COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Personnel Crunch
Risk Management
Lauren Collins, Newyorker
April 9, 2007
In the
wake of a rise in substantiated instances of misconduct by its
recruiters, the United States military, it was reported last month, is
considering installing surveillance cameras in its recruiting stations.
The military may also want to assess the tactics that its employees use
in the virtual realm. This admissions season, an Army recruiter has
been e-mailing recent college graduates with the offer of hundreds of
thousands of dollars in scholarship money to pay for medical school, in
exchange for four years of service. Nothing new there. What’s
surprising is his assertion to students that they would be better off
in Baghdad than in Georgetown.
Susan Kahane, who is twenty-two, graduated from Columbia last spring.
When she took the MCAT, in August, she checked a box to signal that she
wished to receive information about outside sources of financial aid.
Soon, she was inundated with e-mails from the Army, the Navy, and the
Air Force (“FREE MEDICAL SCHOOL!!!”). One, sent on January
31st by Captain Christopher D. Mayhugh, of the Army Medical Service
Corps, stood out. “Upon finishing your residency,” the
message read, “you will be assigned to one of a variety of
locations including Germany, Italy and Hawaii and your obligation will
be complete.” (The Medical Service Corps’s Web page, in
contrast, notes prominently that its officers have participated in
combat operations in Korea, Kosovo, Somalia, Panama, and Iraq.)
Mayhugh’s omission of Iraq, Kahane recalled last week,
“seemed a little bit strange.” Still, she said,
“These e-mails were often slightly tempting to me, because of my
worries about paying for medical school.”
On March 14th, Kahane received another e-mail from Mayhugh, with the
subject “Medical school scholarships still available.” This
time, rather than invoking European and tropical destinations, Mayhugh
addressed the prospect of being posted to a less than desirable locale.
“What if you get sent to Iraq?” he wrote in the
letter’s final paragraph. He continued:
Well, consider this: there has been an average of 160,000 troops in the
Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of
2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. The
rate in Washington, D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are
about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation’s
Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the
nation, than you are in Iraq.
Kahane recalled, “After reading it once, I felt strongly that
something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.” She looked up
the figures and did the math herself, and found that all the statistics
in the e-mail were either outdated or incorrect, and that, even if they
had been correct, Mayhugh seemed to be comparing a yearly figure for
Washington with a monthly one for Iraq. (Going by Mayhugh’s
numbers, there would be nearly fifteen gun murders in Washington every
day. In reality, there were about three murders, of any kind, per week
in 2006. In the same period, an average of sixteen American troops died
each week in Iraq.) Kimberly Thompson, an associate professor of risk
analysis and decision science at Harvard’s School of Public
Health, agreed, last week, to evaluate Mayhugh’s claim and found
the discrepancy even starker. In her estimate, the risk of being killed
in Iraq is ten times higher than the risk of being killed in
Washington, D.C. “The recruiter’s e-mail message is really
amazingly misleading,” she said.
It turns out, as Kahane learned with a subsequent Google search, that
“D.C. is more dangerous than Iraq” is a well-worn canard.
Representative Steve King, a Republican from Iowa, promulgated a
variation, involving his wife’s safety, last year on the floor of
the House, while Mayhugh’s paragraph was plucked, verbatim, from
an e-mail that circulated in 2005. The realization that Mayhugh’s
message derived—one could see, with nominal research—from a
Web fallacy was dispiriting to Kahane. She had written a letter to
Mayhugh, but didn’t send it. “I thought, I guess he knows
the math isn’t right, so what’s the point of telling
him?” she said.
Reached last week at his office in Maryland, Mayhugh stood by the
e-mail, saying, “Most people’s perception of Iraq is that
‘Oh, my God, people are being murdered over there by the
thousands.’ I think if you look at any type of situation where
you have several hundred thousand people on the ground and now you
throw in the fact that what they’re doing is dangerous and they
have very big heavy vehicles and firearms with live ammunition, the
number of people being killed over there is pretty small.”
He acknowledged that the paragraph had come from a forwarded e-mail,
but said that, before pasting it into his pitch, he had done
“some simple calculations” that supported its conclusions.
“In what I’ve seen in dealing with the war and the
misperceptions of it,” he said, “it seemed to me like those
would be the right numbers.” He went on, “I work in D.C. on
a daily basis, and I’m afraid to get out of my car in a lot of
places. I hear about police officers being murdered every day in D.C.
and Baltimore. And I’ve had thousands of friends and colleagues
go to Iraq and come back safely.”
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articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
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material relevant to the work of