, you do your math problems and your reading comprehension over and over and over, and then you take the aptitude test. And if you pass, you can get in. But they're trying to hold the standards where they are. I think what's remarkable is that there are so many people out there that can't meet these minimum standards.
Yeah, she was remarkable. Her name was Savannah Thorne. I think she's 20 years old. And she's from a little town in... in Georgia, and I met her in the weight loss camp. And she was great. She was smart. She was curious. She was super energetic. And she kind of told me her story. And I think she said she came from this pretty broken family. I think her father was in prison.
Her mom had had a bunch of drug problems. She'd been raised by her grandparents. She went to a recruiting station at age 19, weighing 305 pounds. And she said at one point, I spent most of my childhood watching, playing Call of Duty and eating fast food. And the recruiter looked at her and said, thinking he'd never see her again, lose 100 pounds and I'll talk to you.
So she went out and lost 100 pounds. And so she came back to the recruiting station a year later, weighing 200 pounds. And they took her into the course at Fort Jackson to get down to, I think she had to get down to like 105. 65 or something like 165 pounds or something like that. So they took the last 35 pounds off of her.
And so when I saw her, she was like, she said, I have three more days and I got one more pound to lose. And if I don't lose that one more pound, I'm out. They're going to send me home, but I'm going to make it. And she did. She made it. And she's in boot camp right now.
So far, I think the program's working. It's definitely working in terms of numbers. 25% of the Army's recruits go through either the weight loss clinic or the aptitude course. This year, you know, the year we're in right now, they're projecting it's going to be 30%. Do they keep the weight off? I think they have to.
You know, unless the standards get relaxed, they have to pass a physical test and a weight test twice a year. Now, like the Navy, again, the Navy's really suffering. The Navy's kind of, they've kind of played around with that standard. As well, you know, they've kind of like recently they wiped the slate clean and said anybody who failed to make weight, you know, we're going to forget about that.
And so if you typically if you fail to make weight two times in a row, you're out. And so at least on paper so far, it's working. Like the kids who have lost the weight and passed the tests, the aptitude tests, they're, you know, they're hanging in there.
Well, the big way is, so you take this test. It's called like the Armed Forces, you know, aptitude test or something like that, qualifications test. And it's basically like, you know, kind of miniature, you know, SAT or whatever. And you take that test, and then they score you, you get a score, and then they rank you. And then they rank you in one of five categories, depending on...
how well you did. And so, you know, from one being the top to five where you can't get in, you know, like you're out, you know, these are people that scored really low. The category four is like the lowest category that you can score in and still get in. And so what the, there used to be a rule at the Pentagon that said no service can take more than 4% of its recruits in category four, no more.
Well, they had to relax that rule in 2022 because they weren't getting enough recruits. And so I think last year, 20% of the Navy's recruits are Category 4. So they drop. And that means essentially that you're basically below average in your score. And it's not really an intelligence test. I mean, I think they kind of claim that it is, but it's more of like an achievement test.
But you're basically under 50th percentile. So the Navy has definitely had to drop its standards to keep people coming in.
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