Opinion: Thoughts on Military Recruitment

As a young man who’s about to graduate high school in America, it is my rite of passage to be harassed by military recruiters. Many my age suffer this same fate as they bombard with calls, texts, letters and everything else imaginable - all in hopes of fulfilling their quota and ultimately shipping you off to basic training. Without a draft in place, the military has to instead make use of their bloated budget to try and entice young Americans in any way imaginable, ranging from more reasonable methods like college scholarships and healthcare to video game tournaments and Twitter pages. 

To start with, an innocuous offer of free healthcare or college tuition may sound innocent on the surface. It’s an opportunity available to any able-bodied person willing and eligible to serve, and yet it very clearly is meant to target those poor and disadvantaged individuals who have few other options besides poverty. Predatory recruiters will travel to low-income communities and station themselves in schools and community centers, giving a pitch to anyone who’ll listen. This pipeline of poor people to the military is definitely not a new phenomenon, however. Many of the Vietnam War draftees tended to be the most underprivileged of the population and often young black or latino men would be forcibly sent overseas to serve the whims of their nation’s most powerful. Those who wanted to dodge the draft had to do so by enrolling in college, an option only readily available to wealthier, more privileged Americans. So, the poor people of the country were left stranded and awaiting their call for evaluation. Nowadays, we aren’t in as dire a position, and, therefore, do not have conscription in place; meaning the military has to recruit strictly on a volunteer basis.

After the tragedy of  September 11th, 2001, the military saw the highest enlistment numbers in its history. According to a document on nyc.gov, the first full recruitment [year] after the attacks, 181,510 Americans joined the ranks of active duty service and 72,908 enlisted in the reserves. This enormous loss and immense symbolic defeat led to an ignition of patriotic fervor within many Americans, suddenly motivated by a sense of defending their country and avenging those who’d fallen in the attacks. However, that fizzled out pretty quickly. 

By 2005, reports already began showing a plummet in recruitment. As quotas were missed and officials got concerned, recruiters had to start scheming other ways to convince the youth to join their cause. This crisis continued into the 2010’s, where it began to become even more apparent that young people had no interest in serving their country. By 2017, the Pentagon was even releasing reports that 71% of the population in the 17-24 age range would be unfit to serve in some way. This figure has further increased to a staggering 77% being ineligible for service, and even that remaining 23% isn’t too convinced. With some estimates saying that as few as 9% of Americans would even consider enlisting, suffice it to say that recruiters have a tall-task ahead of them. 

I’m sure some of you reading will have heard of Twitch, a live streaming service popular among online video game communities. What you might not have heard is that multiple branches of the United States Armed Forces have pages and partnerships with the platform. On these pages and on the corresponding YouTube channels, viewers can be treated to riveting content like Magic: The Gathering Online gameplay with military recruiters or tournaments in which the best of the best represent our Army in Call of Duty: Warzone. 

While I stand behind my criticisms concerning military recruitment, I do believe that those who serve deserve respect for their choice. To circle back to those soldiers of the Vietnam War previously mentioned, following our loss and withdrawal from the country, those same poor boys who’d been forced to serve now came home defeated, and were spit on by their fellow citizens and called “baby killers.” They were shamed and looked down upon for a war most of them had been forced to serve in, a dirty war which few of them had agreed with themselves. Our veterans should be treated with the dignity they deserve, and in that regard our government is rather questionable. According to Pew Research Center, when asked to assess the job the VA is doing in meeting the needs of veterans, fewer than half (46%) of all veterans say the VA is doing an excellent or good job in this regard.

Serving in active duty is a distressing and often traumatic experience for somebody to undertake, and those who do it require adequate care after the fact to ensure they can cope with any potential psychological toll that may have been incurred over the course of their duty. These soldiers aren’t violent maniacs; they’re people who believe that they are serving something greater than themselves. Whether or not their actions ultimately achieve anything, whether or not they are ordered to do something that is wrong, whether they die in service or never see combat- in the end they’re all still individuals who set out with a goal to serve others and that is an inherently good act worthy of our respect. 

My belief that the military is wrong to utilize a violent game like Call of Duty to try and recruit young, vulnerable men into service has no bearing on whether I revere those same men who then served and fought. I’m sure some might read my statement of respect for veterans and believe that I’m a shareholder of Lockheed Martin, but in reality this is untrue. I’m sure others could see my denouncement of militaristic violence as a call to defund the police, which also isn’t really accurate. You can criticize a part of something without hating it in its entirety. I believe there IS a middle-ground, regardless of how people on Twitter might act. The outside world is full of gray areas, of uncertainty, and of compromises. Our digitized social lives often feed an echo chamber of recurring thoughts which can reinforce this divide, but in reality there are very few who embody the stereotype of whichever political party you disagree with and imagine in your head as you argue on the internet. So, for those of you who are blindly patriotic - please take some time to think about our country’s actions and maybe reconsider that ROTC application; and to everybody else, please remember to respect Veterans.