The United States Coast Guard is the only military service in the United States Armed Forces that does not require mandatory physical training and physical fitness testing for all of its members . For this reason, there is a huge gap between those who are in favor of mandating training and physical fitness tests and those who are against it. Anecdotally, some might conclude that without mandatory physical training and testing your strength levels of fitness and weight compliance will be negatively affected. But is it that simple? Would mandatory physical fitness training and testing improve U.S. Coast Guard weight compliance standards and physical fitness levels? First we need to decide exactly what we are looking for. A force that has a sharp military edge? A fit fighting force? For the purposes of this discussion, we want a combination of both, a proper fighting force that has a sharp military edge. So now we need to ascertain where we stand today to have access to what we need to do to get where we want to go. As stated above, the U.S. Coast Guard does not have a fitness standard but, like all Department of Defense (DoD) services (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines), the U.S. Coast Guard does have a maximum allowable weight and a body fat percentage compliance standard described below. For nearly three decades, the U.S. Coast Guard has relied on a complicated algorithm of height, weight, neck and wrist size, gender and age to determine maximum allowable weight and body fat percentage standards. In 2009, the U.S. Coast Guard implemented the body mass index (BMI) tool used by the Department of Defense as a standard screening tool for maximum allowable weight and body fat percentage. All in all...... middle of the paper......n Revenue cutters. (n.d.). On Wikipedia. Retrieved March 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_ten_Revenue_Service_cuttersAs above, interesting but not so useful.Alexander Hamilton (n.d.) Citizendium, The Citizens' Compendium. Retrieved from http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton This is not a credible source that independently reports the following disclaimer. “All unapproved Citizendium articles may contain factual, bias, grammatical errors, etc. An article is not approved unless it is marked as approved with a dedicated green template at the top of the page, as in the biology article. Approved articles are expected to contain almost no errors. The Citizendium Foundation, the Tides Center and the participants in the Citizendium project make no guarantees regarding the reliability of Citizendium articles or, in general, their suitability for any purpose“.