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military recruitment
'I Might’ve Made a Mistake': How the Military 'Recruits' Kids Like My Students
Thus far we’ve lost six service members. That number will almost certainly increase as this drags on. And the hard truth is the majority of those casualties will be kids recruited out of high schools in marginalized communities.
Mar 09, 2026
When the powers that be talk about sending kids to war, they aren’t talking about their kids. So, whose kids are they talking about, and where do those kids come from?
I teach senior English at an urban high school in upstate New York. The poverty rate here is high. There are no Fortunate Sons (or daughters) on my roster. And several have signed up to join the military after graduation. While I have nothing but reverence and respect for anyone willing to serve our great nation, I’m not sure 18 is old enough–or mature enough–to make such a seismic decision, especially now that a protracted conflict with Iran is a real possibility.
On Monday, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) said, “If anybody has ever been there and been able to smell the war that's happening around you and taste it, and feel it in your nostrils, and hear it, it's something that you'll never forget.” Of course, Mr. Mullin himself has never been anywhere near a war.
Trust me when I tell you: 18 year olds are still children. They say dumb things. They do dumb things. They act on impulse. And a high school like mine is fruitful ground for the military. Most days, there’s a recruiter in the cafeteria when the kids come for lunch. He brings pamphlets and a pull-up bar. He dangles a signing bonus. And once someone commits, the military has them. A contract with any branch of the armed services is the only bona-fide lifelong contract in our culture.
“Kids aren’t supposed to be hurt or used by adults, or sent to potentially die in the sand, when only a few months prior they had to ask permission for a bathroom pass.”
According to the US Department of “War,” the military is seeing its highest recruiting numbers in over a decade. By June 2025, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force had already met their annual benchmarks. Perhaps this uptick is attributed to a sudden surge of patriotism. More likely, it’s because of a tightening job market for high school grads, or the rising costs of a college education.
Retired Staff Sergeant Tony Buchanan, who joined the Army in 2001 after high school, and served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, said, “While I believe the military does a good job evaluating these young men and women before enlisting them, legally, a recruiter does not need to speak with a parent.”
I have no doubt the military teaches hard work, respect, and humility, plus the opportunity to embark on some pretty cool careers. But the reality is, at some point, these young men and women could be called to a war front, regardless of their individual goals or beliefs. Because of that, we must hope that our leadership sees war as a last resort.
To justify the mission, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, they would immediately come after us. If we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked by someone else, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths.”
As a public educator, when I build a unit of study, the first thing I determine is where I want the content to take my students. The defined endgame drives all planning. I don’t just make it up as I go along and hope everything works out. Students always know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and where it’ll lead. They might not like it, and they may not agree with it, but they recognize the rationale.
Regarding our attack on Iran, I fear the endgame hasn’t been defined, and if it has, this administration has done a poor job articulating that. On Monday, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intel Committee, said he’s heard the administration verbalize “at least four different goals in the last eight or nine days.”
Every winter I teach Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories that explore the experiences of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. In it, O’Brien writes: “You don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.”
A CNN poll found that 59% of Americans disapprove of the Iran strikes and think a long-term conflict is likely.
Thus far we’ve lost six service members. That number will almost certainly increase as this drags on. And the hard truth is the majority of those casualties will be kids recruited out of high schools in marginalized communities.
“I’m a parent and teacher, so I see it as my job to protect kids,” said Derek Shuttleworth, a veteran educator who’s taught in Alaska, Oregon, California, and New York. “Kids aren’t supposed to be hurt or used by adults, or sent to potentially die in the sand, when only a few months prior they had to ask permission for a bathroom pass.”
This past January, I sat with a senior who’d just signed with the Army. He was excited about the cash bonus, enough to put a down payment on a “sick-ass truck.” Yesterday, he came back to see me. He’s now worried about the war. He doesn’t want to “catch a bullet in Iran.” He said, “I might’ve made a mistake."
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'Into Sunlight': Commemorating the Vietnam War Through Dance
Choreographer Robin Becker reimagines this story of the human tragedy of war and the eruption of violence during student protests into a powerful and poignant dance production.
Jan 02, 2026
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the American War in Vietnam, Hofstra University hosted a performance of choreographer Robin Becker’s “Into Sunlight.” Inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss’ book, They Marched Into Sunlight,
Becker reimagines this story of the human tragedy of war and the eruption of violence during student protests into a powerful and poignant dance production. Through expressive movement and visual artistry, the performance explores the psychological, emotional, and moral complexities, as well as the historical significance of this tumultuous period.
As a combat veteran of the American war in Vietnam and having yet to “put the war behind me and go on with my life,” as is often advised by those who were not there, I must admit that I was profoundly conflicted by this performance. “Into Sunlight’s” portrayal of the horror and ugliness of war set against the artistic backdrop of Robin Becker’s brilliant choreography and the skilled movements of her dancers, provided a striking contrast that mirrored a personal unease, one that I have long endured and labored to express in my poem "The Rose":
I remember once, in another lifetime,
noticing a lone rose rising defiantly
from beneath the rubble
of a destroyed city North of Danang.
It had no business being there,
adding color to the drabness of war,
beauty to the ugliness of destruction,
and the hope of life
when life held nothing
but suffering and death.
It was a contradiction
and created confusion
amidst the clarity of killing to survive.
...I stepped on it.
There are no flowers in a warzone
nor color, nor beauty, nor hope.
During the talkback that followed the performance, my uneasiness found expression in my rather abrupt request that audience members refrain from applauding my “service” as they had for previous veteran speakers. While I understood that their intentions were sincere—especially at an event intended to honor the "selfless sacrifices" of veterans—I do not believe that my actions as a warrior deserve praise or appreciation. Nor do I believe that participation in war should routinely be met with honor or celebration.
Moreover, after experiencing the horror of war so powerfully portrayed aesthetically in dance, I thought it crucial that the lessons conveyed by the performance not be misunderstood or, worse, glorified. I felt compelled to point out that the common practice of heroizing veterans is not only misguided and dangerous, but perhaps more importantly, fails to serve the interest of both veterans and civilians for several important reasons.
The Mythology of Warrior Worship
- The glorification of warriors hinders readjustment. By providing veterans a refuge of sorts where they may choose to see themselves as heroes, they can avoid facing the realities of their experiences—especially their personal responsibility and guilt for the deaths and destruction they may have caused. Confronting these realities is an essential step toward healing, or better, for reestablishing a sense of normalcy in their lives.
- Heroization of warriors significantly affects public discourse about militarism and war. By making warriors into heroes, open discussion and debate about the necessity, legality, and morality of military engagement become far less likely. As a result, veterans and civilians may be more inclined to support the deployment of military forces to distant battlefields and, increasingly, to American cities, under the pretext of “quelling” what in many cases are manufactured crises.
- Glorification of warriors functions as an effective propaganda and military recruitment tool, an asset to maintaining public support for militarism and endless war, attracting the next generation of “cannon fodder” into military service, often without adequately addressing the realities and consequences involved.
- Though public displays of gratitude and support for veterans and members of the military may appear genuine, they are often superficial and mask the reality of the scandalous way this nation has neglected the needs of returning warriors—the high rates of unemployment, PTSD, moral Injury, homelessness, addiction, and suicide.
- And finally, the heroization of warriors benefits no one in this nation other than the militarists and war profiteers and does little to serve the true interests of veterans and the broader public. Instead, glorification upholds a system that prioritizes military endeavors over the well-being of those most directly affected by them.
Rejecting Troop Blame: Shared Responsibility in War
While recognizing that the mythology of warrior worship must be rejected, and that war is not noble, it is equally important to reject its antithesis as well, the mythology of troop blame. This view regards veterans as murderers and places the entire burden of responsibility for illegal and brutal war on their shoulders while backhandedly absolving civilians of culpability. In a democratic society, governance and responsibility for war is a collective burden—by and for the people. Thus, in a very real sense, there is blood on all of our hands.
The Integrative Power of “Into Sunlight”: Dance as a pathway to Healing
The genius of “Into Sunlight” lies in Robin Becker’s ability to choreograph the sublime movement of her dancers to provide audience members a face-to-face confrontation with the harsh realities of military violence, human suffering, and death. By blending the visual beauty of dance with the discomfort, awe, pain, and exhilaration experienced by warriors on the battlefield, Becker creates a powerful contrast that evokes, in the realm of art, the intense and complex emotions associated with personal trauma.
“Into Sunlight” is not to be passively enjoyed in the conventional sense. Rather, it is participatory, reactive, and demands personal engagement and interpretation. Such art provides an immersive experience transforming audience members from passive observers into active co-creators of meaning. By blurring the boundaries between creator and audience, this performance encourages personal growth, introspection, understanding, self-forgiveness, and reconciliation, opening a pathway for audience members to begin the difficult task of identifying, processing, and healing the lingering effects of personal trauma and moral injury. Or, at least, it provides a way to come to terms with these experiences—to find a place for it in one’s “being.” It is precisely at this intersection where beauty meets the sublime that anguish is transformed into poignant artistry, allowing “Into Sunlight” to succeed in ways other more conventional therapies may have failed.
Conclusion
Though the performance is undeniably unsettling, I know I have benefited from the experience and am confident that other “victims” of war or of personal trauma, will benefit as well. Facing the demons we have for so long tried to suppress, though uncomfortable, is a difficult, though necessary, prerequisite on the path to healing.
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Could the US Military’s Recruitment Problem Be a Good Thing?
Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills?
Feb 09, 2025
Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: ‘We can’t get enough people.’”
“Vietnam Syndrome” hasn’t gone away! It resulted in the elimination of the draft and ultimately morphed into “Iraq Syndrome”—so it seems—and even though those lost, horrific wars are now nothing but history, the next American war is ever-looming (against Canada?... against Greenland?). And yet, good God, the military is having a hard time recruiting a sufficient amount of patriotic cannon fodder.
“We can’t get enough people”—you know, to kill the enemy and to risk coming home in a box. And maybe that’s a good thing! The public is kind of getting it: War is obsolete (to put it politely). War is insane; it threatens the future of life on the planet—even though a huge swatch of the American media seems unwilling to get it and continues to report on war and militarism as though they literally equaled “national defense.” After all, we spend a trillion dollars annually on it.
Indeed, war unites us... in hell.
The above quote is from a fascinating—and troubling—piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, which has long been my favorite magazine. What troubled me was the unquestioned acceptance in the piece of the inevitability, indeed, the normalcy, of going off to war. In that context, war is simply an abstraction—a real-life game of Risk, you might say—and the proclaimed enemy is, ipso facto, less human than we are, and thus more easily reduced to collateral damage.
The article addresses a highly problematic (from a military point of view) diminishing of the military’s recruitment base. For instance: “Recruiters,” Filkins writes, “are contending with a population that’s not just unenthusiastic but incapable. According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record. While the political argument festers, military leaders are left to contemplate a broader problem: Can a country defend itself if not enough people are willing or able to fight?”
While this is no doubt a legitimate question—militarism, after all, exists in a social context—what’s missing from this question, from my point of view, is the larger one that hovers above it, emerging from the future. Perhaps the larger question could be put this way: In a world that is hostage to multi-thousands of nuclear weapons across the planet, and on the edge of ecological collapse—with its Doomsday Clock currently set at 89 seconds to midnight—can a country defend itself from its greatest risks by going to war? Or will doing so simply intensify those risks?
Here’s a slightly simpler way to put it: For God’s sake, isn’t war obsolete by now? Isn’t militarism obsolete? I’m surprised The New Yorker piece didn’t reach a little further into the stratosphere to establish the story’s context. Come on! This is the media’s job.
Actually, there’s also a second question emerging as well. Let me put it this way: Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills? Could this be so despite the quasi-meaningless borders the world has divided itself into, which must be “protected” with ever more omnicidal violence?
The story notes: “After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a groundswell of patriotic feeling encouraged young people to volunteer for the military. The sentiment held as the U.S. attacked the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then as it launched an invasion of Iraq, which quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. But, as those wars dragged on, the public mood soured. The troops deployed there were unprepared and ill-equipped, sent to pursue objectives that could be bafflingly opaque.”
The public mood soured? Could this possibly be described in a more simplistic way—with less respect for the national collective awareness? What if something a bit more significant were actually happening, e.g., a public majority began seeing the invasion, the devastation of hundreds of thousands of lives, as... wrong?
And might, let us say, enormous human change be brewing? The same thing happened in Vietnam. It turned into hell, not just for the people of Vietnam—the war’s primary victims—but for the U.S. troops waging it. It became unendurable. “Fragging”—the killing of officers—started happening. So did moral injury: psychological woundedness that wouldn’t go away. Vet suicides started becoming common.
Back to Iraq. At one point the story mentions Bravo Company, a Marine battalion that had led the bloody assault on Fallujah in 2004. Two decades later, some of the surviving members held a reunion, which was permeated with anguish and guilt. For many, the trauma of Fallujah hadn’t gone away, and they remained emotionally troubled, often turning for relief to painkillers, alcohol, and methedrine.
All of which is deeply soul-cutting, but there’s a bit missing from the context: “Twenty years after the U.S. military offensive in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, locals are still suffering from the lasting impacts of the use of internationally banned weapons by U.S. forces,” according to Global Times. This includes such hellish instruments of war as white phosphorous and depleted uranium, the effects of which—on local air, soil, water, and vegetation—do not go away.
And of course the consequences for the locals have been ghastly, including enormous increases in cancer, birth defects, leukemia, still births, infant mortality and so, so much more, including “the emergence of diseases that were not known in the city before 2004.” And these effects will remain present in Fallujah, according to the article, for hundreds of years.
But the U.S. had to defend itself!
This is insane. War, as I have noted previously, is humanity’s cancer. It affects all of us, whether we belong to “us” or “them.” It affects us collectively. Indeed, war unites us... in hell. The mainstream media needs to stop pretending it doesn’t realize this.
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Who Wants to Kill and Die for the American Empire?
Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
Sep 06, 2024
The Associated Press reports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.
“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire... That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”
This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.
One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.
We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.
Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.
That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.”
A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.
The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”
U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (5,429 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S. combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,739), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.
And yet, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S. government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.
After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.
“There is a refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.”
During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country—the majority of countries—would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the 1 billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this—what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”
When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of U.S. military force.
Instead, the response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.
The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.
The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive, and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.
In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos, and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups, or economic sanctions.
Now the U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.
In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”
Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it, which was published in newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. The letter ended:
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.
As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.
Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
Neither the changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.
If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.
If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation, and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the United Nations Charter, the real “rules-based order,” in fact requires.
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When Joining the US Military Is Not 'All That You Can Be'
Apr 14, 2023
After more than 20 years of losing wars, recruiting for the U.S. Army is now officially a mess. Last year, that service fell short of its goal by 15,000 recruits, or a quarter of its target. Despite reports of better numbers in the first months of this year, Army officials doubt they will achieve their objective this time around either. The commanding general at Fort Jackson, the South Carolina facility that provides basic training to 50% of all new members of the Army, called the recruiting command’s task the hardest since the all-volunteer military was launched in 1973. The Army’s leaders were alarmed enough to make available up to $1.2 billion for recruitment incentives and related initiatives.
Those incentives include enlistment bonuses of up to $50,000 and promotions for young enlistees who successfully bring in new candidates. Women recruits can now wear their hair in ponytails, and regulations have been updated to permit small, inconspicuous tattoos in places like the back of your ear.
The other branches of the military aren’t exactly doing well either. The Marines, for example, met their numbers largely through retention, not recruitment, and the Navy was forced to accept recruits who scored in the lowest-qualifying range on an entrance exam.
The tempo of recruitment has always swung back and forth, depending in part on whether the economy is bad or booming. Today, that economy may be a mess, but hiring is still remarkably robust, leaving high school graduates with more choices than just the Army or stocking shelves at Walmart (which, by the way, also offers college tuition assistance).
The labor market isn’t the only obstacle to filling the ranks. Covid not only kept recruiters largely out of schools — a traditional hunting ground — for a couple of years, but they also lowered the scores on military entrance exams. The Army has seen a 9% decrease in scores (already low when this round of measurement began) on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), the all-important test that determines which branches of the military and which jobs you qualify for. An oft-cited statistic — and it’s alarming, no matter how you feel about the military — is that only about 23% of the Americans the Army aims to recruit qualify as physically, educationally, and mentally fit to enlist.
Then there’s what could be called the patriotic duty gap. The U.S. is no longer officially fighting any wars (though the global war on terror, even if no longer known by that name, never really ends). The lack of a rally-round-the-flag event like 9/11, along with the calamitous military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and 20th-anniversary reexaminations of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, have left Washington wary of starting a new conflict. Sure, tens of billions of dollars of weaponry are going to Ukraine and there are more than 900 U.S. troops still in fighting mode in Syria, where a drone strike recently killed an American contractor and injured U.S. troops, but we seldom hear much about such deployments, or similar ones in Iraq, Niger, Somalia, and other countries across much of Africa, until something goes wrong, so they’re hardly top-notch recruitment material.
Summing up the mood of the military’s present target generation, Major General Alex Fink, chief of Army enterprise marketing, observed, “They see us as revered, but not relevant in their lives.”
What’s a Recruiter To Do?
A year ago, an Army Career Center (aka a recruiting station) opened in my fairly affluent neighborhood. This was curious. After all, it’s an area surrounded by elite universities and not the most welcoming high schools when it comes to the military. I had walked by the station often, noting the posters in its windows advertising career training and the benefits of the Army Reserve. There was even one in Tagalog about an expedited path to U.S. citizenship. (And mind you, there isn’t a large Filipino population in this neighborhood either.)
Finally, as someone who’s worked for years with antiwar GIs and wrote the book War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, I decided to drop in for a chat, only to hesitate, anticipating suspicion, if not outright hostility.
Boy, was I wrong! The four noncommissioned officers stationed there, only one of whom had spent extended time in a war zone, couldn’t have been more eager to talk about the benefits of Army life. Their spiel was good, too: career training, college tuition, some control over the first duty station you’re likely to get, housing, health care, family benefits, competitive pay, even bonuses, not to speak of 30 days off each year and substantial responsibility at a young age. Admittedly, the tuition reimbursement offered wouldn’t faintly cover any of the universities near where I live and it takes a while for your salary to amount to much… still, it was an impressive pitch.
And they don’t take just anyone, either. Enlistment requirements are similar across the six branches of the military, except when it comes to age limits. (For the Army, you have to be between 17 and 35.) You must be a high school graduate or the equivalent, a citizen or Green Card holder, medically and physically fit, in good moral standing, and score high enough on the ASVAB entrance exam, which only about one-third of test-takers now pass. (Full disclosure: I couldn’t do the sample math questions.)
So, how’s recruiting going? The Army has about 9,000 recruiters at 1,508 locations nationwide whose pay and benefits are tied to their success. Each recruiter is responsible for signing up a minimum of one recruit for each of the 11 months they’re at work. If this had actually happened, the Army would have coasted to last year’s goal. (I can do that math.) My neighborhood recruiters, however, seem to be typical in coming in well under that quota.
A Necessary Revamp
Somewhere in our friendly chat, I pointed out that armies exist to go to war. They countered that, for every infantryman in the U.S. military, there are about 100 support personnel and pointed to wall posters advertising 130 Army career options. No one seemed inclined to delve any deeper into the subject of future battlefields.
Surely, anyone qualified to enlist in the Army should know that such forces exist for only one significant purpose: to fight wars. And the U.S. military — with its 750 bases around the world and its unending war on terror, while the pressures between China and this country only continue to escalate — might well find itself at war again any time. The Army’s website is clear enough on its mission: “To deploy, fight, and win our nation’s wars by providing ready, prompt, and sustained land dominance by Army forces across the full spectrum of conflict as part of the joint force.” But curiously enough, on its recruiting website, the topic of fighting a war doesn’t show up under “reasons to join.” The system is clearly focused instead on all the remarkably peaceful opportunities the Army offers its soldiers.
That emphasis shines forth in the resurrection this spring of the oldie (but apparently goodie) ad campaign “Be All You Can Be,” which last appeared in 2001. It has now replaced the “What’s Your Warrior” ads, with their video-game visuals and bass-heavy soundtrack. The new campaign includes short YouTube videos, where likeably plain-spoken soldiers explain just what they appreciate about the Army. One features an Army rapper; in another, a woman talks about finding balance in her Army life, as images of soldiers with weapons and soldiers with families flash by.
Admittedly, there have been a few hiccups along the way to this gentler, hipper vision of that service. Take the two high-profile ads in the new recruitment campaign that featured actor Jonathan Majors (Antman, Creed III) and were pulled shortly after their debut when he was arrested on charges of assault, harassment, and strangulation.
Get ‘Em Early, Get ‘Em Young
Army recruits tend to come from military families (83% of enlistees by one reckoning) and hometowns near military bases, where kids grow up around people in uniform and time in the military becomes part of their worldview. Elsewhere, the military works remarkably hard to introduce that worldview. High schools receiving certain kinds of federal funding, for instance, are required to give recruiters the same access as they do colleges or employers and provide the military with contact information for all students (unless their parents opt out).
While Covid-19 limited recruiters’ access to schools, there were always ways around that. Take Army J.R.O.T.C., which currently has programs in more than 1,700 high schools, a sizeable portion of them in low-income communities with large minority populations. (J.R.O.T.C. boasts about this, although a New York Times exposé on the subject revealed it to be more predatory than laudatory.) The literature emphasizes that it’s a citizenship and leadership program, not a recruitment one, and it’s true that only about 21% of Army enlistees attended a school with such a program. Still, it’s clearly another way that the service recruits the young. After all, its “cadets” wear their uniforms in school and are taught military history and marksmanship, among other things. “Co-curricular activities” include military drills and competitions.
And there have been problems there, too: among them, a report citing 58 documented instances of sexual abuse or harassment of students by instructors in all branches of J.R.O.T.C. between 2018 and 2022. (As with all statistics on sexual abuse, this is undoubtedly an undercount.)
J.R.O.T.C. is hardly the only program exposing young students to the military. Young Marines is a nonprofit education, service, and leadership program dating back to 1959, which promotes “a healthy, drug-free lifestyle” for kids eight years old through high school. Its website emphasizes that it isn’t a military recruitment tool and doesn’t teach combat skills. Nonetheless, “events that Young Marines may participate in may involve close connection with public relations aspects of the armed forces.”
Then there’s Starbase, a Defense Department educational program where students learn STEM subjects like science and math by interacting with military personnel. Its primary focus is socio-economically disadvantaged fifth graders. And yes, that would be 10- and 11-year-olds!
It’s good when extra resources are available to students and schools. In the end, though, programs like these conflate good citizenship with militarism.
Too Little — Or Too Much?
A recent student of mine, who joined Navy R.O.T.C. to help pay for the college education she wanted, told me her age group, Gen Z, a key military target, doesn’t view such future service as beneficial. Her classmates, typically enough, felt less than positive about her wearing a uniform. Only older people congratulated her for it.
Three senior Army leaders reached a similar conclusion when they visited high schools nationwide recently to learn why enlistment was so dismal. They came away repeating the usual litany of problems: tight job market, pandemic barriers, unfitness of America’s youth, resistance from schools, and especially a lack of public information about the benefits of an Army career.
But what if the problem isn’t too little information, but too much? Despite ever-decreasing reportage on military and veterans’ issues, young civilians seem all too aware of the downsides of enlisting. Gen Zers, who until recently never lived in a country not openly at war, have gobs of information at their fingertips: videos, memoirs, movies, novels, along with alarming statistics on sexual assault and racism in the military and the ongoing health problems of soldiers, including exposure to toxic waste, rising cancer rates, and post-traumatic stress disorder. And that’s not even to mention the disproportionate rates of suicide and homelessness among veterans, not to speak of the direct contact many young people have had with those who returned home ready to attest to the grim consequences of more than 20 years of remarkably pointless warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across all too much of the rest of the planet.
All of this probably helps explain what the Army found in surveys of 16- to 28-year-olds it conducted last spring and summer. That service described (but didn’t release) its report on those surveys. According to the Associated Press, the top three reasons cited for refusing to enlist were “fear of death, worries about post-traumatic stress disorder, and leaving friends and family.” Young Americans also made it clear that they didn’t want to put their lives on hold in the military, while 13% anticipated discrimination against women and minorities, 10% didn’t trust the military leadership, 57% anticipated emotional or psychological problems, and nearly half expected physical problems from a stint in the Army. Despite recent accusations from conservative members of Congress, only 5% listed the Army being too “woke” as a deterrent, which should put that issue to bed, but undoubtedly won’t.
Let me offer a little confession here: I find all of this heartening — not just that potential recruits don’t want to be killed in war, but that they’re aware of how dangerous joining the military can be to body and mind. And apparently the survey didn’t even explore feelings about the possibility that you could be called on to kill, too. In an op-doc for the New York Times that followed a group of American soldiers from their swaggering entry into the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in 2003 to their present-day lives, an off-screen voice asks, “So what does it do to a generation of young people during these deployments?” The answer: “They become old. They are old young men.”
If there’s one thing the Gen Zers I know don’t want, it’s to get old before their time. (Probably not at their time either, but that’s another story.) So, add that to the reasons not to enlist.
Early in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I met Elaine Johnson, a Gold Star Mother from South Carolina, so outspoken in her opposition to the Iraq War after her son, Darius Jennings, was killed in Fallujah in 2003 that she reportedly came to be known in the George W. Bush White House as “the Elaine Johnson problem.” Antiwar as she was, she also proudly told me, “My baby was a mama’s boy, but the military turned him into a productive young man.”
So, yes, the Army can be a place to mature, master a trade, take on responsibility, and learn lasting lessons about yourself, while often forging lifelong friendships. All good. But that, of course, can also happen in other types of organizations that don’t feature weapons and killing, that don’t take you to hell and back. Just imagine, for a moment, that our government left the business of losing the wars from hell to history and instead spent, say, half of the $842 billion being requested for next year’s military budget on [fill in the blank here with your preferred institutions].
Count on one thing: we would be in a different world. Maybe this generation of potential soldiers has already figured that out and will someday make it happen.
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Moving From the Margins to the Mainstream
Jun 02, 2008
Movements for change begin mysteriously at the margins but if they take hold, they can have a big impact on society.
"Things happen. You have to count on it," said Tom Hayden at a recent lecture sponsored by the Southwest Branch of the ACLU of Michigan.
The veteran activist first witnessed the process of social change while a student at the University of Michigan in 1960. As editor of the Michigan Daily he was covering John F. Kennedy's visit to campus and discovered that a small group of students got to the presidential candidate about 11 p.m. and handed him a plan for an international peace program.
That group included local activist David MacLeod, who Hayden recognized at the lecture.
At the time Kennedy didn't know fully what he was signing on to and his advisers were stunned by his spontaneous policymaking. The program turned out to be the Peace Corps.
"It was unexplainable how David got the [plan] into JFK's hands," said Hayden who pointed out that "chaotic processes" often accompany movements for change.
A year later Hayden would co-found the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which promoted the 18-year-old right to vote. This idea had first surfaced during World War II but it was the Vietnam War that brought home the point that the nation that felt its young were responsible enough to fight a war should be responsible enough to vote.
"We were relatively marginal but that didn't matter because we found a cause," said Hayden. "It was driven into me at the time that all things are possible."
Although the idea for the Peace Corps literally happened overnight, change usually takes at least a decade, said Hayden, and not all movements achieve their goals. Women's suffrage took 100 years; ending slavery took 500 years.
The Electoral College seems to be an obvious issue for change, especially since the 2000 election when Al Gore won the popular vote and George W. Bush won the electoral vote. However, there seems to be no political will to eliminate it.
"The Electoral College was one of the dynamic compromises of the Constitution," said Hayden, adding that the "imperfect document" also follows the movement for change model.
Prior to the Revolution of 1776 the Continental Congress grappled with whether or not to declare its independence from England, a prospect too radical for most colonists. However, taxation without representation eventually tipped a majority of the public toward separation.
In 1787 the framers of the U.S. Constitution incorporated independence as a key theme for the new republic but they could not end slavery or extend suffrage beyond white, male property owners. Such radical ideas would have split the movement for nationhood.
"Each generation claims the promise, ideals and aspirations of the founders and they become a movement," said Hayden. "This is how social change works and it's an important concept for professors to discuss and teach."
Hayden wasn't sure what America's next great social movement would be but he predicted that it will come out of the "Obama generation."
Obama came from the margins, too, Hayden noted. No one saw him coming anymore than they did Kennedy. And like Kennedy, Obama may end up articulating a new vision for the country based on the next generation's desire for change.
"They have a self-confidence that their moment has come," said Hayden of today's young. They don't want to settle for the way things are or for the way they were achieved in the 60s."
Hayden's own 34-year-old son has had to convince his father of this break from the past.
"You have to go to Obama's rallies to see this or you'll miss it, too," said Hayden. "There is an unexpected social movement that has not occurred since 1968."
Hayden's eight-year-old son, who is African-American, is also swept up in the "turbulence" of change. Interestingly, he isn't moved by race in this presidential election as much as he is by the environment. He aspires to be a marine biologist to do something about it.
The former state legislator and sociologist by profession illustrated that social change occurs once activists achieve 25 to 30 percent support from mainstream public opinion. When they reach 40 percent, the idea becomes a "norm." Politicians then pass a law to institute the change, although it is far more compromised from its radical origins.
Nevertheless, the existing order co-opts the movement for change, said Hayden, because grassroots activists usually disperse once they achieve their goal, much like the Iraq War peace movement has.
The existing order also seeks to erase the memory of the movement or to claim it as its own through commemorations on postage stamps or the naming of parks, buildings, boulevards and holidays.
"This was the same government that jailed radical reformers [like Martin Luther King, Jr.,]" said Hayden.
The activist, writer and politician is a leading voice for withdrawal from Iraq and last year published Ending the War in Iraq. He spoke about that prospect somberly.
"Ending the Vietnam War took 12 years of my life," said Hayden. "So far, the Iraq War has been going on for five years -- 15 if you count Gulf War I."
Hayden said that even with a Democratic win, the plan is to leave tens of thousands of troop advisers in Iraq. The Baker-Hamilton Study Group also advocated withdrawing all but 20,000 troops in order to stabilize the country.
"If we can't win with 150,000 troops, how can 30,000 finish the job?" he asked.
Hayden also pointed out that this war has been designed with the Vietnam War in mind. For example, there is no draft and the number of dead soldiers is minimal in comparison. There is also a great effort to subdue the protests, which accounts for the media's sketchy coverage of the peace movement.
"Fighting tolerant warmakers is harder than fighting those who beat you up," said Hayden, who was thrashed and jailed during the 60s protests. The Internet generates much more information to a broader audience but it creates much less face-to-face interaction and fervor.
Hayden urged peace activists to help end the war in Iraq with the following suggestions:
* Spend time with those who disagree with you and make alliances.
* Work with anti-war people in the armed forces and let them know their rights.
* Show up at community colleges and conduct debates on military recruitment.
* Consult https://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home to find out and report how the cost of war is diverting funds from your community.
* Make alliances with those hurt by war's budget (i.e., senior citizens, veterans who need medical care, educators).
Hayden also said that any movement for change can happen by focusing on one's own experience. Working for energy efficiency on college campuses is a good example of what students can do.
"Start with things that are achievable and reach out to the undecided population," he advised. "Look for friends on the faculty but focus on your student friends."
Because activism often competes with students' time for study and a job, Hayden recommended that students combine their activist interests with service learning opportunities, work-study projects and research papers.
Hayden's Web site provides information about his other causes, which include erasing sweatshops, saving the environment and reforming politics through greater citizen participation.
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