COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: General
FIGHTING FORCES
Nick Turse, Army Times
Sep 16, 2006
US military recruiting in 2006 has been marked by upbeatpronouncements from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, claims of
success by the White House, propaganda releases by the Pentagon,
and a spate of recent press reports touting the way the military
has made its wo/manpower goals.
But the US armed forces have only met with success through a
fundamental "transformation", and not the transformation of the
military - that "co-evolution of concepts, processes,
organizations and technology" - Rumsfeld is always talking about,
either.
While the secretary of defense's long-standing goal of
transforming the planet's most powerful military into its
highest-tech, most agile, most futuristic fighting force has, in
the words of the Washington Post's David Von Drehle, "melted
away", the very makeup of the armed forces has been mutating
before our collective eyes under the pressure of the war in Iraq.
This actual transformation has been reported, but only in
scattered articles on the new recruitment landscape in the United
States.
Last year, despite NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car
Auto Racing), professional bull-riding and Arena Football
sponsorships; popular video games that doubled as recruiting
tools; television commercials dripping with seductive scenes of
military glory; a "joint marketing communications and market
research and studies" program actively engaged in measures to
target for military service Hispanics, dropouts and those with
criminal records; and at least US$16,000 in promotional costs for
each soldier it managed to sign up, the US military failed to
meet its recruiting goals.
This year, those methods have been pumped up and taken over the
top in 12 critical areas of recruitment that make the old army
ad-line "Be all that you can be" into material for late-night TV
punch lines of the future.
1. Hard sell
When not trolling for potential soldiers via video games,
websites or, most recently, the social-networking site
MySpace.com and text messaging, the armed forces employ
recruiters who use old-fashioned hard-sell tactics to cajole
impressionable teens into enlisting.
Recently, one New Jersey mother told her local newspaper about
the army's persistence in targeting her 17-year-old daughter.
When the mother finally asked the army to stop calling her child,
the recruiter argued vigorously against it. The mother, who
otherwise praised the military, was nonetheless aghast at the
recruiter's tactics. "That's what frightened and enraged me -
this military person telling me that I have no rights over my
child," she said.
Teens are also subject to military advertising and high-pressure
tactics at school. The Boston Globe recently wrote that
recruiters were now setting up booths in "cafeterias in high
schools across the nation", while the State Journal-Register of
Springfield, Illinois, reported that local recruiters were
"visiting each school about every three to four weeks". At one
school, administrators were forced to "clamp down on aggressive
recruiters" and bar at least one from ever returning to campus.
2. Green to gray ....
3. Back-door draft ....
4. Rubber-stamp promotions ....
5. Foreign legion ....
6. Mercenary military ....
7. Abuse of power ....
8. Civilian headhunters ....
9. How low can you go? ....
10. Armed and considered dangerous ....
11. Gang warfare ....
12. Trading desert camo for white sheets ....
Force transformation
When the US war in Vietnam finally ground to a halt, the US
military was in a state of disarray, if not near-disintegration.
Uniformed leaders vowed never again to allow the military to be
degraded to such a point.
A generation later, as the ever less appetizing-looking wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan spiral on without end, an overstretched US
Army and Marine Corps have clearly become desperate. At a
remarkable cost in dollars, effort and lowered standards,
recruiting and retention numbers are being maintained for now.
The result: US ground forces are increasingly made up of a motley
mix of under-age teens, old-timers, foreign fighters,
gang-bangers, neo-Nazis, ex-cons, inferior officers and a host of
near-mercenary troops, lured in or kept in uniform through big
payouts and promises.
In the latter half of the Vietnam War, as the breakdown was
occurring, US troops began to scrawl "UUUU" on their helmet
liners - an abbreviation that stood for "the unwilling, led by
the unqualified, doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful".
The US ground forces of 2007 and beyond, fighting in Iraq,
Afghanistan or any other war, may increasingly resemble the
collapsing military of the Vietnam War, the band of criminal
misfits sent behind enemy lines during World War II in the
classic Vietnam-era film The Dirty Dozen, or the janissaries of
the old Ottoman Empire. ...
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