ABSTRACT

The body sizes of US soldiers reported by Gordon et al. (1989) are still the best possible estimates of American civilian adults because most of the results of a newer study by Robinette et al. (2002) are proprietary and not available to the public. In the US military, the Army is the least selective service and hence best presents the general population. Table 2 contains the data measured on the soldiers. In the absence of better information, their anthropometry may be taken as representative of the general population of American civilian adults. Yet, caution is in order when applying the weight data, listed as no. 37 (and related dimensions such as no. 23, abdominal depth, or 28, hip breadth): given the current trend toward obesity, the actual mean and standard deviation are likely to be larger than shown in Table 2.