COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: General
Join the Marines... for the Summer
The Nation
January 03, 2007
The other day, the college-age daughter of a friend received ane-letter from a Marine Corps Officer Selection Officer, inviting her to “an
awesome summer training program called the Platoon Leader's Course.”
Think of it as Marine Corps summer camp. No uniforms (“This is not ROTC!”),
but reasonable amounts of moolah. Here’s some of what was on offer to
her, part of a desperate military’s Iraq-era appeal to citizenly duty:
“You will earn approximately $2,400 (six weeks) or $4,000 (ten
weeks)
plus room and board during the training. How's that for a summer
job?.... You will not incur any obligation to the Marine Corps even
after completing the training. (You can choose whether or not to
continue with the program).... Tuition assistance will be available
to you after you complete training this summer. You could
potentially
earn $8,000 to $25,000 for school, depending on graduation date.”
Imagine! The Marine Corps is willing to pay young people to go to a
uniform-less summer camp to test their “leadership potential,” with
no commitment to the Corps necessary. Consider that; then consider
what was certainly the President’s only significant decision of the
holiday season past--to permanently expand the US military by as
many
as 70,000 troops.
Now, as in some old math problem, the question is: How do you
connect
these two points. (Hint: Not with a straight line.)
Faced with a December shot across the bow in testimony before
Congress by Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker, who warned that
the Army “will break” under present war-zone rotation needs,
President Bush responded by addressing the “stressed” nature of the
US Armed Forces. He said, “I'm inclined to believe that we do need
to
increase our troops--the Army, the Marines. And I talked about this
to Secretary [Robert A.] Gates, and he is going to spend some time
talking to the folks in the building [the Pentagon], come back with
a
recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea." All
this was, he added, “to meet the challenges of a long-term global
struggle against terrorists.”
Ah... that makes things clearer.
Of course, to get those new “volunteer” officers and men, who have
generally been none too eager to volunteer for the Army and the
Marines in the midst of a disastrous, far-away, increasingly
incomprehensible set of double wars, you’ll have to pay even more
kids more money to go to no-commitment summer camp; and, while
you’re
at it, you’ll have to lower standards for the military radically.
You’ll have to let in even more volunteers without high school
diplomas but with “moral” and medical “waivers” for criminal records
and mental problems. You’ll have to fast-track even more new
immigrants willing to join for the benefits of quick citizenship;
you’ll have to ramp up already high cash bonuses of all sorts;
you’ll
have to push the top-notch ad agency recently hired on a five-year
contract for a cool billion dollars to rev up its new “Army Strong”
recruitment drive even higher; you’ll certainly have to jack up the
numbers of military recruiters radically, to the tune of perhaps a
couple of hundred million more dollars; and maybe just for the heck
of it, you better start planning for the possibility of recruiting
significant numbers of potential immigrants before they even think
to
leave their own countries. After all, it’s darn romantic to imagine
a
future American all-volunteer force that will look more like the old
French Foreign Legion--or an army of mercenaries anyway. All in all,
you’ll have to commit to the fact that your future soldier in your
basic future war will cost staggering sums of money to hire and even
more staggering sums to retain after he or she has had a taste of
what “leadership potential” really entails.
Put another way, as long as Iraq remains a classic quagmire for the
Army and Marines, any plan to expand the U.S. military in order to
make it easier to fight such wars in the future, threatens to become
a classic financial quagmire as well. In other words, Iraq and
military expansion don’t fit together well at all. And yet, looking
at the state of our military in Iraq in a certain light, expansion
seems so… well, logical.
After all, the American military, now at just over 500,000 troops,
stood, at the time of the First Gulf War, at 703,000. (Of course, no
one now counts the quite expensive hired mercenaries who envelop our
military -- the privatized, Halliburton-style adjuncts, who cook the
food, build the bases, do the cleaning, deliver the mail and
supplies, perform interrogation duties, and so on, and whose
increase
has been striking as has the growth of rent-a-mercenary corporations
whose armed employees are, for instance, all over Iraq.) In
addition,
it has long been clear that the Armed Forces could not take the
strain of failing wars in Central Asia and the Middle East forever,
not to speak of increased “commitments” in the Persian Gulf and the
normal massive global basing and policing that the Pentagon
regularly
refers to as our “footprint” on the planet. Added to this, the
President seems to be leaning towards increasingly the pressure on
military manpower needs by “surging”--the Vietnam era word would, of
course, have been “escalating”--up to 30,000 troops into Baghdad and
al-Anbar province, while naval and air forces (with an obvious eye
to
Iran) are simultaneously ramped up in the Persian Gulf.
In light of Iraq, military manpower needs cry out to be dealt with.
In light of Iraq, dealing with them any time soon will be
prohibitively expensive.
In Washington, this conundrum leads nowhere in particular. Instead,
in the spirit of imperial-mission logic (and with the urge to bash
the Bush administration for being late to such an obvious
support-our-
troops position), Democrats simply leaped onto the expand-the-
military bandwagon even faster than Republicans. In fact, leading
Democrats had long been calling for just this sort of expansion. ("I
am glad [the President] has realized the need for increasing the
size
of the armed forces... but this is where the Democrats have been for
two years," commented Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the new House Democratic
Caucus chairman.) The Democratic leadership promptly pledged to make
such an expansion one of its top reform priorities in the New Year.
To get those numbers significantly higher will, it’s estimated, take
a decade and unimaginable sums of money (as well as those lowered
standards). And, if the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan worsen,
as they almost certainly will, and American casualties rise with no
end in sight, you can start going through your multiplication
tables. This could be considered but a form of ongoing blowback from
American imperial shock-and-awe tactics in Iraq and presents some
curious choices to our leaders. After all, to take but one example,
those most eager to expand the military, with their eyes on the
imperial future, should be eager to liquidate the Iraqi mission as
soon as possible.
But a far more basic choice lurks--one rarely alluded to in the
mainstream. If we voted on such things–-and, in truth, we vote on
less and less that matters--the choice that actually lies behind the
Marine e-letter to my friend’s daughter might be put this way:
Expand
the military or shrink the mission?
This is the essential question that goes largely unmentioned--and
largely unthought as well. In the meantime, money will continue to
pour into military recruitment ad campaigns, bonuses, and summer
camps. In the meantime, those Marine e-letters will continue to go
out. In the meantime, money will continue to pour into the Pentagon
and the national security world generally. In the meantime, we will
continue to build our near billion-dollar embassy, the largest on
the
planet, in the heart of Baghdad’s Green Zone. In the meantime, the
imperial and military paths will continue to fuse, and the Pentagon
will continue to take on new roles, even outside “declared war
zones,” in intelligence, diplomacy, “information operations,” and
other “self-assigned missions”; so that, as Mark Mazzetti of the New
York Times recently described it, even our embassies will
increasingly be militarized outposts in the global war on terror.
Shrinking the mission--choosing some path other than the imperial
one
(in part by redefining what exactly our national interests are)--
would, of course, address many problems. It would make paying young
people thousands of dollars to test their leadership potential or
thinking about scouring Central America for a future Foreign Legion
far less necessary. But no one in Washington--not in the Bush
administration, not in James A. Baker’s Iraq Study Group, which
recently captured the Inside-the-Beltway “middle ground” on Iraq
policy, not in the Democratic leadership--is faintly interested in
shrinking the American global mission. No one in Washington, where a
kind of communal voting does go on, is about to vote “no” to that
mission, or cast a ballot for democracy rather than empire.
Expanding the military may seem like a no-brainer in response to the
Iraq crisis. As it happens, it’s anything but. Unfortunately, few
ever discuss (as, for instance, Chalmers Johnson did in his book,
The
Sorrows of Empire) the 700-plus military and intelligence bases we
retain around the world or ask why exactly we’re garrisoning the
planet. No one, in these last years, has seriously challenged the
ever expanding Pentagon budget; nor the mushrooming supplemental
requests for Iraq and Afghanistan, including the record-setting
latest for almost $100 billion; nor, generally, the fact that paying
for actual war-fighting is no longer considered an appropriate part
of the Pentagon’s normal budget process.
No one challenged it when, in 2002, the United States gained a new
North American Command (Northcom), making U.S. citizens but another
coequal part of the Pentagon’s division of its imperial world, along
with those who live in regions covered by Centcom, Paccom, and the
just authorized Africa Command (Africom). No one challenged the vast
expansion of Pentagon intelligence activities. No one offered a
challenge as the military took on ever more civilian domestic
duties,
including planning for the potential arrival of a pandemic disease
on
our shores or for future Katrinas. No one seriously challenges the
plans the Pentagon has on the drawing boards for exotic, futuristic
hardware meant to come on line decades from now that, along with
futuristic military tactics already being worked out, will help
predetermine the wars most Americans don’t even know we are going to
fight--from the vast mega-slum-cities of the Third World to the
borderlands of space.
No one considers what the Pentagonization of our world and the
Homeland Securitization of our country is doing to us, because
militarism here has never taken on the expectable forms--few vast
military parades or displays (despite the almost full-scale
militarization of Presidential funerals); few troops in the streets;
no uniforms in the high councils of government. In fact, it’s one of
the ironies of our particular form of militarization that when our
military--no longer really a citizen army--goes to war and troops
begin to die, less Americans are touched by this than perhaps at any
time in our recent history.
Shrink the mission or expand the military? Your choice?
Fat chance.
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