You post has some good points and I thank you for posting it.
then if physical fitness needs to be fixed the taxpayers can fund it -- call it a perk of the job from a personal health perspective.
I think that I disagree with this part of your point. If they were capable of being fit to the level required for entry into the military service, they would probably have done it already. Really, the physical fitness level required for entry is NOT that high. Obviously, the original story says this is a problem.
My alternative is to take that money and invest it into a sharp junior NCO to make them into a warrent officer. I see a lot of the key cyber positions being intel and signal warrent officers. You get the benefit of a know quantity of a junior NCO, you are giving them a career track to grow into, and you get deployability inherent as a prior servicemember. The military also gets the inherent benefit of the warrent officer as a career professional who stays within their specialty as opposed to commissioned officers whose assignments go between one associated with their basic branch and "broadening" ones.
It is also important to understand why those physical any physical fitness standards exist. Yes, it is in large part to ensure the service member is capable of performing their job. Another reason is the ability to deploy world-wide. At any given time, a certain percentage of the armed forces is non-deployable for any number of reasons. The higher the percentage of non-deployable service members, the larger the required size of the standing force.
Deployable means being sent to places within a wide range of conditions, from the higher-echelon HQs and units (mostly above Division-level) that are within well-established fixed locations with permanent facilities at one end of the spectrum to the most austere environments at the other end and everything in between.
A counter argument then follows of "do they really need to be deployable?" Maybe, maybe not. If we want to deviate from a standard that applies to the bulk of the force, so be it. I am not necessarily opposed to that, I am pointing out that such a deviation should only be done after careful consideration for the second / third order effects.
To some extend, I do believe that there is some differences with how medical professionals are handled. I am referring to specialized medical professionals. They also have a whole separate accession process and perhaps that would be the appropriate model for the cyber field. As far as I know, the same physical and physical fitness requirements still apply to those medical specialties.
I hope this has been relatively coherent. Time for me to go to work... :)