WASHINGTON - Older men - and women - can now enter the US Air Force and compete with 17-year-olds when they do the physical fitness tests and general aptitude tests before they are admitted to boot camp.

The US Air Force has come out with a new policy to raise the maximum age for recruits from 27 to 39. With this new age limit, thousands of applicants who didn't make it through initial screening because of their age are expected to swarm into recruiting station and re-apply - even those who applied ten years ago.

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This change in the air force recruiting policy comes in the wake of statements by military brass that the services would be needing less people, because of the end of the Iraq deployments and the reduction of forces in Afghanistan.

Before this announcement, the air force had the lowest enlisting age limit at 27. The US Army's maximum age for enlisted recruits stands at 35, the navy at 34, and the marines at 28.

At the Air Force Recruiting Service at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph in Texas, spokeswoman Annette Crawford said the air force would be watching if older recruits could survive the physical fitness tests like their younger peers, and set a more restrictive age limit if necessary.

But military training instructors or MTIs - the air force equivalent of army drill sergeants - are not worried. These MTI's are senior non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who are between 30 and 40 years old on the average, and they've known older recruits who were better prepared for the physical tests than 17-year-olds.

Crawford said the change in the maximum enlistment age applies to all enlisted occupation specialties and is not targeted at increasing the number of new airmen in certain areas of the US.

The US Air Force recruits anywhere from 9,000 to 12,000 new airmen every year.

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