SCHENECTADY, N.Y. ­­­— Doctors serving the nation’s Military Entrance Processing Stations (MEPS) issued a scathing indictment today about the quality of today’s recruits, carrying significant implications for a Department of Defense already struggling with recruiting.

“I’ve been at MEPS for 50 years, and these are the most disappointing buttholes I’ve ever seen,” said Dr. Beauregard Evanchuck, president of the Military Entrance Examiners Union. Asked to elaborate, he cited the twin evils of junk food and video games for rectums that appeared lifeless, wan, and lacking in spunk.

“These are not the buttholes that defeated the Nazis,” he said.

Defense officials have been sounding the alarm for years regarding a downward recruitment trend, with the Army alone falling 10,000 recruits short of its 2023 goal. But no one looks more intimately at the recruiting crisis than the doctors who see it up close. Indeed, for many recruits, these professionals are the first military authority figures they meet and superiors whose orders they feel obligated to follow.

“It's well known that Washington lost more men at Valley Forge to hemorrhoids than hunger or disease," said Dr. Farragut H. Fairbanks from his office in a van near the Schenectady MEPS. “But this goes way beyond buttholes. We used to routinely encounter youthful musculature infused with a subtle, graceful virility. Now, the boys’ muscle tone barely springs back from a gentle, medically-necessary caress.”