Introduction

December 2016 / Matthew F. Rech / School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University - On 8 January 2002 in the US, George Bush Jr. signed into law an educational federal grant Act entitled ‘ No Child Left Behind ’ Though seemingly commendable at first glance, it being designed to improve academic attainment in disadvantaged state- funded schools (Zgonjanin 2006 ), a closer look at NCLBAs 670 pages revealed a provision that allowed military recruiters near unimpeded access to the personal information of enrolled students. On pain of forfeiture of federal funding, schools covered by the Act were required to release student names, addresses and telephone numbers to military recruiters. As Nava ( 2011 , 465) details, although

The provision gave parents the ability to ‘ opt-out ’ of releasing this information only if they first submit written notification to the school ... NCLBA ... does not provide any requirement, instruction, or mechanism to ensure that parents are aware of this.

The data-gathering proposition in the NCLBA, just as with the Pentagon ’ s Joint Advertising Marketing and Research database (Ferner 2006 ), is designed, at root, to streamline the solicitations of military recruiters. It focuses a military recruiting and retention budget, which reached $7.7 billion in 2008 (Vogel 2009 ), effectively according to gender, age, ethnicity and recreational interests, amongst other variables. Combined with the access granted to military recruiters in that of ‘ extra-curricular ’ junior reserve Officer Training Corps programmes, or the Armed Services Aptitude Battery test (a ‘ Careers ’ test offered by two thirds of all US schools) (Allison and Solnit 2007 ), it is clear that military recruiting is an important set of practices in what Harding and Kershner ( 2011 ) call a ‘ deeply embedded ’ culture of militarism in the US.

Though cultures of militarism differ markedly between places, their being a symptom of nationalisms, political, geographical and historical imaginaries, and a product of the state ’ s apparatus of persuasion, militarism in the UK is also bound to legislative efforts to promote a ‘ military ethos ’ in schools. In July 2012, for instance, shadow secretaries Stephen Twigg (education) and Jim Murphy (defence) wrote to the Telegraph to outline their vision for the future involvement of the British Armed Forces in schools (Twigg and Murphy 2012 ), opining that:

We are all incredibly proud of the work our Armed Forces do in keeping us safe at home and abroad. They are central to our national character, just as they are to our national security. The ethos and values of the Services can be significant not just on the battlefield but across our society.

Practically, Twigg and Murphy called for the widening of military Cadet schemes; new schools with service specialisms; the use of military advisors and reservists for physical education and other curricula; and a rebalancing of military involvement particularly as it is absent from the majority of state schools. The military might be best-placed to teach, they suggest, a ‘ service ethos ’ , a sense of ‘ responsibility and comradeship, and ‘ the value of hard work ’ and ‘ public service ’ .

Twigg and Murphy ’ s vision, has, since November 2012, variously become a reality with an expansion of the Cadets, a ‘ Troops to Teachers ’ programme, and Government support for fledgling military ‘ free-schools ’ and academies (Education.gov.uk 2014 ). Much like critics of NCLBA however, there are some who can ’ t help but see the connection between the Department for Education ’ s ‘ Ethos ’ programme and military recruitment. Indeed, as Sangster ( 2012 ) notes, along with the fact that the DfE does not provide an examination of what ‘ military ethos ’ actually means, or why schools are the best place to teach hierarchy, demand for obedience, or the value of the use of force, there are clear, and clearly troubling, links between the integration of military attitudes into the structure of national education policy and eventual enlistment (Armstrong 2007 ; Lutz and Bartlett 1995 ).

Understanding military recruitment as part of political- and social-scientific inquiry is important for three reasons. Firstly, military recruitment is the formal mechanism by which militaries persuade and enrol their personnel, and as such, is a manifestation of the state ’ s obligation to account for itself and its role. The media of recruitment (posters, TV ads, online games) provide opportunities to understand how violent visions, metaphors and templates are central to state-centric narratives of global politics (Rech 2014 ), and how states deploy nationalisms, domestic histories and mythologies of warfare, and mediate anxiety, threat and otherness in the name of consent and acquiescence (Rowland 2006 ; Saucier 2010 ).

Secondly, thinking beyond the state, the media of recruitment and the practices which bring it into being reflect and constitute contemporary militarisms. Successful military recruitment, as with government public relations, requires intricate economies of advo- cacy involving not only states and militaries, but a range of corporate advertising, creative and market research agencies (Rech 2012 ). More importantly, military recruitment is arguably part of, and synonymous with, a ‘ cultural condition ’ of militarisation (Stahl 2010 ). Namely, imaginaries conducive to recruitment – for example, the unproblematic acceptance of militaries and warrior tropes, a preference for the use of force – are widely present in popular media and are celebrated at public events (Allen 2009 ; Lewis 2010 ). Compounding matters is the fact that there is now, much as with advertising, a scant difference between military-industrial, media and entertainment industries in the West (Der Derian 2001 ; Robb 2004 ), with the effect that military public relations and recruit- ment happens at an interstices of reality and fiction, recreation and simulation.

Thirdly, and most pertinent to this paper, understanding military recruitment is important because it reveals possibilities for protesting militarism. Both the NCLBA in the US and the ‘ Ethos ’ programme in the UK, for instance, have been met by a burgeoning counter-recruitment (CR) movement. Though diffuse, the CR movement has grown amidst ʽ the heightened militarism [consequent of the US ’ and UK ’ s] ... involvement in long-term wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ’ (Harding and Kershner 2011 , 79). The methods adopted by CR advocates are varied, as the paper describes, but CR has two main aims. Firstly, it aims to challenge militarism in a concrete fashion. That is, where militaries will always rely upon a population for personnel, CR aims to disrupt the continuance of warfare by denying militaries the wherewithal to fight wars by impeding the ʽ structures supporting military enlistment as a viable career option ’ (Harding and Kershner 2011 , 79). Secondly, in light of a largely ineffective modern anti-war movement, it aims to provide a ʽ strategic approach to challenging the roots of unending war and militarization ’ (Allison and Solnit 2007 , xi). CR is a grassroots movement organised at the community level – manifest as ‘ opt-out ’ strategies in the US, or CR activities in UK schools (forceswatch.org) – designed, not despite its local focus, to challenge militarism writ large.

In this paper, CR will be used to envision ways to do and think critical military studies. As it will be demonstrated below, studies of military recruitment are limited either by a normative and uncritical outlook, or by a too general attitude toward a ‘ global militarism ’ (in which recruitment is simply subsumed). Similarly, this paper suggests that ‘ critical military studies ’– a realm of inquiry straddling critical geography, political science and critical IR – is limited either by an unwillingness to develop a critical moral stance toward violence, or by a too general attitude toward militarism which is often blind to militarisms affects. Put differently, the manner in which military recruitment has been studied is considered here analogous to current approaches to ‘ critical military studies ’ . The paper argues, however, that by exploring how CR reflects and operationalises the concerns of recent feminist scholarship, that CR is indicative of possible changes to both studies of recruitment and critical military studies. In doing so, it attempts to underscore the possibility for scholarly approaches which.

[a]re more accountable to the safety of bodies ... [and which traverse] scales from the macrosceurity of states to the microsecurity of people and their homes: from the disembodied space of neorealist geopolitics [ qua ‘ global militarism ’ ] to a field of live human subjects with names, families and hometowns. (Hyndman 2007 , 36) 246 M.F. Rech Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 03:57 31 July 2014 .

The paper prompts us to think not only about what the efforts of CR activists tell us about how we might do future critical military studies (e.g. of recruitment), but about how protest might alter how we conceptualise our broader notions ‘ militarism ’ and ‘ militarisation ’ when we are forced, as when we study CR, to situate the response to their affects. The paper in divided into three parts, and firstly will review academic scholarship on military recruitment in military sociology, geography and critical IR. Secondly, it provides a more detailed exploration of CR activism and protest in the context of feminist geopolitics and feminist-inspired critical military scholarship. Thirdly, the paper outlines what a feminist geopolitical approach to critical military studies, and the practical work of CR activists, might have to offer those seeking to resist militaries and militarism.

Military recruitment

Military sociology

The study of military recruitment can be divided into two categories: the ‘ military sociological ’ and the ‘ critical ’ (the latter representing work in geography, political science, critical IR, etc.). In the first instance, with its origins in the development of military sociology beginning during WWII, sociological interest in recruitment was prompted by a shift to all-volunteer forces in the Anglo-American world from the 1960s onwards. 1973, for instance, saw an end to the roundly protested Vietnam-era draft, and the implementation of Milton Friedman ’ s ‘ market-model military ’ in the US. The draft, Tannock ( 2005 , 165) notes, was protested above all because

it was inequitable and bore heaviest on working-class youth and youth of color; [because] it enabled U.S. military aggression and imperialism abroad, by guaranteeing the state a captive supply of military manpower; and [because] it coerced conscience and violated personal liberty.

The market model, on the other hand, aimed to indulge the US ’ ideals of individual freedom and economic efficiency (Rowland 2006 ) and was designed to repair the military ’ s tarnished image where the Cold War still necessitated permanent mobilisation (Saucier 2010 ). Insofar as it necessitated a sharp change to force organisation and publicity efforts, however, the market military posed a set of challenges. Speaking of the US Army, Saucier ( 2010 , 3) suggests that the military met these challenges by, firstly

Provid[ing] [as part of recruitment incentives] better pay, housing, and educational opportunities to compete with the civilian job market, as well as [by] recruit[ing] more women and racial minorities. [Secondly, it took] the unprecedented step of hiring advertisers to create a massive print, radio, and paid national television advertising and recruiting campaign.

In other words, this market model military was a military in which matters of recruitment were commoditised, and more sceptically, in which the soldier became a mere employee (rather than a proud servant of queen and/or country) (Rowland 2006 ).

Subsequently, military sociologists went to lengths to understand changing motivations for enlistment, particularly where military service might be considered merely as employment. The most popular schema developed to try to understand this change was Moskos ’ ( 1977 ) institutional/occupational (I/O) model. Under this rubric, where Moskos believed that effective military service relied upon primary group solidarity, the ‘ institutional ’ tenets of ‘ duty to country, loyalty and commitment ’ were becoming less of a Global Discourse 247 Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 03:57 31 July 2014 motivation to enlist than were ʽ extrinsic [Occupational] concerns such as comparative pay, acquisition of technical training and [other] incentives ’ (Eighmey 2006 , 308). Moskos was critical of the change to an all-volunteer force because, he thought, occupational concerns were having a damaging effect on the ‘ group solidarity ’ essential for an effective military.

Another tradition used to understand the effectiveness and purpose of recruitment is the civil-military relations literature (CMR). CMR asserts that military effectiveness and/ or civilian control of the military is tied to the dynamics of the relationship between distinct civil and military spheres. Born of two paradigmatic but opposed military socio- logical texts – Huntington ’ s The Soldier and the State ( 1957 ) and Janowitz ’ The Professional Soldier ( 1960 ) – CMR was also born of the changing relationship between an increasingly liberalising civil society and Conservative military officer corps. Subsequent scholarship on civil-military relations was split between adherents of the two theorists (Feaver, Kohn, and Cohn 2001 ). Huntington, for his part, argued that the military ’ s ability to ʽ protect democratic values [and defeat] external threats ’ (Burk 2002 , 13) required an equilibrium of civil-military relations manifest only in a state of ‘ objective civilian control ’ (Nielsen 2005 ). This approach – often labelled ‘ divergence ’ (Born 2003 ) – is based on the ʽ recognition of an autonomous military professionalism and on a rigid separation of the [armed forces] from the political [and civilian] sphere ’ (Caforio 2003 , 16). Janowitz, on the other hand, favoured ‘ convergence ’ and the bridging of gaps between military, society and the political system (Born 2003 ).

He believed that

genuine civilian control of armed forces could be completely realized only when the military is integrated into the broader network of social relations ... [where] not professional warriors, but citizen-soldiers, either conscripts or reservists, would better link the military to its host society through their civilian roots. (Rukavishnikov and Pugh 2003 , 133)

Though differently political (Huntington espouses a liberal theory, and Janowitz a civic republicanism), both theories imply policies of recruitment and retention. Huntington ’ sis a vision calling for an increased presence of a careerist, politically neutral officer corps. Janowitz ’ involves ʽ increasing civilian involvement in officer professional education ’ (Nielsen 2005 , 67) and efforts toward ʽ embedding military service within a system of voluntary national service and ... programs of political education [linking] the professional training of soldiers to national and transnational purposes ’ (Burk 2002 , 14).

Both the I/O model and CMR retain an enduring legacy. For instance, associated most strongly with the work of Peter Feaver and Richard Kohn (Feaver and Kohn 2000 , 2001 ; Feaver 1999 ; Kohn 1994 ) and an ‘ American Renaissance ’ in military sociology beginning in the 1990s (Nielsen 2005 ), CMR remains tied to theorising the ‘ civil-military problematique ’ (Feaver 1996 ). This is a challenge to ʽ reconcile a military strong enough to do anything the civilians ask them to with a military subordinate enough to do only what civilians authorize them to do ’ (Feaver 1996 , 149). Since the 1990s, however, such concerns have been considered in more directly cultural terms, with military sociologists exploring the implications of a ‘ culture gap ’ between civil and military spheres (Avant 1996/1977 ; Cohen 1997 ; Rahbek-Clemmensen et al. 2012 ).

Neither I/O nor CMR remain uncontested or undebated, however (see Armed Forces & Society 24 v.3), and there exist a number of critiques of the foundations for and reality of a split between ‘ institution ’ and ‘ occupation ’ (Chodoff 1983 ; Faris and Burk 1982 ; Harries-Jenkins 1986 ; Padilla and Laner 2001 ). Considering the focus of this paper, however, what is less important than attempts to extend of refute either the I/O model or CMR is the epistemological context into which they fit. Namely, whilst military sociology has experienced recent conceptual jolts – ones associated with Moskos et al. ’ s ( 2000 ) notion of the ‘ postmodern military ’ , scholarship around military work and citizen- ship (Cowen 2005 , 2008 ) or the emergence of non-state military actors in global conflict (Sheppard 1998 ; Avant 2000 ; Singer 2002 ; Fredland 2004 ; Carbonnier 2006 ) – the study of military recruitment in military sociology has not been so influenced. Therefore, social scientific understandings of recruitment remain tied to the instrumental and normative approaches which parallel the theorisation and academic investigation of I/O and CMR, with two implications.

Firstly, there is the issue of analysis. The predominant method of analysis in sociologies of military recruiting and I/O, as Jenkings et al. ( 2011 , 38) note, is that of a ʽ hypothetico-deductive epistemology and a resultant emphasis on positivist methodologies and the development and testing of models of social relations ’ . For example, Withers ( 1977 ) – focusing on estimations of British recruiting policy and simulations of recruit behaviour – employs a regression analysis of manpower objectives; Padilla and Laner ( 2001 , 2002 ) use a content analysis of recruiting images to assess trends in US recruiting; and Eighmey ( 2006 ; Miller, Clinton, and Camey 2007 ; Yeung and Gifford 2011 ) analyses telephone survey data on youth motives. Similarly, recent and contemporary CMR uses survey-based approaches to public and military attitudes toward the ‘ culture gap ’ (Feaver and Kohn 2001 and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies), and relies upon testing relationships between dependent and independent variables (Feaver 1999 ). Whilst there do exist a small number of qualitative analyses of recruiting images (Hockey 1981 ; Rowland 2006 ; Saucier 2010 ), military promotional iconographies (Roderick 2009 ), and the disparity between the image and reality of military service (Shyles and Hocking 1990 ), little has been done to consider, in particular, the power of the image to affect dispensa- tions toward military service. Neither has there been much attempt to understand what Jenkings et al. ( 2011 ) call ‘ military identities ’ and situated, local and ‘ (inter)subjective experiences ’ which are clearly part of military promotion (Allen 2009 ). Summarily, as Jenkings et al. ( 2011 ) continue, the retention of hypothetico-deductive approaches in parts of military sociology when the broader discipline was experiencing its cultural turn explains in part the limited nature of social scientific studies of military recruitment.

Secondly, there is the issue of the purpose and critical imperative of military sociology vis-à-vis the ʽ close institutional links between sociologists and military establishments ’ (Jenkings et al. 2011 , 39). Considering the aforementioned shift to a ‘ market model military ’ , these links shouldn’ t be surprising. Indeed, with the establishment of all- volunteer militaries, ʽ recruitment and management became an essential function of ... military operations ’ (Tannock 2005 , 3). As Saucier ( 2010 , 4) notes of the US Army after the Vietnam War, much of what would make this ‘ new ’ military effective was an ‘ image-making system ’ ; a system in which ʽ army leadership, experts [i.e. sociologists], and advertisers became acute cultural and social analysts in order to sell the army to a community of American consumers ’ . But the military-social collaboration between scholars and military institutions has three effects:

First, it facilitates access to data, whether primary or secondary. Second, collaboration involves gatekeepers, who by virtue of their role have significant authority and power in shaping research trajectories ... Third, collaboration requires accepting military institutional definitions of acceptable methodologies, conceptualisations of the social world that underpin the development of research questions, and understandings of how research fits a broader ‘ national interest ’ dictum. (Jenkings et al. 2011 , 44)

Global Discourse 249 Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 03:57 31 July 2014 The implications of this for social scientific studies of recruitment specifically are telling. The I/O model and the methods used to survey CMR have, for instance, directly influenced US Department of Defence (Sackett and Mavor 2003 , 2004 ) and Army (Szayna et al. 2007 ) research into recruitment to the extent that there is little difference between sociological recruitment research from ‘ military ’ and ‘ non-military ’ perspectives (McCrory 2002 ). CMR, moreover, is designed to be simply ʽ one aspect of national security policy ’ (Huntington 1957 , 1) theorised, as Bland ’ s( 2001 , 536) writing reveals, ʽ For the Good of the Service ’ . In following an ‘ engineering ’ rather than ‘ enlightenment ’ model of inquiry (Higate and Cameron 2006 ), military sociology thus works predominantly ʽ accord[ing] to ... the conceptual world-views of [military] forces and their govern- ing institutions ’ (Jenkings et al. 2011 , 44).

Critical military studies

Though reflecting the aspirations of this paper more closely than sociological work on military recruitment, work in the ‘ critical ’ category is no less problematic. Starting from the assumption that recruitment inheres in popular culture and everyday life, this work has, notably, used film, games and gaming as its empirical focus. For example, in geography and the field of critical geopolitics, Ó Tuathail ( 2005 , 373) suggests that whilst it is unclear to what extent Hollywood cinema (in this case Behind Enemy Lines ) inspired individuals to join the military, those who were are sure to be ʽ negotiating a world that is a great deal more complex than that presented in the movie ’ . Much of the critical geopolitical literature, similarly, is concerned with the difference (or not) between the ‘ image ’ and ‘ reality ’ of geopolitics and with the fact that popular and militarised visions of the world are problematic insofar as they go toward influencing how people respond individually to global politics (Dalby 2008 ; Klien 2005 ).

Moving to games and gaming, Der Derian ( 2001 ), in his work on the Military Industrial Military Entertainment Network, has set the stage for research which tracks the blurring of boundaries between military training simulations and commercial games, and which reveals games as instruments of recruitment and consent. With a focus on military-themed, first-person shooters, much of this work considers the propensity for games to mirror real-world conflicts (Power 2007 ), to ʽ cast ... players themselves in [for instance] the War on Terror ’ (Stahl 2006 , 112), to reproduce common-sense iconographies, aesthetics and imaginaries of cultural Others (Gieselmann 2007 ; Shaw 2010 ; Sisler 2008 ), and to influence ʽ understandings of war, peace and politics ’ (Salter 2011 , 362). A key game where recruitment is concerned – one with its own sub-genre of critical studies (Schulzke 2013 ) – is America ’ s Army , which was commissioned by the US Army expressly for the purpose of recruitment and the amassing of demographic data. The gaming literature has also charted the literal presence of game-based recruiting in civil spaces such as with America ’ s Army Experience roadshows (Allen 2009; Lewis 2010 ), and also provides insights into how game-based militarisms might be resisted (Stahl 2011 ).

But as with military sociology, though providing important insights, the ‘ critical ’ literature is limited in two ways. Firstly, as reflected in the work of Stahl ( 2010 , 48), its critical stance assumes a pervasive global culture of militarisation where recruitment, crucially, has Expanded beyond its normal confines to become a generalized cultural condition. While the appeal to actually join the military is one aspect of this condition, the interactive war consistently offers the civic sphere a standing invitation to become a ‘ virtual recruit ’

The first limitation of this work is, then, too general an attitude toward the persuasive effects of contemporary popular militarised cultures and a weak distinction between the ‘ virtual ’ and ‘ actual ’ recruit. This paper does not dispute that recruiting has become implicated in broader cultural changes in the mediation of war (i.e. as a shift from ‘ spectacular ’ to ‘ interactive ’ war, Stahl ( 2010 )). Rather, it argues that an understanding of the production of media specifically by and for states and militaries is essential wherever militaries use popular culture to persuade prospective personnel. As the opening of the paper revealed, military recruitment is a manifestation of the state ’ s obligation to account for itself and its role and a focused deployment of nationalisms, domestic histories, mythologies of warfare and senses of anxiety and threat. But recruitment is also a process through which people are persuaded to act upon such imaginaries; a fact that denotes the not subtle distinction between ‘ virtual ’ and ‘ actual ’ enrolment.

Secondly, these critical approaches do not often demonstrate the situated, local and embodied experience of militarism and military recruitment. As it has been demonstrated already, recruitment happens in-place – in schools, for example, and as part of spectacular events such as airshows. In this sense, a predominant focus in the critical literature on games is telling. Namely, even if we discount the fact that military recruiting happens in- place and as part of ‘ real-world ’ scenarios, the persuasive potential of military-themed games is not somehow trapped on the screen as representation. Gaming happens at the interface of discourses, screens, devices and players, and is embodied and affective. In kind, rather than confining an analysis to representations, or to the general ways in which the citizen is made ʽ by default an interactive participant [in an “ interactive ” war] ’ (Stahl 2010 , 38), a critical approach to recruitment and militarism should, rather, emphasise the specific effects of military promotion and a ‘ becoming military ’ for individuals.

In summary, both military sociological and critical engagements with recruitment are limited, lacking either a critical normative stance toward violence, and/or a reading of the specific, situated and individual effects of militarism. By further exploring the efforts of CR activists in the context of feminist scholarship, the paper now considers how these issues might be remedied as part of a re-envisioned critical military studies.

Counter-recruitment

The exploration of counter-recruitment in this paper is informed, as the following subsection describes, by recent feminist scholarship on geopolitics and militarisation. However, scholarly discussions of sex, gender, diversity and inclusivity in Western militaries (in relation to recruitment) are not new, being evident in military sociological literatures also. Growing diversity in militaries, as Winslow, Heinecken, and Soeters ( 2003 ) note, relates to a move from conscription to all-volunteer forces and ‘ fully- integrated ’ postmodern militaries (Moskos et al. 2000 ) where recruiting quotas are met by the tapping into of increasingly ethnically diverse populations, and particularly, by targeting women. The opening up of posts to women, as Woodward and Winter ( 2007 , 39, 2004 ) note of the British context, implies a range of issues such as ʽ recruit selection and training, the evolution of equal opportunities and diversity policies, and ... the exclusion of women from direct combat posts ’ . Military sociology, for its part, has tracked the arguments for the greater integration of women service personnel in differing national contexts by outlining a ʽ theory of the variables that affect the degrees and nature of women ’ s participation ’ (Segal 1995 , 758). Whilst the need for personnel (a military variable) has arguably been the driving force behind expansion of women ’ s military roles (Nuciari 2003 ), other variables associated with ‘ social structure ’ and ‘ culture ’ have been increasingly important in subsequent research which has explored the social con- struction of gender in the military (Archer 2013 ; Baaz and Stern 2013 ; Chapman 1999 ; Evans 2013 ; Kümmell 2002 ; Sasson-Levy 2003 ; Stachowitsch 2013 ). Gender is clearly an issue for recruitment and influences, in a basic sense, the division of the recruit pool according to sex (Woodward and Winter 2007 ). Yet whist military sociology remains wed to questions around sex distributions, broader literatures point to the discursive impor- tance of gender difference, gender relations and gender identities to military practices and militarism (Enloe 1983 , 2007 ). Where militarism sees the ʽ conflation of specific forms of masculinity with military identity ’ (Woodward and Winter 2007 , 3), recruitment thus becomes a matter of judgements about physical capability and potential, about gender more broadly as a marker of difference, and about whether appropriate ‘ male ’ and ‘ female ’ behaviours are commensurate with the ideal of the ‘ soldier ’ .

In parallel with this latter and more nuanced approach to the gendered aspects of militarism, the paper adopts a feminist-inspired approach to the CR movement. Specifically, it uses feminist geopolitics and critical military studies to prompt a more situated and grounded understanding of how military-social norms (including, but not limited to, military masculinities) circulate, become affective and might be resisted in civilian spaces.

Feminist geopolitics and critical military studies

Feminist geopolitics emerged as a challenge to the field of critical geopolitics. Critical geopolitics can be thought of as ʽ the moniker for the writings of a loose assemblage of political geographers concerned to challenge the taken for granted geographical specifications of politics ’ (Dalby 2010 , 280). Its aim is to undermine the tradition of geopolitics where it ʽ offers for many a reliable guide of the global landscape [employing the use of] geographical descriptions, metaphors and templates ’ (Dodds 2007 , 4). Critical geopolitics is also, as Dodds ( 2007 , 5) continues, concerned with how these descriptions, metaphors and templates ʽ generate particular understandings of places, communities and accompanying identities ’ and with the imaginative, discursive and cultural work that constitutes and reproduces dominant, state-centric narratives of global politics. It is, after Ó Tuathail ( 1996 , 256):

One of many cultures of resistance to Geography as imperial truth, state-capitalized knowledge, and military weapon ... [and] as small part of a much larger rainbow struggle to decolonize our inherited geographical imagination so that other geo-graphings and other worlds might be possible.

However, a vital part of feminist interventions into critical geopolitics is an argument that, though a fruitful mode of interrogating knowledge production and the geo-graphing of politics (Hyndman in Jones and Sage 2010 ), critical geopolitics is nevertheless limited. For instance, Smith ( 2000 ; Sparke 2000 ) argues that critical geopolitics runs the risk – amidst its reliance on the analytics of Derrida and Foucault – of merely bolstering the cause of linguistic post-structuralism rather than dealing with the material realities of geopolitics. Though demonstrating that IR theory and geopolitics is gendered (Dalby 1994 ), critical geopolitics is also charged with being a similarly masculinist practice considering its perennial focus on the Big Men of historical and classical geopolitics (Hyndman 2004 ). And as Hyndman (in Jones and Sage 2010 , 317) continues, though quite successful at decentring the nation-state and in its quest to destabilise the normative, ʽ it rarely engages in transformative or embodied ways of knowing and seeing ’ .

Regarding approaches to geopolitics, militarism and militarisation in IR, similar and parallel contradictions are apparent. For example, as Sylvester ( 2012 , 483 – 484) notes:

To date, much of IR has been operating comfortably in a world of theoretical abstractions – states, systems, power, balances, stakeholders, decision-makers, peace, war – tacitly leaving people and war to journalists, novelists, memoirists, relief workers, anthropologists, women ’ s studies and social history to flesh out. (my emphasis)

Critical IR, much as with critical geopolitics, therefore misses out, Sylvester ( 2012 , 484) continues, on ʽ the key elements of war: its actual mission of injuring human bodies and destroying normal patterns of social relations ’ . For Sylvester ( 2011 ), McSorley ( 2013 ) and others concerned to explore War, Politics and Experience, remedying the oversights of IR in relation to militarism and militarisation means drawing ʽ attention away from strategic and national interest politics of war to the prospect of theorizing war from a starting point of individuals ’ (Sylvester 2011 , 1), and particularly, to that of understanding how war engages and acts on bodies. For geographers like Dowler ( 2012 ), Katz ( 2007 ) and Nicley ( 2009 ), it is place which must figure as the locus for a renewed or reinvigorated investigation of violence and militarisation. Indeed, militarisation, Dowler ( 2012 , 492) suggests, should be considered a ʽ type of gendered sovereignty that is not only fixed at the scale of international hierarchies, but also rooted in embodied place-making practices ’ .

It is in the context of the combined aspirations of feminist geopolitics, critical IR and feminist geography that the paper sites the concerns and practices of the CR movement. In the following discussion, a twin parallel is drawn between the omissions from current critical military studies (outlined above) and the affordances of feminist approaches to militarism and militarisation. Put more directly, the remainder of the paper frames the efforts of counter-recruiters as, firstly, developing a critical normative stance toward violence by implicitly underscoring ʽ the universal value of human life (and death) ’ (Hyndman 2007 , 36) and the urgency of countering and protesting the militarisation of societies. Secondly, by shifting the scale at which militarism is thought to operate and by providing more ʽ epistemologically embodied accounts of war that more effectively convey the loss and suffering of people affected by it ’ (Hyndman 2007 , 36) CR will be shown to prioritise a reading of the specific, situated and local effects of militarism.

Practicing counter-recruitment: protesting militarism

As noted earlier in the paper, the means and methods of the CR movement in the US, UK and Canada are varied. However, there are three predominant tactics used by counter- recruiters. Firstly, and perhaps most straightforwardly, CR activists produce and distribute promotional materials and occupy certain spaces in order to counter the message and efforts of military recruiters. As the opening examples also implied, much current CR activism takes place near or on school campuses, and as Allison and Solnit ( 2007 ) note, this might take a number of different forms. Flyering outside school property is one of the easiest and most effective methods of CR, and if done at strategic times, its message – perhaps a simple printed list of the ‘ 10 things you should know before you join ’– might well become the subject of class discussion during the school day. As the authors continue, flyering might be complimented by ‘ tabling ’ on campuses at lunchtime, at sporting events or careers fairs. Here, a static presence is used to distribute other literatures like Andreas ’ ( 2003 ) comic book Addicted to War , badges, buttons and other symbolic materials.

Counterpropaganda – the defacement of military and recruiting iconographies – is also a popular tactic for CR activists who have adopted an approach which uses flyers or postering. For instance, drawing upon a broader culture of the remixing and ‘ jamming ’ of military recruitment and militarised popular cultures (Graham 2010 ; Stahl 2011 ), CR campaigners have quite successfully remixed US recruiting so as the ‘ Army of One ’ campaign became a series of ‘ An Army of None ’ posters (nnomy.org). A culture of flyering, tabling and postering in the CR movement also follows an ethic of the free distribution of information and artwork. Both Penner ( 2006 ) and Allison and Solnit ’ s ( 2007 ) accounts of the CR movement, for example, are useful examples of the history of CR in the US and Canada and billed as ‘ organising kits ’ for aspirant counter-recruiters, and as such, are free of copyright restrictions.

The precise mission of CR where it centres on the distribution of materials and the maintenance of presences in/around schools is diverse and, importantly, context-specific. But a number of overlapping objectives are readily observable. As Allison and Solnit ( 2007 ,xv – xvi) argue, CR is, firstly, about informing people as to ʽ what military recruits are used for in the world, understanding war, and creating viable alternatives [with a view to breaking] out of the deadlock of militarism ’ . In this sense, the distribution of flyers, the putting up of posters and the maintenance of presences at careers fairs has been important to the offering alternative careers advice – or ‘ vocational visions ’ (Harding and Kershner 2011 ) – especially in the (nearly always poorer) communities relied upon by recruiters.

CR is, similarly, about producing and distributing materials which challenge the ‘ core myths ’ of military service, including those which suggest the military provides relatively equitable employment and post-service benefits and that ʽ the military provides a healthy environment in which to live, work, learn, and develop oneself mentally and physically ’ (Tannock 2005 , 169). Moreover (as described in more detail below), CR involves providing the material wherewithal to ‘ opt-out ’ of naturalised and seemingly mandatory data-gathering programmes like the NCLBA, and in doing so, reveals an important resistive impulse. In many cases, activism of this sort emerges as a direct response to military presences at schools and in communities – emerging as counter-presences and counter-visibilities – wi th the effort to distribute materials being a subversion of the symbolic violence of military recruiters-on-campus.

The second tactic used by CR activists is legal challenge. Such approaches have been markedly useful in challenging the access granted to recruiters to US public schools. A key example of the CR as, essentially, a legal practice, is that of the battle for ‘ equal access ’ . As Nava ’ s( 2011 ) commentary on US educational and constitutional law describes, after having been barred from her local school by a district superintendent (who considered the presence of counter-recruitment ‘ peace tables ’ in school as ‘ unpa- triotic ’ ), CR activist Sally Ferrel of Wilkes County, NC, was forced to litigate against the school district. Legal challenges against military recruiters of this sort happen, however, in a complex landscape of historical precedent. Where schools are free to make policy surrounding who gains access to the campus (be it either recruiters or CR activists), for instance, many public schools are wary of denying access to the military for fear of violating the more recent stipulations of the NCLBA. Schools may allow access to CR activists, however, on the basis of previous legal contestations around ‘ viewpoint discrimination ’ and the ‘ equal access act ’ , both of which highlight the legal basis for providing alternative voices and viewpoints to be present wherever the military deign to recruit (Jahnkow 2006 ). The outcome of a number of legal challenges to the culture of recruiting in the US now means that

the question of military service (whether voluntary or compulsory) [is now recognised as] a controversial political (not economic or academic issue), and if a school establishes a forum from one side to present its views on the issue, it must give opponents equal access to the forum. (Allison and Solnit 2007 , 72)

Therefore, as Allison and Solnit ( 2007 ) note, an integral though straightforward element of CR should be knowledge of your legal rights as a student, parent, teacher or commu- nity member.

Insofar as the CR movement has, in this way, secured key legal and policy victories (Harding and Kershner 2011 ), resistance to the fated NCLBA has unfolded along similar legal lines. Where, as mentioned earlier in the paper, NCLBA does not make it incumbent upon schools to offer the opportunity to opt out of the data-sharing part of the Act, CR has been targeted at this issue in particular. As Zgonjanin ’ s( 2006 ) account of the NCLBAs legislative and legal history details, the effort of CR activists has forced a fundamental re- think not only of how military recruiting happens in schools, but the broader nature and purpose of federal funding. Revealing a range of contentions around the Act, Zgonjanin ( 2006 , 195) argues that

The mandated disclosure of student information to military recruiters does not meet the purpose of the NCLB[A] [it being at odds with the aim to improve education for the most disadvantaged], and furthermore, it compels speech by students and parents in opposition of such disclosure [insofar as it requires an active ‘ opting-out ’ ], violating clearly established law under the First Amendment. [Furthermore] Section 9528 ’ s opt-out provision is an impermis- sible exercise of the government ’ s power to regulate. It violates freedom of speech and the right to anonymity and by doing so imposes an unconstitutional condition on recipients of federal funds.

Save having NCLBA or the offending provision around opt-out repealed, CR and anti-war coalitions are, thus, focusing strongly on ‘ opt-out ’ organising with the primary aims being

To ensure that school districts live up to their legal mandate to inform students and parents of their right to opt-out; [and] to encourage students and parents to sign and submit opt-out forms to their school districts. (Tannock 2005 , 164)

As Allison and Solnit ( 2007 ) note, ‘ opt-out ’ campaigns have resulted in best-practice policies amongst the CR movement which pressure schools to place opt-out checkboxes on student emergency contact forms, and to recognise that an ‘ opt-out ’ decision carries over a whole school career, rather than one year, as it stands currently.

The third and least developed CR tactic is the direct lobbying of government around recruiting and retention policies. A key organisation working in this area is the UK-based Forces Watch charity (forceswatch.org). Forces Watch has three overriding priorities: to observe and respond to ways in which the military is being promoted as a normal part of everyday life; to make the argument and support people in resisting, military presences in schools; and to advocate for change in policies of military recruitment, the conditions of service, rules around contentious objection and the human rights of soldiers through the lobbying of government ministers. Though providing regular briefings and reports on UK military policies, lesson plans and other educational materials, and organising public debates, Forces Watch also attempts to directly influence government policy in these ways.

A key issue for the charity has been, in this sense, the stark fact that the UK is the only country in Europe and the only country on the UN Security Council to have a minimum age of 16 for enlistment into the Armed Forces. Criticised by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, and by the UK Parliament ’ s own joint committee on Human Rights, government and Forces policy in this area is critiqued by a coalition of anti-militarist charities including Forces Watch who have argued that, until the age of 18, recruited service personnel should have the right to a discharge from service if one is sought, even during the period between the second and sixth month of service (the Discharge As Of Right period). Due to campaigning by Forces Watch and others, June and July 2011 saw a number of changes to government policy in this area including the right for newly recruited personnel to leave the military before their 18th birthday, along with a shortened –‘ cooling off ’– maximum notice period of 3 months, and the reduction of notice required by adult personnel to 6 months. These changes, suggests Emma Sangster of Forces Watch, have ended ‘ the injustice of the six-year trap, which forces 16- and 17-year old to remain in the military until 22 ’ (forceswatch.org press releases).

Conceptualising counter-recruitment/situating militarism

As this outline of Anglo-American CR demonstrates, CR activism is clearly bound to a critical moral stance toward military violence and the value of human life. This is particularly the case where the aim is to protect the expression of counter-narratives to militarised cultures, to protect privacy, to free the genuinely emancipatory potential of education from military interference, and as with Forces Watch, to align military recruiting policies with more broadly held expectations surrounding human rights. CR is in this sense about ‘ emphasising clearly defined – and what organizers see as achievable – goals linked to the “ symbolic violence ” represented by military recruiters in schools and local communities ’ (Harding and Kershner 2011 , 80). But more than this, CR accounts for violence and militarism more broadly conceived where, for example, flyering and remix- ing involves a tacit critique of contemporary war in the Middle East and of the military- industrial complex. CR is, drawing on Harding and Kershner ( 2011 , 101 – 2) again, thus profoundly:

anti-militarist , [rather than] simply anti-war. [CR] is aimed at countering that part of ... culture which promotes violence and war as the optimal response to conflict ... [and] is thus a means of resisting not just one war, but the larger culture of militarism whose survival depends in part on young people ’ s passive acceptance of military values and ideals.

However, considering the framing of this paper, CR ’ s tendency to situate anti-militarist practice amidst the lives and places that militarism affects, warrants further discussion.

As noted at the outset, a primary aim of CR is to offer a strategic approach to challenging militarism where the modern anti-war movement has been largely ineffectual. CR, in this sense, is a pragmatic solution and is concerned with the fact that without troops, governments ʽ can ’ t fight war ... maintain an occupation ... [or] begin new wars ’ (Allison and Solnit 2007 , 145). For adopting such an approach, however, CR is not without detractors. For instance, as Jahnkow ( 2006 ) argues, speaking of US schools, if ‘ opt-out ’ awareness strategies are the only ones adopted, activists undoubtedly miss a range of other recruiting tactics used in schools and beyond (e.g. cadet schemes). Similarly, Tannock ( 2005 ) argues that a focus on individual potential recruits, schools or communities might be too parochial where the concern is to remove militaries and militarism from our societies more broadly. Such strategies, moreover, cannot account for the cultures of militarism which enable military presences in schools in the first place.

Such critiques accepted, this paper argues that it is precisely this sensitivity to the individual and local – where it is readily connected to militarism broadly conceived – which might inspire a critical military studies in theory and in practice. CR is a useful example of this because, as Allison and Solnit ( 2007 , xiii) argue, it critiques all the adverse effects war has on communities without moral or geographical relativism and, vitally, seeks ʽ connections between injustice abroad and at home, [between] local strug- gles [and] global ones ’ . This multi- and trans-scalar imaginary has its roots in peace movements since the Vietnam War which have allied social struggles for equality at home (e.g. the overrepresentation in Western militaries of people from working class and/or minority ethnic groups) with the misuse of lethal power and loss of life abroad. CR also understands that ‘ pragmatic actions, like keeping youth from joining the military, are most effective when they have as their end the transformation of the root causes of war, undemocratic governance, and injustice ’ (Allison and Solnit 2007 , xviii). But most importantly, the practical philosophy of CR recognises the interconnectedness and multi-scalar phenomenon of militarism and that, despite decades of vocal anti-militarism since the Cold War, militarism starts and ends at home. In this sense, CR activists would argue that

War cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from people and not only studied down from places that sweep blood, tears and laughter away, or assign those things to some other field to look into; and [that people] too comprise international relations, especially the relations of war, and cannot therefore be ignored or relegated to collateral status. (Sylvester 2012 , 484)

All of this is to say that, along with being anti-militarist and engaged with the business of the defence of human life, CR is also a form of protest which doesn ’ t resign considerations of ‘ militarism ’ and ‘ militarisation ’ merely to the sphere of international relations, states, nations and sovereignty. Rather, it is a practice and ethic which attempts a globally informed, whilst epistempologically situated ʽ politics of security at the scale of the civilian body ’ (Hyndman 2004 , 309). CR is committed to exposing and remedying the specific and individuated effects of militarism, where militarism is conceived of as an intercon- nected phenomenon, affective often simultaneously at scales from the body to the global.

Conclusion: toward a critical military studies

Military recruitment has, to date, been studied by scholars across a spectrum of the social and political sciences. The outlook and aspirations of the various disciplines and sub- disciplines engaged with it differ widely, but all would concur, however differently, that recruitment is a process through which individual and social identity-work meets an apparatus of persuasion, and inflects through nationalisms, domestic myths of warfare and the warrior, and geographical imaginaries. Studies of military recruitment, however, have the potential to reveal more than this and could be vital starting points in resisting militarism. In reviewing the efforts of CR movement, the paper has revealed possibilities for thinking critically about not only the constructedness of the imaginaries inherent to recruitment, but how military recruitment and the societal structures which enable it to happen might be questioned. In this way, the paper pointed to the limitations of the current literatures. Where existing work often fails is in lacking a critical normative stance toward violence and an underscoring of the universal value of human life. It also fails in not providing a reading of the specific, situated and local effects of militarism. The CR movement, therefore, demonstrates how a more refined and resonant approach to recruitment and everyday militarism – framed by dissident scholarship around the protestation and ending of political violence (Hyndman 2007 ) – might be practiced and theorised.

In moving forward, what should hopefully be implied by this paper is a need for more research around military recruitment. But more fundamentally, an attempt has been made here to use CR to envision a theory and practice of ‘ critical military studies ’ . What this paper doesn ’ t argue for, however, is a critical military studies modelled on CR. Taking inspiration from the efforts of anti-military activists should always be done in knowledge of the entanglements of peace, resistance and power (Sharp et al. 2000 ). In this sense, CR is not without its problems. Most importantly, CR, much like military sociological CMR and the I/ O model, is based on the assumption of distinct civilian and military spheres whereby CR activists identify (normatively and much like CMR surveys) the ‘ military values ’ which go toward militarising civil society. The extant critical military literature, as we ’ ve seen, would contest such a reading and would argue rather for a relational reading of both ‘ civilian ’ and ‘ military ’ and that the lines between the two matter only insofar as they are indistinct.

This paper calls for a critical military studies which is a synthesis of these two approaches grounded in a more responsible analysis (after Megoran 2008 ). This would be a critical military studies which recognises militarism as a global phenomenon manifest as the blurring of civilian and military spheres, and there are distinct, situated practices (like recruitment) whereby certain militarised dispositions, and a ‘ becoming military ’ ,is fostered and taught. Though highly problematic, work in military sociology and on CMR in particular is adept at identifying these sorts of dispositions (i.e. widely held beliefs and subjectivities around militarism and militarisation), and would provide the critical scholar a good starting point. But where there is work to do to explore the shared concerns of critical geographical, geopolitical and IR-inspired feminist analyses of militarism and militarisation, a more resonant critical military studies means, fundamentally, ʽ taking sides ... [and adopting] embodied ways of seeing war, witnessing and protesting violence ’ (Hyndman 2004 , 319). It would mean situated apprehensions of militarism and militarisa- tion at, and across, multiple scales. But would also entail, as with CRs ethic of non-violent futures, taking seriously the theory, practice and radical potential of protest.

Funding
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/J005096/1].

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Singer, P. W. 2002. “ Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry and its Ramifications for International Security. ” International Security 26 (3): 186 – 220. doi: 10.1162/ 016228801753399763 .

Sisler, V. 2008. “ Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games. ” European Journal of Cultural Studies 11: 203 – 220. doi: 10.1177/1567549407088333 .

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Stachowitsch, S. 2013. “ Professional Soldier, Weak Victim, Patriotic Heroine. ” International Feminist Journal of Politics 15 (2): 157 – 176. doi: 10.1080/14616742.2012.699785 .

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Edward Hasbrouck / Resisters.info Parent Category: NNOMY Articles  / 12 March 2026

I believe the good book says “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Yet it seems like our leaders want to become God. They play chess, we are the pawns. 

March 12, 2026 / Edward Hasbrouck / Antiwar.com - The organizations listed below oppose the recent change in federal law, buried in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, that will result in the Selective Service System (SSS) trying to “automatically” identify, locate, and register men ages 18 through 25 for a future draft.

“Automatic” registration won’t produce an accurate or complete list of potential draftees. But it will increase the likelihood of war and violate the privacy of U.S. citizens and residents. Once implemented, an automatic registration system will deny young men, including conscientious objectors, the opportunity to indicate their opposition to being drafted by opting out of registration.

This change in law was proposed by the SSS because the previous method of relying on men to register themselves with the SSS has, over time, resulted in tens of millions of young men failing to register or report changes of address. The failing record of the self-registration system was underscored when the SSS reported that in 2023 only 39.9 percent of men complied when they reached the mandatory registration age of 18.

While there currently is no active military draft, the SSS is tasked with maintaining the mechanism for one if it is authorized by Congress. Given threats and actions by the Trump administration to intervene militarily in an increasing number of places around the world, it is concerning that, at this time, steps are now being taken to grow the number of people who could be facing the threat of a future draft.

Furthermore, even before a draft is activated, the mere presence of a system to carry it out and enroll men to be involuntarily inducted can encourage politicians and military planners to feel overconfident in planning and carrying out larger and longer wars without having to worry about whether enough people would be willing to fight them. Thus, having a system for a draft in place reduces a critical guard rail for such decisions.

The new “automatic” registration law will give the SSS unprecedented authority, starting in December 2026, to acquire and aggregate information from any other federal database that might help identify or locate potential draftees. However, whether an individual is required to register depends on factors like their sex as assigned at birth and their immigration and visa status, information that could very well be absent from other federal data sources used by the SSS. Relying on such a wide breadth of federal data sources could, thus, make the SSS database inaccurate and vulnerable to misuse and weaponization, especially against transgender, nonbinary, and immigrant youth.

This potential for weaponization has been starkly demonstrated by recent efforts to grant the Department of State and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services access to the SSS database of registered individuals. The stated purpose for requesting this is to evaluate the eligibility of individuals for U.S. citizenship, but it could also be used to identify immigrants for potential deportation. If implemented, the personal information and privacy of all U.S. citizens and residents would be at risk.

The change to “automatic” registration was enacted with no hearings, no debate, and no budget review. There’s no reason to think that a list constructed from other databases compiled for entirely unrelated purposes will be any more fit for the purpose of provably delivering induction notices than the current “selfregistration” list.

In light of these facts, including the failure of the self-registration system, we are calling for Congress to end SSS registration and totally repeal the Military Selective Service Act, for which bi-partisan legislation has been introduced multiple times in the last few years (e.g., S.4881 in 2024 and H.R.2509 in 2022).

Lawmakers should act quickly on this issue before federal records are misused and the rights of young men are infringed in an ill-considered attempt to bolster the capacity of the U.S. for endless, unlimited wars.

Source: As U.S. Military Threats and Actions Escalate, Coalition Calls for Ending Preparations for a Military Draft - Antiwar.com Blog

Statement signers (as of 3/12/26):

• Alliance of Baptists

• American Friends Service Committee

• American Solidarity Party, Indiana Chapter

• Antiwar.com

• Center on Conscience and War

• CODEPINK

• Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

• Episcopal Peace Fellowship

• Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR-USA)

• Franciscan Action Network

• Friends Committee on Legislation of California (FCLCA)

• Friends Committee on National Legislation

• Friends of Swazi Freedom

• International Peace Research Association

• Jewish CO Project

• Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

• Mennonite Central Committee U.S.

• Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild

• National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY)

• Pacific Yearly Meeting, Peace and Social Action Committee (Quakers)

• Pax Christi USA

• Planet VS Pentagon

• Presbyterian Peace Fellowship

• Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO)

• Quaker House of Fayetteville

• Resisters.info

• Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

• Southern California Quarterly Meeting Peace & Social Concerns Committee, Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)

• Syracuse Cultural Workers

• The Libertarian Institute

• The Peace and Justice Studies Association

• The Truth Project (Palm Beach County, FL)

• United Church of Christ

• Veterans for Peace

• Veterans for Peace Chapter 112, Ventura County, CA

• Veterans for Peace, Phil Berrigan Chapter, Baltimore, MD

• War Resisters League

• WeAreNotYourSoldiers.org

• Winsted Area Peace Action

• Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom U.S.

• World BEYOND War

NNOMY staff /| Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 06 March 2026 

March 06, 2026 / NNOMY staff / The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) - Across the United States, a largely invisible system has taken shape inside public schools—one that blends curriculum, culture, and institutional access to guide young people, especially boys, toward military enlistment. While framed as leadership development or career exploration, these programs function as early pipelines into military service, shaping students’ identities and opportunities long before they reach adulthood. At the center of this system is the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), a century‑old program that has expanded dramatically in recent years and now reaches nearly half a million students nationwide. 1

JROTC is officially described as a citizenship and character‑building program, but its structure and history reveal a deeper purpose. The program was created under the National Defense Act of 1916 and later expanded to additional military branches, with the explicit goal of raising awareness of military service and encouraging students to pursue military pathways.1 Its curriculum includes drill, rank hierarchies, military history, and marksmanship, all taught by retired or reserve military personnel employed by school districts but overseen by the armed services. The result is a school‑based environment that normalizes military culture and subtly positions enlistment as a natural next step.

Although JROTC is marketed as voluntary, its presence is most concentrated in schools serving low‑income communities and youth of color. Research cited by NNOMY shows that JROTC units are disproportionately located in poor, rural areas and urban districts with limited civilian opportunities, aligning with broader recruitment strategies that present military service as a pathway out of poverty. This geographic pattern is not incidental: military leaders have long acknowledged the program’s effectiveness in boosting enlistment. In 2000, the Air Force Chief of Staff testified to Congress that nearly half of Air Force JROTC participants eventually enter military service through enlistment, ROTC, or the service academies.2

The program’s influence has grown even more significant as the military faces a historic recruitment crisis. In 2023, the Army, Navy, and Air Force collectively missed their recruitment goals by 41,000 personnel, prompting calls from defense commentators to “engage young people earlier in their high school journey” and use JROTC as a primary conduit for rebuilding the recruitment pipeline.3 This framing—treating high school students as a strategic resource to be shaped for future enlistment—reveals the underlying logic of the program’s expansion.

Gender plays a central role in this system. While girls participate in JROTC, the program’s culture, imagery, and messaging remain deeply rooted in traditional notions of masculinity. Physical training, drill competitions, and the valorization of toughness reinforce the idea that military service is a proving ground for manhood. Recruiters and instructors often frame enlistment as a path to discipline, purpose, and identity—messages that resonate strongly with boys navigating economic uncertainty or searching for belonging. These gendered expectations are rarely acknowledged in official materials, yet they shape how students interpret the program and how schools direct certain youth toward it.

Beyond JROTC, schools themselves become recruitment zones through everyday practices that blur the line between education and enlistment. Military recruiters are granted regular access to cafeterias, hallways, and classrooms, forming long‑term relationships with students. Many schools administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), sometimes without transparent opt‑out policies, providing recruiters with detailed information about students’ aptitudes. Elective courses tied to defense industries—such as cybersecurity competitions or drone programs—extend militarized education into technical fields, often under the banner of STEM readiness. These programs are frequently marketed as opportunities for career development, yet they also familiarize students with defense‑oriented skill sets and institutional networks.

The cumulative effect is a school environment where military pathways are highly visible and heavily resourced, while civilian alternatives—apprenticeships, community college pipelines, public service programs—receive far less institutional support. For many students, especially boys in under‑resourced schools, the military emerges not as one option among many but as the most accessible and clearly defined path to stability, employment, and identity. This shaping of opportunity is rarely acknowledged in official narratives, which emphasize leadership and personal growth while downplaying the program’s role in recruitment.

For organizations concerned with youth rights and educational equity, the issue is not simply the presence of military programs but the systemic forces that guide young people toward enlistment without fully informed consent. The blending of education and recruitment obscures the distinction between exploration and preparation, making it difficult for students and families to understand the long‑term implications of participation. It also raises questions about how public schools allocate resources, whose futures are being shaped by these programs, and what alternatives are available to students who deserve a full range of civilian opportunities.

As JROTC continues to expand—now reaching more than 3,500 units across all 50 states and DOD schools overseas1 —the need for transparent information, community‑based alternatives, and a broader public conversation becomes increasingly urgent. The question is not whether young people should have the option to serve, but whether they are being guided toward that choice by structural pressures rather than genuine agency. Understanding how these programs operate, and whom they most affect, is essential for protecting youth autonomy and ensuring that all students have access to meaningful, non‑militarized futures.

Sources:

1. "Defense Primer: Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps," Congressional Research Service (CRS), https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF11313/IF11313.16.pdf

2. "JROTC," The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY), https://nnomy.org/en/what-is-militarization/school-militarization/by-program/jrotc.html

3. "Is High School JROTC the Solution to America's Military Recruitment Crisis?," Hudson Institute, https://www.hudson.org/domestic-policy/high-school-jrotc-solution-america-military-recruitment-crisis-jeremey-hunt

NNOMY staff / Parent Category: NNOMY / Articles 02 March 2026

A Message to Young People Considering Military Enlistment 

March 2, 2026 / NNOMY staff / National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth - Many young people think about joining the military because the benefits are real: steady pay, health coverage, college tuition, job training, and a sense of direction at a time when life can feel uncertain. These are powerful incentives, especially when school is expensive, jobs are unstable, and families are under financial pressure. Recruiters know this, and they speak directly to those needs.

But there is a deeper question beneath the surface—one that every young person deserves the chance to consider honestly: What does it mean to accept personal benefits that may require participating in actions that cause harm to others? This is not a question about patriotism or politics. It is a question about moral agency, and about the kind of life you want to build for yourself.

Modern systems of violence do not depend on monstrous individuals. They depend on ordinary people who have been persuaded that their private needs—income, stability, a mortgage, a sense of belonging—can excuse their participation in actions that inflict extraordinary harm on others. This is the quiet moral transaction at the heart of many atrocities: the conversion of personal benefit into a shield against ethical responsibility. The question is not why institutions commit violence; institutions have clear incentives. The question is why individuals inside those institutions come to believe that their own survival or comfort can justify participating in the destruction of human life, including the lives of children.

This tension between personal gain and collective harm is not abstract. It is the mechanism by which violence becomes normalized, bureaucratic, and routinized. It is how unimaginable acts become everyday tasks. And it is how institutions maintain power: by convincing individuals that obedience is safer than conscience.

People rarely enter harmful systems with the intention of doing harm. They arrive there through a series of sanctioned steps that make the unthinkable feel routine. Institutions cultivate this shift through a set of psychological and structural mechanisms that gradually erode moral judgment.

The first mechanism is the elevation of authority over conscience. Individuals are taught that the institution sees a larger picture, that their own moral instincts are naïve or incomplete, and that obedience is a virtue. This belief allows people to set aside their own ethical discomfort because they assume someone else has already done the moral calculus. When a person believes that the institution knows better, they begin to treat their own conscience as an obstacle rather than a guide.

The second mechanism is the dehumanization of the people being harmed. Children in a distant country are reframed as “threats,” “shields,” “future combatants,” or “collateral damage.” This language does not merely distort reality; it erases the humanity of the victims. Once a child is no longer seen as a child, empathy becomes optional. Violence becomes easier to justify when the people suffering are imagined as abstractions rather than individuals with families, dreams, and futures.

The third mechanism is economic precarity. A paycheck becomes a lifeline, and the threat of losing it becomes a tool of control. People begin to believe that their personal survival depends on their willingness to comply. The mortgage, the health insurance, the student loans—these pressures are real, but they are also the levers institutions use to secure obedience. When someone says, “I have to do this; I need the job,” they are describing a genuine fear, but they are also revealing how effectively the system has tied their livelihood to their compliance.

Together, these mechanisms create a moral fog in which individuals can participate in collective harm while convincing themselves that they are simply fulfilling their responsibilities.

The tragedy is that the personal benefits used to justify participation in harm are often fragile and illusory. A mortgage payment, a promotion, a sense of belonging—these are temporary comforts, not lasting rewards. The real beneficiaries of violence are not the individuals carrying out the orders but the institutions that profit from instability, fear, and domination. Defense contractors, political leaders, and ideological movements gain power and wealth, while the individuals who execute the harm gain only short-term security and long-term moral injury.

The system offers personal benefit as a kind of moral anesthesia. It numbs the conscience without resolving the underlying ethical conflict. It allows individuals to believe that their participation is necessary, even noble, because it protects their families or secures their future. But this is a false bargain. No amount of personal gain can erase the reality that someone else is paying the price for that security—often with their life. 

What kind of people benefit from bombing schools and children and justify that on the basis of a home loan? That is the primary question

What kind of people benefit from bombing schools and children and justify that on the basis of a home loan? That is the primary question. The essential ethical argument is stark in its simplicity: no personal gain can justify participation in the harming of children or the destruction of civilian life. This is not a call for martyrdom or heroism. It is a recognition that certain lines cannot be crossed without forfeiting one’s moral agency. A person’s first responsibility is to their own moral judgment. Institutions may demand obedience, but they cannot absolve individuals of the consequences of their actions. Economic pressure may be real, but it cannot transform an immoral act into a moral one. And no narrative—no matter how sophisticated—can erase the humanity of the people being harmed.

This argument does not deny the complexity of survival under capitalism or the coercive power of large systems. It simply insists that ethical responsibility cannot be outsourced. When an institution asks a person to harm children, the only moral answer is refusal. Anything else is a surrender of conscience.

Large-scale violence depends on the compliance of ordinary people. It requires technicians, analysts, operators, administrators, and educators who are willing to suspend their own judgment in favor of institutional logic. When even one person refuses, the machinery of harm loses a piece of itself. Refusal is not rebellion; it is the restoration of moral agency. It is the recognition that personal benefit cannot be purchased with someone else’s suffering—especially the suffering of children.

Institutions fear this kind of refusal because it exposes the fragility of their power. They rely on the belief that individuals have no choice, that obedience is inevitable. But history shows that systems of violence are vulnerable to the smallest acts of conscience. A single refusal can disrupt a chain of command, inspire others to question their roles, or reveal the moral bankruptcy of the institution itself.

The question of personal benefit versus collective harm is not limited to war or militarization. It is a question about the kind of society we are building. A society that teaches people to trade conscience for comfort will reproduce violence indefinitely. A society that teaches people to honor their moral limits—even at personal cost—creates the conditions for peace.

Our private lives are not separate from the public consequences of our actions. The mortgage, the job, the career ladder—these are real pressures, but they cannot be allowed to eclipse the value of human life. When individuals refuse to participate in harm, they are not only protecting others; they are protecting the integrity of their own humanity.

Young people deserve real options—not pressure, not half‑truths, and not the idea that their future must be purchased by participating in harm. The goal here is to lay out credible, concrete alternatives to military enlistment that offer stability, education, community, and purpose without requiring you to surrender your moral agency. 

Real Paths, Real Futures: Civilian Careers That Honor Your Conscience

You don’t need to enlist in the military to build a life that’s stable, meaningful, and respected. There are civilian paths that offer education, income, and purpose—without asking you to surrender your values or risk moral injury. These careers exist in every community, and they’re built on the idea that your future should never depend on someone else’s suffering.

• Skilled Trades and Union Apprenticeships
  If you want to earn while you learn, union apprenticeships are one of the most powerful alternatives to military service. Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, HVAC technicians, and ironworkers all start with paid training and end up in careers that offer healthcare, pensions, and pride. These jobs can’t be outsourced, and they often surpass military pay within a few years. You build real things, serve your community, and keep full control over your conscience.
  
  

• Community College and Transfer Pathways
  Community colleges offer low-cost or free tuition in many states, and they’re designed to help you transfer into four-year universities without drowning in debt. Whether you’re interested in nursing, digital media, STEM, or allied health, these programs give you the same degree as someone who paid four times as much—without signing away years of your life or risking being placed in violent situations. You stay rooted in your community and in your values.
  
  

• Civilian National Service Programs
  If you’re looking for purpose and teamwork, national service programs like AmeriCorps, YouthBuild, and Conservation Corps offer stipends, education awards, and job experience while serving communities. You might help restore ecosystems, support public health, or rebuild housing. These programs give you leadership and direction—everything recruiters promise—without requiring you to harm others or enforce policies you didn’t choose.
  
  

• Healthcare and Emergency Services Training
  Many states offer subsidized or free training for EMTs, paramedics, certified nursing assistants, and medical assistants. Fire academies also train young people for lifesaving roles. These careers offer meaning, stability, and community respect. You save lives instead of taking them. You become someone your neighbors rely on—not someone deployed to enforce someone else’s agenda.
  
  

• Technology and Digital Skills Bootcamps
  If you’re drawn to tech, short-term bootcamps can launch you into careers in IT support, cybersecurity, web development, UX design, and cloud computing. These programs are fast, focused, and often lead to entry-level jobs with real upward mobility. You don’t need a four-year degree or military service to break into tech—you need access, mentorship, and a clear path forward.
  
  

• Public Sector and City Jobs
  Cities, counties, and states hire young people into stable, unionized roles with benefits. Parks and recreation, public works, transportation, libraries, and administrative departments all need smart, committed workers. These jobs offer long-term security, pensions, and a chance to serve your community directly—without being part of a system that may ask you to harm someone else’s.
  
  

• Creative, Media, and Cultural Work
  If you’re a storyteller, artist, or communicator, there are paths that build identity and voice. Community media centers, youth arts organizations, local journalism, graphic design, and film production all offer ways to shape culture and speak truth. These careers build purpose and connection—things recruiters often promise but cannot guarantee.

Why These Paths Matter

The military’s benefits are real—but they are tied to an institution that may require you to participate in actions that violate your conscience. Civilian alternatives matter because they allow you to build a future without moral compromise. You deserve options that honor your intelligence, your values, and your potential. You deserve a life of purpose that doesn’t depend on someone else’s suffering. These options provide income, training, and long‑term opportunity. They differ in structure, but all share one thing: you keep full control over your conscience and your future.

Additional Resources:

•  Peaceful Career Alternatives | Career alternatives to the military that offer ways to develop job and teamwork skills, learn personal discipline, and pursue educational goals | NNOMY
  
  

• Thinking of Joining the Military to Gain Citizenship? | Intended for non-citizens looking to join the military for immigration benefits, to let them know what to be aware of immigration-wise before approaching a recruiter | Project YANO

Grace Segers, Tori Otten /  Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 16 February 2026

February 16, 2026 / Grace Segers, Tori Otten  / New Republic - Last November, during his address before McDonald’s investors, President Donald Trump—as he is wont to do during public speeches—went on one of his weird tangents. “And that plane went ‘pshh,’ like this,” he continued, diving his hand downward in an accompanying gesture. “You know, when it drops a bomb, it goes down very steeply, because that gives it a better angle, and, you know, more speed for the bomb.”

It was a characteristically glib illustration for Trump, as he narrated the experience of watching military planes drop bombs on Iran. The planes were described not in terms of the damage of their payload but rather by the sound they made as they levered inexorably downward. By now, we’re used to the way the president’s mind might lock onto something loud or shiny he sees on a screen, especially if those images provoke his enthusiasm or anger. But his play-by-play descriptions of bombs bursting in air is actually something his administration and his allies have long encouraged Americans to do: view their biggest atrocities through a gamified lens.

One demographic may be particularly susceptible to this kind of incitement, one for whom targeting an otherized population is viewed more as a game than as state-sanctioned violence: lonely, angry young men.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump made a concerted effort to market himself to this cohort. He appeared on multiple podcasts popular in the “manosphere,” a community that promotes misogyny and (often white) male supremacy. Since taking office a second time, Trump and his allies have continued to gamify many of their policy decisions, in a campaign to encourage their audience to transfer their online anger to the real world.

As they are increasingly siloed online, it becomes easier for young men to distance themselves from others, viewing all other perspectives as illegitimate or unimportant. If your experience is the only true version of reality, then other people become NPCs, or “nonplayable characters”—not individuals but mere background actors populating the scenes in your everyday life.

“You’re the protagonist in the same way that a player character in a game might be,” said Adrienne Massanari, an associate professor of communications at American University.

This perspective is frequently encouraged by the administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given his missions names such as “Midnight Hammer” and “Southern Spear,” phrases that sound more like weapons in a game than actual military operations. (Hegseth also has a tattoo that reads “Deus Vult,” a slogan adopted by the far right that was popularized by the grand strategy computer game Crusader Kings II.) And Trump, of course, continues to enthusiastically describe military strikes with the use of sound effects, as if he were watching an action flick rather than bombs dropping on human beings.

Characterizing military or law enforcement service as a video game–style activity can be an effective way to attract young men. Historically, recruitment efforts by the military have been intertwined with video game culture, encouraging this perspective—from the Army releasing its own hugely popular video game in the early 2000s to its use of esports to reach young Americans and encourage them to join up.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has enthusiastically adopted the strategy of explicitly appealing to gamers through distinct visuals and coded language. One recruitment poster shared by ICE on its Instagram account last year harkened to the video game series Halo, encouraging potential recruits to “destroy the flood.” In the Halo series, the “flood” is a parasitic alien life form and one of the primary villains of the franchise—the administration is thus comparing undocumented immigrants to an existential threat to society that must be eradicated.

“It is easier to be able to dehumanize an immigrant, if you’re an ICE agent, if you view it as, ‘It’s just a game,’” Massanari said. If a man in a position of authority sees himself more as a protagonist in a first-person shooter game than someone working toward the collective good, that distance between him and his community only widens.

ICE has planned a $100 million year-long recruitment push—capitalizing on the role-playing-game-obsessed, violently inclined fan base that Trump cultivated on the campaign trail. Other marketing tactics include Snapchat ads, hiring influencers and livestreamers on the far-right streaming platform Rumble, and using a geolocation technique to send ads to anyone near military bases, Nascar races, college campuses, or gun and trade shows. ICE will also send targeted ads to people who listen to patriotic podcasts or attend UFC fights. As the Young Men Research Initiative has noted, the agency is explicitly targeting young men who have fears of being economically insolvent and are anti-immigrant and right-wing.

The end result may be a law enforcement culture that is more defined by a desire to exert power over the vulnerable than protect them, a perspective that has been partially shaped and encouraged by the modern internet. That shift in goal came into stark clarity on February 3, during a hearing on ICE brutality held by congressional Democrats from both chambers. Chicago resident and U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez testified about getting shot five times while following immigration agents in her car and trying to warn her neighbors.

“After being at the hospital for less than three hours, I was discharged from the hospital into custody of the FBI. As we left the hospital, I was escorted out through the back in a wheelchair. I observed over dozens of Border Patrol agents waiting outside the hospital,” Martinez said. “One of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It was the same agent who had previously kept coming in and out [of my hospital] room, and I had to repeatedly tell him to leave.

“Was this the agent that shot me? Was this a trophy for him?”

She also revealed that the agent who shot her, Charles Exum, bragged over text after the shooting, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”

Last May, Elon Musk sulked when British journalist Mishal Husain asked him tough questions about his work at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—its very name a meme reference—which had been brutally slashing federal funding and jobs with minimal oversight. Musk called her an NPC and started giving her only one-word answers.

“I mean, I feel you’re somewhat trapped in the NPC dialogue tree of a traditional journalist,” he said. “So it’s difficult when I’m conversing with someone who’s trapped in the dialogue tree of a conventional journalist because it’s like talking to a computer.”

Musk’s willingness to refer to a woman sitting just feet away from him essentially as unreal is emblematic of how this kind of language has entered the mainstream. It’s shockingly easy for the manosphere to pick up new followers by offering a sense of community, in large part due to the overwhelming sense of isolation that many younger men feel. At least 16 percent of men under the age of 50 say they feel lonely all or most of the time, the Pew Research Center found in January 2025. And only 38 percent of men overall said they’re likely to reach out to a friend if they feel in need of support.

Young men are disproportionately likely to turn to online communities to find solidarity, according to the Young Men Research Initiative, and tend to believe that the people they follow on social media are “better” than they are: wealthier, more successful, and more attractive. This can create not only a sense of distance from their peers but bitterness that they appear to have fallen behind.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the sense of isolation deepened. A survey by SocialSphere conducted last March found that young men between the ages of 18 and 29 were more likely to report a loss in dating and socializing opportunities compared to young women. Of the young men surveyed who said they were significantly affected by the pandemic, 49 percent reported “feelings of isolation or disconnection from support networks,” and 48 percent said they have a “strong need to belong to groups where I feel completely accepted.”

The young men who were teenagers or in their early twenties during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and may not have had sufficient peer-to-peer interaction could have instead experienced the world through screens during a defining point in their development. Social media and video games in a vacuum cannot be blamed for a rise in misogyny and racism, but the “atomized” media experience during the pandemic helped further isolate this population, said Massanari.

“It made it easier to be in the spaces where … certain ideas, certain memes, certain language, would just be normalized as that’s how people talk and engage with each other,” she said.

Andrew Breitbart, the creator of the eponymous far-right site, popularized the “doctrine” that “politics is downstream of culture.” For the modern young man, the more accurate assessment is that “politics is downstream of experience,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.

“The experience for too many people, specifically too many young men, is struggle in isolation and feeling, feeling like no one has their back,” said Della Volpe. “So that you had that moment a year and a half ago where Trump and the aligned forces, you know, in the quote-unquote manosphere promised to have their back and to allow them to be the protectors and providers that they wanted to be, making them feel good about themselves.”

This desire for belonging dovetails into a desire to see “strong” political figures. According to a survey by SocialSphere, 71 percent of young men said it was important to have a leader who “demonstrates strength and authority, even if it means bypassing traditional political norms.”

Fringe groups, such as incels, male supremacists, and neo-Nazis, are quite welcoming to people who feel isolated in real life. “They offer this status. They offer this sense of mastery over ‘forbidden knowledge,’” said Dr. Pasha Dashtgard, the director of interventions at the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, or PERIL, at American University. “These toxic online communities also play on grievance. They give you someone to blame. They give you an absolution for your failure” to participate in society through, for instance, getting a job or sleeping with lots of women.

Dashtgard described it as a sort of “toxic belonging”—a sense of exclusivity for people who are normally excluded.

“These kinds of toxic online communities offer a sense of meaning, a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves. And they give you this kind of narrative, that … you can be a protector of a community,” he said.

Belonging to these online communities can also make people more inclined to acts of violence, against both others and themselves. Community leaders will often lead other members down a slippery slope of increasingly extreme ideas, resulting in desensitization to violent imagery or the deepening of beliefs that certain groups are naturally inferior.

“You start to think of yourself as part of this existential conflict, between good and evil, between my people and your people. Where we can’t coexist,” Dashtgard explained. “Where it’s a zero-sum game, and either my group destroys or dominates your group or your group is going to destroy or dominate my group.”

Massanari draws a line from the “Gamergate” movement of 2014 to modern politics both online and IRL—in real life, in internet parlance. What began as a disgruntled ex-boyfriend’s lengthy rant against his former partner, a video game designer, morphed into a massive online harassment campaign against women in the gaming community. The young, white men who participated in Gamergate doxed and explicitly threatened the safety of their targets, railing against racial and gender diversity in an industry that had heretofore catered to them almost exclusively.

Right-wing provocateur and Trump adviser Steve Bannon, then a Breitbart editor, saw Gamergate as an opportunity to harness the vitriol of young men who felt their position of power threatened in the gaming community, and direct that rage toward American culture as a whole. Massanari, who has written a book on the connection between the tech community and the far right, said that Gamergate helped normalize tactics of online harassment and a widespread atmosphere of conspiracism.

Where the participants in Gamergate believed that societal ills were caused by feminists and “social justice warriors,” the current netizens of the online right see immigrants and transgender Americans as agents of a great replacement. The disaffected young men of today who are inculcated in these messages grew up with the internet that Gamergate built.

The consequences can be severe. The shooter who killed right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last year included references to memes and to the satirical video game Helldivers 2 on his bullet casings. But this does not mean that the game should be connected to any particular ideology; references to internet culture have been rising among young, male shooters for years.

Journalist Ryan Broderick noted in an interview with PBS News last year that “many young extremists that we have seen come out of the woodwork over the last few years since the pandemic see public violence as a path towards fame, towards glory, another way to go viral.” They may have an “accelerationist” viewpoint that political violence will push the country to destruction.

“It is a very nihilistic, very apocalyptic view that has become more and more popular, particularly on the dark corners of the internet in the last 10 years,” Broderick said.

Trump’s support among young men is far from universal. Some polls show that the majority of Gen Z men, and even a percentage of the young men who voted for him, are feeling some buyers’ remorse.

It is also unfair and inaccurate to blame video games, social media, or the internet as a whole for the isolation that young men may feel, or the extremism that vulnerability can beget. Loneliness can stem from something as simple as having no outlet for difficult emotions. (Let’s also just jump ahead of whatever complaint you may have about young men not being the only ones struggling with loneliness; this is a universal issue that plagues young women as well, and indeed, Americans across all ages and genders.)

Gaming communities can provide those outlets. Della Volpe said that when he talked with young men over the summer for the “Speaking With American Men” initiative, which seeks to provide research on how Democrats can reconnect with this demographic, he noticed that young men he surveyed do not feel comfortable talking about their emotions outside of “anonymized communities.”

“Whether it’s politics or financial or personal, those are the kinds of conversations that clearly come up in those kinds of channels,” said Della Volpe, who is also the founder and CEO of SocialSphere.

A potential cure, then, is ensuring that there are other opportunities for young men to connect with each other. Dashtgard added that “there are proven, empirically validated strategies for preventing this kind of violence from happening,” primarily by helping young people in general create offline spaces and networks where they can discuss the feelings that would otherwise lead them to online fringe groups.

“Violence is preventable. This is not something that … young men are doomed to,” Dashtgard said. “Most young men are not participating in extremist groups, are not being radicalized into male supremacy. Even the ones who are consuming don’t necessarily become radicalized to it.”

Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/206368/trump-ice-gamify-political-violence

Natasha Souza / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 14 January 2026

January 12, 2026 / Natasha Souza / NNOMY - The military was part of my life long before I was old enough to understand what war meant.

My father served in the Army. Growing up, deployment was not an abstract policy debate—it was our household reality. Iraq. Afghanistan. Each deployment brought a quiet fear that settled into everyday life. Each return carried relief, alongside the understanding that something had shifted. The military does not enlist only one person; it pulls entire families into its orbit. That reality is rarely acknowledged, and almost never disclosed to the young people later targeted for recruitment.

That lived experience is why military recruitment in schools raises serious ethical concerns.

Teenagers are approached at a developmental stage where they are still forming the capacity to understand long-term consequences. They are encouraged to sign legally binding contracts written in complex language, while being presented with a carefully curated narrative of service. Recruiters emphasize opportunity—education benefits, job training, structure—while minimizing or omitting the realities of lost autonomy, indefinite obligation, physical and psychological risk, and the inability to refuse orders once enlisted.

This practice is not evenly distributed.

Military recruitment is concentrated most heavily in lower-income schools and in communities of color—places where students are more likely to face underfunded education systems, fewer college pathways, and economic instability. In these environments, enlistment is often framed not as one option among many, but as the most viable route forward. When opportunity is constrained by systemic inequality, recruitment operates less as choice and more as pressure.

Federal policies reinforce this imbalance. Through mechanisms such as the ASVAB Career Exploration Program and provisions within the Every Student Succeeds Act, military recruiters are granted access to schools and student data in ways that civilian employers are not. Families are often unaware that student information can be shared unless they actively opt out—and many are never meaningfully informed of that right. This lack of transparency undermines informed consent and disproportionately affects families with fewer resources or less access to advocacy.

What students are also not told is that enlistment may lead to domestic deployments in today's military.

Increasingly, service members are deployed within the United States, sometimes in roles that place them in opposition to civilians, protests, or communities that resemble their own. Many recruits never anticipate this possibility when they sign up. Yet once under contract, refusal is not a realistic option. These deployments create profound moral conflict—conflict that recruiters do not address, and that adolescents are not equipped to foresee.

There is also the issue of legality and geopolitical ambiguity.

Service members may be ordered to participate in operations tied to contested foreign policy objectives, including actions related to Venezuela or strategic militarization and positioning involving Greenland. These missions are often justified under broad national security claims, even when their legal grounding under international law is unclear or disputed. Those carrying out these orders do not craft the policy, cannot decline the mission, and frequently lack transparency about the long-term consequences of what they are being asked to do.

Schools should be spaces dedicated to learning, critical thinking, and exploration—not recruitment pipelines. Allowing military recruitment in educational settings compromises the educational mission and normalizes the targeting of young people—particularly those from marginalized communities—for military labor.

This is not an abstract debate about patriotism or service. It is about informed consent, equity, and the protection of students' rights.

A decision with lifelong legal, moral, and physical consequences should not be marketed to minors during the school day.

Until military recruitment is removed from schools—and until families are fully informed of their rights to limit recruiter access and protect student data—the harm will continue to fall hardest on those with the fewest alternatives.

Natasha Souza
NNOMY Communications staff volunteer
natasha@nnomy.org

Resources for Citizens, Immigrants, and Soldiers with Questions:

• Emergency Webinar: Illegal Orders under US Military Law . Military Law Task Force, Jan 03, 2026

• U.S. Citizens Are Joining the Military to Protect Undocumented Parents, New York Times, Jan 12, 2026

• What’s the status of the military draft and draft registration?, Draft Resistance News, December 2025

• GI Rights Hotline - https://girightshotline.org/

Lauren Morales / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 07 January 2026

January 2026 / Lauren Morales / Committee Opposed to Militarism & the Draft (COMD)  - For decades the United States has been a hypermilitarized country. The public is force fed the notion that we must respect the armed forces who are forever fighting to keep U.S. Americans safe at home and abroad. Yet there has always been a small part of society that challenges this indoctrination, recognizing that worshiping imperialist ideology is irreconcilable to national and global justice.

But what happens when the empire’s Department of Defense becomes the Department of War, and the war is being waged on our own cities and on our own people? Will members of mainstream U.S. confront their blind glorification of militarism when they see soldiers in the streets facilitating inhuman immigration policies and enforcing the criminalization of dissent? 

Those who follow U.S. militarism have noted significant new developments over the past year. As The Intercept recently reported, as of mid-September Trump had deployed “roughly 35,000 troops within the United States this year,” even though the true number could actually be “markedly higher.” Military members have been drawn from the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines and National Guard “in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant” and tough-on-crime agenda. Experts contend these intensifying efforts violate the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th century federal law that generally prohibits the armed forces from carrying out domestic law enforcement. Adherence to the Posse Comitatus Act has been widely understood as fundamental to maintaining democracy and a safeguard from slipping into a full-blown police state.

Currently, 10,000 troops are deployed (or deploying) to assist Customs and Border Protection at the U.S./Mexico border -- a dramatic increase over the approximately 2,500 troops who were deployed to the region when Trump took office in January. In April, a presidential memorandum ordered the military to take control of a 60-foot-wide federal land buffer along some parts of the border that are called the Roosevelt Reservation. Trump said in the memorandum that “our southern border is under attack from a variety of threats” and that “the complexity of the situation requires that our military take a more direct role” in security and enforcement than in the past. Allowing the Department of War to control this land has given troops the green light to “detain any trespassers, including migrants” and asylum seekers. According to analysts at the Brennan Center for Justice, the plan seems to be to “let the military act as a de facto border police force, with soldiers apprehending, searching, and detaining people.”

The escalating use of the military to assist in immigration and law enforcement is something that should give pause to potential enlistees who are often people from racialized and disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. While enlistment is voluntary, enlistees are often funneled into the armed forces for a variety of reasons related to their lived experiences and working-class realities. Young people who sign their lives over to the Department of War must realize they will be increasingly utilized to enact terror in their own communities and support federal agencies accused of human rights abuses here on our own soil.

It’s been widely reported that Trump’s goal is to deport one million people within his first year in office. On August 25th, Newsweek reported that National Guard troops could “soon be deployed in 19 states . . . to help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)” meet this quota. Just this summer we witnessed the chaos and fear unleashed on Los Angeles when thousands of military members were ordered to effectively occupy the city against the wishes of state and local governments. We've seen similar scenes unfold in such places as Washington, D.C. and Chicago, as well. The dystopian visions of military vehicles cruising the streets in full tactical gear and with the weapons to match make it obvious that this administration knows no bounds when it comes to instilling fear among “enemy” communities. Threats to enact similar military occupations of other U.S. cities continue to make headlines.

On September 27th, Trump posted on his official social media accounts that he was directing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to send troops to “war ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect “ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa” and that he was “authorizing full force, if necessary.” This tweet came just days after it was reported by the Miami Herald that hundreds of people who were formerly detained at the scandal-ridden immigration jail in the Florida Everglades, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” have vanished from ICE’s online database, their families left in the dark as to their whereabouts. Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at the Florida Immigrant Coalition explained that “what we’re seeing at Alligator Alcatraz is basically a new model of immigration detention, where a state-run facility is operating as an extrajudicial black site, completely outside of the previous models of immigration detention in this country. And it’s making what was already a terrible system somehow even worse.”

The Trump administration’s agenda to militarize immigration enforcement and deploy troops on American cities to crush dissent is snowballing at an alarming rate. Every person of conscience who cares to fight against our country’s rapid descent into fascism ought to prioritize counter-recruitment organizing as a key part of this struggle. It's high time to realize that the U.S. military is not only a tool of imperialism abroad but also crucial to domestic repression. As new, darker days surely lay ahead, we must creatively strategize ways to protect U.S. American youth from being seduced into the very forces that threaten human rights here at home.

Lauren Morales is a professional educator who teaches high school Ethnic Studies and United States history. She views education as key to liberation for oppressed peoples and communities.
This article is from the October-December 2025 issue of COMD’s newsletter, Draft Notices, https://draftnotices.org/


Information Sources:

Terse, Nick. “Trump Deployment in U.S. climbs to 35,000 boots on the groundTrump Deployment in U.S. climbs to 35,000 boots on the ground.” The Intercept, Sept. 17, 2025.
Lopez Todd, C. “Interagency Land Agreement Strengthens Military Border Mission.” U.S. Department of War, April 17, 2025.
Baldor, Lolita & Copp, Tara. “Us Army to control land on Mexico border as part of base, migrants could be detained, officials say.” Associated Press, Apr 14, 2025.
Goitein, Elizabeth & Nunn, Joseph. “How Turning the Border into a Military Zone Evades Congress and Threatens Rights.” Brennan Center For Justice, Apr 28, 2025.
Rahman, Khaleda. “National Guard Mobilization Plans Across States: What We Know.” Newsweek, Aug 25, 2025.
Dasgupta, Shirsho & Kennedy, Thomas. Interview by Amy Goodman. “Where Are the Detainees? Hundreds of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Prisoners Disappear from ICE Database.” Democracy Now, Sept. 25, 2025.

Drew Harwell, Joyce Sohyun Lee / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 31 December 2025

A strategy document shared among immigration officials details plans to use influencers and geo-targeted ads to supercharge their push to hire thousands of deportation officers nationwide. 

December 31 / Drew Harwell, Joyce Sohyun Lee / Washington Post - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are planning to spend $100 million over a one-year period to recruit gun-rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and a geo-targeted advertising campaign, part of what the agency called a “wartime recruitment” strategy it said was critical to hiring thousands of new deportation officers nationwide, according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post.

The spending would help President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation agenda dominate media networks and recruitment channels, including through ads targeting people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear, according to a 30-page document distributed among officials in this summer detailing ICE’s “surge hiring marketing strategy.”

The Department of Homeland Security has spoken publicly about its fast-tracked effort to significantly increase ICE’s workforce by hiring more than 10,000 new employees, a surge promoted on social media with calls for recruits willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.” The agency currently employs more than 20,000 people, according to ICE’s website.

But the document, reported here for the first time, reveals new details about the vast scale of the recruitment effort and its unconventional strategy to “flood the market” with millions of dollars in spending for Snapchat ads, influencers and live streamers on Rumble, a video platform popular with conservatives. Under the strategy, ICE would also use an ad-industry technique known as “geofencing” to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of anyone who set foot near military bases, NASCAR races, college campuses or gun and trade shows.

The document was also distributed among ICE officials in the days after the agency published a request for bids seeking contractors who could use “precise audience targeting, performance media management, and results-driven creative strategies” to “accelerate the achievement of [its] recruiting goals.” The language in the published bid closely mirrored language in the strategy document. That same month, DHS awarded two marketing firms nearly $40 million to support ICE’s public affairs office “recruitment campaign,” according to federal awards data.

It’s unclear how much of the spending and strategy have been carried out. But the plans outlined in the document have coincided with a rush of recruitment ads online seeking Americans who will “answer the call to serve.”

The rapid-recruitment approach is unlike anything ICE has ever pursued, said Sarah Saldaña, a director of ICE during the Obama administration, who recalled the agency filling its open positions through local police departments and sheriff’s offices with appeals to officers’ interests in federal public-safety work.

She said she worries that the speed with which ICE is racing to bring on new hires — coupled with the ad campaign’s framing of the jobs as part of a war — will raise the risk that the agency could attract untrained recruits eager for all-out combat.

The appeal to law enforcement should not be “the quicker we get out there and run over people, the better off this country will be,” she said. “That mentality you’re fostering tends to inculcate in people a certain aggressiveness that may not be necessary in 85 percent of what you do.”

ICE deferred comment to Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokeswoman, who did not dispute a detailed list of claims and financial figures sent by The Post and said she was “thrilled to see the Washington Post highlight … [the] wildly successful ICE recruitment campaign, which is under budget and ahead of schedule.”

The agency, she said, has received more than 220,000 job applications in five months and has issued more than 18,000 tentative job offers. More than 85 percent of the new hires had experience in law enforcement, she added.

Congress this summer tripled ICE’s enforcement and deportation budget to about $30 billion by passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, helping to start a hiring spree that officials have said would be necessary to carry out the Trump administration’s promise of the biggest mass deportation in American history. Officials set a goal of 1 million deportations within the first year of Trump’s term.

To bolster its recruiting, the agency has removed its age limits for applicants and offered signing bonuses of up to $50,000. A job listing on a federal hiring board said the salaries for many deportation officers could range from $50,000 to $90,000 a year.

Recruitment ads have proliferated across TV, radio, print and podcasts directing viewers to an ICE hiring website that portrays immigration as an existential threat. “America has been invaded by criminals and predators,” reads the website, which includes an image of Uncle Sam. “We need YOU to get them out.”

Uncle Sam looms large on ICE's recruitment site. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Department of Homeland Security)

On social media, administration accounts have mixed immigration raid footage with memes from action movies and video games to portray ICE’s mission as a fight against the “enemies … at the gates.” “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” one post says. “Are you going to cowboy up or just lay there and bleed?” says another.

But to reach ICE’s “rapid hiring” goal of about 14,000 new Enforcement and Removal Operations officers, Homeland Security Investigations agents, ICE lawyers and support staff, the strategy document also calls for deploying more finely targeted digital advertising tools that can home in on viewers’ interests and lifestyles.

ICE recruitment ads, the plan said, would be shown to people with an interest in “military and veterans’ affairs,” “physical training” or “conservative news and politics” and would target people whose lifestyles are “patriotic” or “conservative-leaning.”

The strategy said to target listeners of conservative radio shows, country music and podcasts related to patriotism, men’s interests and true crime, as well as any accounts that resemble users with an interest in “conservative thought leaders, gun rights organizations [and] tactical gear brands,” the document said.

To further attract recruits, the strategy called for spending at least $8 million on deals with online influencers whose followers are largely Gen Z and millennials and who were in the “military families,” “fitness” and “tactical/lifestyle enthusiast communities.”

The document did not name specific influencers but said it would focus on “former agents, veterans and pro-ICE creators” who would be expected to host live streams, attend events and post short- and long-form videos and other content to Facebook, Instagram, Rumble, X and YouTube. Blogs, Substack newsletters and Threads accounts would also be targeted for more “niche communities,” the document said.

The objective, it said, is to build trust through “authentic peer-to-peer messaging” and to “normalize and humanize careers at ICE through storytelling and lived experiences.” The document said it expected more than 5,000 applicants would come through the influencer program, costing ICE about $1,500 per application.

ICE has run ads on Google, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, targeting the latter to military veterans and “entry-level job” seekers, according to the companies’ ad libraries, which share public data on the platforms’ ad campaigns. Millions more in advertising was slated for delivery to gaming consoles, connected TV devices and streaming services such as ESPN, Fox News and Paramount+, as well as across newspapers, billboards and box trucks, the strategy document said.

Listeners on Spotify have heard ICE ads calling on recruits to “fulfill your mission,” leading to hundreds of complaints on the music service’s message board. One NASCAR viewer who saw the ads on live streams said in a Reddit post that they changed the channel, and separately told The Post that they had “never felt such distaste for our government airing such ads.”

Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, a deputy director at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, said ICE’s ads harked back to World War I recruitment posters by using symbols like Uncle Sam.

Hamilton Nolan / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 24 November 2025

What does courage demand? 

Oct 01, 2025 / Hamilton Nolan / How Things Work -  Six months ago, I wrote a piece urging soldiers to leave the United States military. At the time, the possibility that the president might use the military as a tool to unjustly abuse US citizens was still somewhat theoretical. At the risk of being repetitive, events in the world make me feel compelled to write, once again: Leave the military now. The time when you can say that you did not understand what might happen is coming to an end.

Yesterday, the Secretary of Defense and the Commander in Chief gave speeches to all of our nation’s generals, who they had ordered to assemble in Washington. It is bad enough, I imagine, for all of these accomplished career officers to be subjected to the performative tirade of Pete Hegseth, a childish television host, installed as their superior, ranting about the need to be more macho, fairly dripping with overcompensation for his various inadequacies. Yet if Hegseth’s speech was unnecessary, bigoted, and cartoonish, the performance of the Commander in Chief was much more substantively dangerous.

First, because it must have been clear to all of those assembled generals that Donald Trump, who possesses complete and total control of the military and its awesome powers, is, at best, mentally unwell. His speech, characteristically, was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness rant consisting mostly of narcissism and fiction and personal grievances. The mind of the man who has the ability to tell all of these officers what to do is broken and impervious to facts and reason. This is the man who can tell you when and how and who to kill.

“They’re brave in our inner cities, which we’re going to be talking about because it’s a big part of war now, it’s a big part of war,” Trump said, speaking about firemen. “But the firemen go up on ladders and you have people shooting at them while they’re up on ladders. I don’t even know if anybody heard that. And actually don’t talk about it much, but I think you have to. Our firemen are incredible. They’re up on one of these ladders that goes way up to the sky rescuing people, and you have animals shooting at them -- shooting bullets at firemen that are way up in death territory.” This is your boss.

Worse, the president made his intentions for the military clear. “You know, the Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one,” he said. “And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military,” he said, repeating bizarre, made-up stories about Chicago, Portland, and Seattle as war zones.

I am not going to try to convince generals in the United States armed forces to embrace my own personal moral beliefs. Rather, I would urge them all to consider their own moral beliefs. Honor and courage are often touted as the highest military values. What do those values demand of these generals at this moment in history? To salute their deranged superiors, and then, in private, to mutter under their breath about how incompetent and awful those commanders are? Is it honorable for these hundreds of generals to go forward doing their very best to carry out the will of a president who vows openly to use the military to suppress his domestic political enemies, and who has in fact already done that in major cities? Is it courageous of these officer to—for the sake of their own careers—continue to robotically serve a man who is obviously making decisions based upon things that are not true, and who is obsessed with revenge above all, and who is quite straightforward about his intentions to use the military to forcefully oppress Americans? Is that what honor and courage demand of the highest ranking officers in our military? Nothing at all?

It is common for people in the military to point out that they took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and to imply that their allegiance to that oath would prevent them from carrying out truly unjust orders. I can’t help but notice that the point at which this moral duty to stop obeying orders kicks in appears to recede forever into the future. We, the citizens, are assured that there exists some ill-defined moment at which the personal moral code of military soldiers and officers will kick in and stop an out-of-control Commander in Chief from using the military for purposes of tyranny.

Well? The tyrant is here. Talk is cheap. This theoretical guardrail of our democracy would be much more comforting if it were ever possible to see it produce some tangible action.

The other prevailing argument against what I have said is that, if all of the good people leave the military, only the bad people will remain. This would, some argue, rob us of the benefit of the staunch code of honor that is supposed to prevent the military from abusing the citizens. Yet, like that much-touted code of honor itself, this argument means nothing if it never produces any attendant action. All of history’s dictators, strongmen, and villains have had armies, and those armies have been made up of people just like you and me, who talked of honor and courage and morality. And all of those armies carried out grotesque injustices and acts of oppression. Why? Because those were their orders, and armies follow orders. The fact that the soldiers and officers were uncomfortable with the strongman’s orders to oppress the population does not do much for the population. In reality, the end point of the argument that the military is better with all of the “good” people still in it is a soldier who, as he shoots you, says “You’re lucky—if I wasn’t doing this, somebody bad would be.”

It is not too late to change America’s future. We sit, right now, in a moment of possibility. The president has made his intention to use the military against American citizens abundantly clear, but the worst versions of this oppression are still to come. He has told us what is coming, but all of it has not happened yet. That means that there will never be a better moment for people of honor and courage to leave the military. There will never be a better moment for the generals to demonstrate that their moral values are not just empty words. There will never be a better time to actually weaken the power of an aspiring dictator by refusing to be a part of his army. There will never be a better chance to exempt yourself from the stain of participating in a great, historic injustice against America’s ideals. Everyone can see who is in charge. Everyone can see what the plan is. Nobody can say that they didn’t see what was coming. Nobody can say that they went into this blind. For the members of the military—and, above all, for the officers at its highest level—the time to be courageous, or not, has arrived.

Like any large organization, the military is full of all types of people who got into it for all types of reasons. Despite my own objections to the things that politicians make the military do, I do believe that the military itself is full of people who sincerely value patriotism, sacrifice, and public service. And there can be no doubt that the military is full of people who have demonstrated great personal bravery, perseverance, and willingness to overcome daunting obstacles in order to do a job that they believe is honorable and necessary. In 2025, all of these admirable qualities demand a very particular action: to leave the military. Before you find yourself doing things that do not comport with the values that you hold. Before you find that you have become the bad guy. If you can run into a gunfight, you can find the bravery to quit. That’s what patriotism means today.

Source: https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/leave-the-military-now

Check out the comments on this article

Edward Hasbrouck / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 12 October 2024 

October 11, 2024 / Edward Hasbrouck / Antiwar.com - Of men in the U.S. who turned 18 in 2023, fewer than 40% signed up for the draft – down from more than 60% in 2020 before the start of the war in Ukraine.

This eye-popping and previously undisclosed admission, as well as other revelations equally damning to plans to increase readiness to activate a draft, was included in documents released recently by the Selective Service System (SSS) in response to a Freedom Of Information Act request.

The SSS maintains a database of eligible male U.S. citizens and residents who could be conscripted if and when Congress and the President institute a draft. Per the law, American males must register within 30 days of their 18th birthday or find it difficult to get a drivers license in some states.

Public statements from supporters of draft registration have justified preparation for a draft as needed for national emergencies, self-defense, or implausible existential threats such as a Chinese invasion of the mainland US. But the lead bullet point in the newly-disclosed SSS talking points to Congress in support of the SSS proposal to automatically register all young Americans for a future draft is the possible activation of a U.S. draft for foreign wars in Ukraine and/or the Middle East.

“SSS is experiencing a significant decline in registrations by 18-year-old men. In 2020, the registration rate for 18-year-old men nationwide was 61.8%, today it is just 39.9%,” the agency reports.

Most men register eventually, but often years after their prime draft eligibility. The SSS allows men to register without penalty until their 26th birthday. Some men deliberately or inadvertently delay registering until they are close to age 26. This minimizes their exposure to a possible draft while preserving their eligibility for Federal or state jobs or other programs later in life.

The SSS is also misleading Congress about its use of immigration records. In its messaging to Congress, the SSS falsely claims that, “The SSS, nor any of its systems or processes, collects or identifies the immigration status of any resident.” In fact, the SSS systematically accesses USCIS visa records and matches them against records of driver’s licenses obtained from state motor vehicle agencies to try to identify which draft-age foreigners in the US are required to register for the draft.

Is the SSS afraid that members of Congress would balk at giving the agency even greater authority to access records of other Federal agencies if they knew that it is already using immigration records to prepare to draft U.S.-resident foreign citizens into the U.S. military?  Or is the SSS afraid that foreigners in the U.S. would be less willing to provide information to Federal or state agencies if they knew that it could be used to help administer military conscription – a special concern for those who have come to the U.S., like so many previous immigrants, to avoid being drafted into foreign armies?

“Immigrant” foreign citizens are subject to the US draft. Foreign students, H-1 and other temporary workers, and others holders of “nonimmigrant” visas are not. Because the requirement to register with the SSS depends on immigration status, visa records would be essential to automatic draft registration.

The SSS claims that, “By using federal, state, and commercial databases, the agency will be able to register all individuals required to register…. (databases: Social Security Administration, DMVs, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, etc.) Note: The agency is already aware of who is required to register because of these existing data sharing agreements.” This claim to completeness and accuracy is both unwarranted and untested. Data matching can get the SSS only so far.

With respect to completeness, it should be obvious that existing databases omit, among others, many undocumented draft-age immigrants, who would be subject to the draft and are required to register with the SSS.

As for accuracy, the test of provable deliverability is whether, when an induction notice is sent by certified mail to the address in SSS records, the SSS gets back a return receipt signed by the registrant – not a parent or anyone else — that provides sufficient evidence to prove to a jury, beyond reasonable doubt, that the registrant received the notice. That’s what’s needed to prosecute a registrant who doesn’t report for induction.

The only way to test this is to send letters to a sample of registrants, and compare the signatures on the return receipts with the signatures in registration records. But the SSS has never done this.

Records released by the SSS show that the only test of the accuracy of SSS records was limited to comparing SSS records with records from commercial data brokers. Unsurprisingly, they mostly include the same entries with the same addresses.  But that says nothing about the completeness of these databases, or whether they have the same addresses because they are derived from the same unreliable sources.

As I noted in my testimony to the National Commission on Military National, and Public Service, which considered, but recommended against, trying to automate draft registration, “Many parents would either refuse to sign for an induction notice for their child, or destroy it to protect their child against being drafted.”

Furthermore, the SSS has withheld its cursory one-page cost estimate for automated registration. But the one-page letter it provided to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) makes clear how little consideration it has given to the real cost of automating draft registration. It includes no funding for database integration or for collection or verification of information not available from existing databases, including current physical addresses for provable delivery.

Congress and OMB need to scrutinize the proposals for automation and/or expansion of Selective Service registration, which have been through no hearings or budget review, much more closely. At a minimum, Congress should remove these provisions from the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2025, and schedule full hearings next year specifically on Selective Service, with witnesses for and against continuation, expansion, automation, or repeal of draft registration. There’s antiwar opposition to Selective Service registration from both the right and the left.

While Selective Service registration is being discussed behind closed doors in negotiations on the NDAA, the issue has been raised publicly in the Presidential campaign. In a speech in September, former President Trump criticized Vice-President Harris for allegedly supporting a military draft.

Mainstream media has fact-checked this as false, but has failed to note that, while Harris hasn’t directly called for a draft, (1) Democrats and Republicans have both supported planning and preparation for a draft, as part of their bipartisan national security consensus, and (2) Trump did nothing as President to end draft registration, which he could have done by executive order if he were really opposed to a draft.

Selective Service registration requires authorizing legislation (the Military Selective Service Act) and funding from Congress as well an order from the President. The order currently in effect was issued by Jimmy Carter in 1980, and could have been rescinded or revised by any subsequent President. If either Presidential candidate wants to show that they don’t support a draft today, they could endorse Selective Service repeal legislation and/or promise to issue an order, if elected, ending draft registration.

In the meantime, more and more young people will take the decision of which wars to fight into their own hands by opting out of Selective Service registration, either by not registering or by not telling the SSS when they move.

Edward Hasbrouck maintains the Resisters.info website and publishes the “Resistance News” newsletter. He was imprisoned in 1983-1984 for organizing resistance to draft registration.

Source: https://original.antiwar.com/edward_hasbrouck/2024/10/10/military-draft-sign-ups-plunge-as-war-fears-rise/

National Network Opposing / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 01 October 2024 

Fantasies underlying push for conscription are delusional and dangerous

August 13, 2024 / Edward Hasbrouck / Antiwar.com - Doubling down on their recent war-game exercises and report on the (un)readiness of the U.S. to activate a military draft, Taren Sylvester and Katherine Kuzminski of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have a new article in War on the Rocks, “Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic,” laying out why they think the U.S. needs to prepare for a draft in order to be able to win an all-out war with China over Taiwan.

CNAS and War on the Rocks like to describe themselves as “realists”. But their arguments for stepped-up planning and preparation for a draft are strikingly unrealistic, in at least four respects.

First, Sylvester and Kuzminski – like the Selective Service System and the Department of Justice – entirely ignore whether, much less how or at what cost, a draft could be enforced.

The practical difficulty of enforcing a draft in the face of widespread evasion and resistance was the Achilles heel of the last U.S. draft, and has to be central to any realistic plan for a future draft.

You can’t just wave a magic cheerleader’s baton and get every would-be draftee, male or female, to march down to the induction office to ship out for Taiwan, Ukraine, Palestine, or points unknown. Like it or not, many young people won’t go voluntarily. If they would, a draft wouldn’t be needed.

As I said in my testimony to the National Commisison on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) in 2019, “Any proposal [for military or civilian national service] that includes a compulsory element is a naïve fantasy unless it includes a credible enforcement plan and budget… How much are you prepared to spend, and how much of a police state are you prepared to set up, to round up the millions of current draft registration law violators or enforce a draft?”

Struggling to enforce draft registration and call-up orders, Ukraine has resorted to roving press gangs snatching suspected draft dodgers off the streets. Are similar enforcement tactics a realistic option in the U.S.? If not, what enforcement mechanisms are the realists contemplating? Neither the CNAS nor the NCMNPS reports say a word about enforcement of draft registration or induction orders.

Second, CNAS wrongly conflates an attack on Taiwan with an existentential threat to the U.S.

This discredited domino theory was made explicit in the scenario they used for their mobilization exercise: “The teams were first presented with a potential crisis scenario in which the PRC conducted a large-scale invasion of Taiwan… The teams were then provided with a breaking update: the PRC had effectively invaded Taiwan, and Congress and the president had enacted the draft… After the exercise, participants were provided with a scenario update: having observed that the United States was mobilizing in defense of Taiwan, the PRC attacks a location in southern California between San Diego and Los Angeles.”

China might indeed, as this scenario suggests, see U.S. military mobilization as threatening. But that’s a reason to retard U.S. mobilization, not to accelerate it. The scenario most feared by many people in Taiwan is that U.S. sabre-rattling might derail the chnaces for diplomacy and provoke a Chinese attack. Even if China is provoked, there’s no realistic reason to think that China – or, lest another spectre be raised, Russia – has any interest, ability, or likelihood to invade the U.S. A desire to be prepared to defend the U.S. is not a reason to prepare to send U.S. troops overseas, or to maintain readiness to conscript them if they don’t volunteer to do so.

CNAS may support increased U.S. military engagement in Taiwan to advance what they see as U.S. interests. But it’s disingenuous to pretend that this has anything to do with defending the U.S. homeland.

Third, despite the genuinely existential risk of triggering nuclear war, CNAS and other advocates for  heightened readiness for massive U.S. military mobilization, including preparedness for a draft, entirely ignore the nuclear implications of mobilization.

Their stated assumption is that, “The nation’s ability to credibly signal its potential to endure and prevail in a protracted conflict can serve as a deterrent to future conflict provocation by would-be adversaries.”

Foreign leaders aren’t fools. They can see that any attempt to activate a draft in the U.S., even if would-be draftees are registered “automatically”, would be widely resisted, unworkable, and unenforceable, even if proponents of a draft are reluctant to recognize that reality.

Given that the U.S. has, and is unlikely to have, any credible capacity either to mobilize a conscript army to fight a foreign war or to prevail in a war with China over Taiwan, it’s unrealistic to expect gearing up for a draft to have any deterrent effect.

Fourth, the CNAS theorists fantasize that if only we had a draft available as a “fallback”, the US could “defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan.”

U.S. special forces are already deployed on the Kinmen Islands, just a few miles off the coast of mainland China in the Taiwan Strait.

But given the realities of supply lines and numbers, with or without a draft, a U.S.-China war over Taiwan – 5,000 miles from the U.S. mainland, with a population of more than 20 million people – would be another unwinnable quagmire for the U.S., like those in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, not a winnable war or another easy invasion and conquest of a small nearby island like Grenada. It’s not realistic to think that waves of U.S. conscripts would be able to push Chinese invaders off Taiwan.

Any attempt to make an all-out war with China in Asia or the Western Pacific thinkable, to imagine that such a war would be winnable or that China could be defeated without nuclear omnicide, or to use a draft to prop up that thinking, isn’t military or strategic realism. It’s delusional – and dangerous.

If a total war with China or another great power would require more troops than the U.S. has available, and a draft isn’t a realistic option, the realistic course is to plan and prepare for only those wars that people would volunteer to fight. If that requires changes in unrealistically ambitious U.S. war plans, it’s time to start making those changes in strategic thinking and military policy, not making futile efforts to resuscitate the paper tiger of the failed Selective Service System and its sham preparedness for conscription.

From this more genuinely realistic perspective, enactment of the Selective Service Repeal Act (S. 4881) would be not just a step away from the draft as a fallback source of more troops than would volunteer, but a step back from the nuclear and conventional total-war brink toward de-escalation and diplomacy.

Edward Hasbrouck maintains the Resisters.info website and publishes the “Resistance News” newsletter. He was imprisoned in 1983-1984 for organizing resistance to draft registration.

Source: https://original.antiwar.com/Edward_Hasbrouck/2024/08/12/realists-think-we-need-to-prepare-for-a-draft-so-we-can-win-a-war-with-china/

Perplexity / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 12 September 2024

9/12/2024 / Perplexity Ai - NNOMY, or the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth, is a coalition of organizations in the United States that actively opposes the militarization of schools and the recruitment of young people into the military. Founded in 2004 following a national counter-recruitment conference in Philadelphia, NNOMY aims to connect local, regional, and national activists and organizations to promote awareness and education regarding militarism in educational settings.

Objectives and Activities

 NNOMY's mission includes advocating for peaceful alternatives to military service and challenging the increasing presence of military recruitment in schools, particularly in disadvantaged communities. The network emphasizes the importance of providing youth with viable paths to success that do not involve military enlistment. Key activities and campaigns organized by NNOMY include:

• A National Call: Save Our Civilian Public Education: This campaign addresses the influence of conservative forces and corporate interests in educational environments, advocating for the removal of military programs from schools.

• Divest “Your Body” from the War MachineDivest “Your Body” from the War Machine: In collaboration with CODEPINK, this initiative aims to encourage communities to divest from companies that profit from militarization and to promote alternative community service opportunities for youth.

• Campaigns Against JROTC and Marksmanship Training: NNOMY works to end involuntary placements in Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) programs and to remove marksmanship training from schools, highlighting the negative impacts of such programs on youth.

NNOMY also engages in public education efforts to inform young people about the realities of military enlistment and the potential consequences of joining the military.

How counter-recruiters take on the US military

 Getting involved with the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) can be accomplished through various actions and initiatives aimed at countering military recruitment in schools and advocating for youth rights. Here are some ways to participate:

1. Join the NNOMY Network

You can become a part of NNOMY by joining their network, which connects individuals and organizations committed to opposing the militarization of youth. This membership provides access to resources, updates, and opportunities for collaboration with like-minded activists.

2. Participate in Campaigns

NNOMY organizes various campaigns focused on demilitarizing schools and raising awareness about military recruitment practices. You can participate in these campaigns by sharing information, organizing local events, or collaborating with other activists in your area.

3. Establish a Recruitment Observatory

Consider setting up a "Recruitment Observatory" at your local school to monitor military recruiter activities. This initiative can help inform school officials and the community about recruitment practices and advocate for policies that protect student privacy.

4. Advocate for Policy Changes

Engage with your school district to advocate for policies that limit military recruiter access. This can include writing letters to school administrators and boards expressing concerns about excessive military presence in schools.

5. Distribute Informational Materials

Help educate peers and parents about military recruitment by distributing materials that provide alternatives to military service. NNOMY offers resources such as palm cards and pamphlets that can be shared in schools.

6. Organize Educational Events

You can initiate or participate in events that promote peace and justice, such as workshops, speaker sessions, or peace clubs in schools. These activities can create a platform for discussing the implications of military recruitment and the importance of informed choices for youth.

7. Contact NNOMY for Support

If you are interested in taking action but need guidance, you can reach out to NNOMY directly via email or phone. They can provide assistance and resources tailored to your specific interests and community needs. By engaging in these activities, you can contribute to NNOMY's mission of opposing the militarization of youth and promoting peaceful alternatives.

What specific actions can I take to help NNOMY's campaigns

 Based on the information provided, here are some specific actions you can take to support NNOMY's campaigns:

1. Join the NNOMY Network. This will connect you with other activists and organizations, and provide access to resources, handouts, videos, and update

2. Distribute opt-out forms at local high schools. At the beginning of each school year, parents can opt out of allowing their children to be contacted by military recruiters. You can download and distribute these forms

3. Campaign for an equal access ordinance in your school district. This would mandate that peace groups get equal time and access to students to offer alternatives to military enlistment

4. Help students start peace and justice clubs on campus. Assist students in organizing events, inviting speakers, writing articles, or distributing informational literature about alternatives to military service

5. Create localized counter-recruitment resources. Adapt NNOMY's materials to include information on local job training programs, mentorships, and other opportunities for youth in your area

6. Participate in NNOMY's campaigns, such as:
   
   

   • A National Call: Save Our Civilian Public Education

   • Divest 'Your Body' from the War MachineDivest 'Your Body' from the War Machine

   • Efforts to remove marksmanship programs and shooting ranges from schools

7. Organize educational events to raise awareness about military recruitment practices and alternatives to enlistment

8. Monitor and challenge excessive military recruiter access in your local schools

9. Share NNOMY's resources and information through your social networks to expand their reach

10. Consider volunteering your time or skills to support NNOMY's communications, outreach, or campaign efforts

Remember to tailor your approach based on your local context and the specific needs of your community.

How can I collaborate with local peace groups to strengthen NNOMY's campaigns

 Based on the information provided, here are some ways you can collaborate with local peace groups to strengthen NNOMY's campaigns:

1. Connect with existing peace organizations in your area. The search results mention groups like Veterans for Peace, Fellowship of Reconciliation, and local peace coalitions. Reach out to chapters near you to explore partnership opportunities.

2. Help establish a "Recruitment Observatory" at your local schools to monitor military recruiter activities. This initiative can provide valuable data to inform NNOMY's campaigns.

3. Organize educational events and workshops in collaboration with local peace groups to raise awareness about military recruitment in schools and NNOMY's work. You could invite speakers from NNOMY or other experienced activists.

4. Work with peace organizations to distribute NNOMY's informational materials and resources to students, parents, and community members. This could include leafleting campaigns or tabling at local events.

5. Collaborate on letter-writing campaigns or petitions to school boards and local officials, advocating for policies that limit military recruiter access in schools.

6. Partner with groups to start or support peace clubs in local high schools. The search results provide guidance on how to establish these clubs.

7. Join forces to organize protests, rallies, or other direct actions aligned with NNOMY's campaigns, like opposing JROTC programs or marksmanship training in schools.

8. Coordinate with peace groups to lobby local representatives and push for legislation supporting NNOMY's goals, such as the Department of Peacebuilding bill.

9. Utilize the expertise and resources of established organizations to enhance NNOMY's outreach and effectiveness. Many groups have experience in areas like counter-recruitment and can provide valuable insights.

10. Create a local coalition of peace groups focused specifically on youth demilitarization efforts, with NNOMY's campaigns as a central focus. This can help pool resources and amplify your impact.

Remember to tailor your approach based on the specific needs and context of your community. Collaborating with existing peace groups can significantly strengthen NNOMY's campaigns by providing additional support, resources, and local connections.

Sources

• https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/359-about-nnomy.html

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Network_Opposing_the_Militarization_of_Youth

• https://www.commondreams.org/organization/national-network-opposing-militarization-youth-nnomy

• https://nnomypeace.net/counter-recruitment/for-activists/what-can-you-do.html

• https://afsc.org/news/five-ways-counter-military-recruitment-your-school-district

• https://myeducationforpeace.org/

• https://nnomypeace.net/

National Network Opposing / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 13 July 2024

July 13, 2024 / Staff / National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth - June 27th, 2024 marks the founding of the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth stemming from the formation of the network at the national counter-recruitment organizing conference held June 25-27, 2004 named Stopping War Where It Begins: Strengthening the Movement Opposing the Militarization of Youth in Philadelphia. (1) 

Through the many cultural shifts and political machinations of the United Sates domestic and foreign policy, the prospects and opportunities for NNOMY have experienced many ebbs and flows.

As the next period ahead unravels, like the presidential election debacle we now see unfolding five month before the next election, the time ahead for NNOMY, and the peace activist community in general seems uncertain and certainly demoralizing with, now two active proxy wars that the current Biden Administration has entrenched the country in. 

With what is being articulated by the Pentagon and its Command Structure, a potential war is looming in Asia for the USA with China over control of the China Sea, and even Polar Ice shipping routes for Russia of Petrochemicals product shipments to Asia being contested by the US State Department, allowing circumvention of sanctions imposed upon it by the US and its G7 coalition of countries, the chances that American youth may become drawn into direct military conflicts that they have little understanding of or little interest to get involved in a war over, are greater than ever.

Additionally, the Southern Command leadership has openly articulated their intention to control the resource extraction of the American Continent as their own without the presence of other international powers present at the table. It is the Monroe Doctrine redux. (2)

Looking back at another time of resurgent US Militarism during the Bush Administration's Iraq war in response to a proven false narrative imposed upon the 9/11 terrorism, NNOMY experienced the height of counter recruitment activism as peace groups correctly intervened into the proceedings of US military recruitment at the high school level, to stem the flow of bodies into a series of unnecessary illegal wars for regime change

Below as a testament and recognition of their efforts are listed the groups on this twentieth anniversary of the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth and their counter-recruitment pages:

CITY

ACTIVIST

ORGANIZATION

STATE

WEBSITE (ARCHIVED FROM 2005)

Alachua

Shawna Doran

Alachua County Green Party

Florida

http://alachuagreens.weebly.com/

Albuquerque

Sue

Another Side (An educational project of the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice)

New Mexico

http://www.stopthewarmachine.org/other/gi.htm

Americus

Sanders Thornburgh

Koinonia

Georgia

http://www.koinoniapartners.org

Ann Arbor

Bob Krzewinski

Veterans for Peace - Chapter 93

Michigan

http://www.vfp93.org/

Arcata

Dave Meserve

North Coast United to Protect Youth

California

http://www.stoprecruitingkids.org

Arlington Heights

Libby Frank

Northwest Suburban Peace & Education Project

Illinois

http://www.nwsubpep.org/

Athens

John Howell

Appalachian Peace and Justice Network

Ohio

http://www.apjn.org/

Atlanta

Michael Burke

Coalition for Student Career Alternatives

Georgia

http://www.scapatl.org/

Atlanta

Michael J. Burke

Veterans for Truth in Military Recruiting

Georgia

http://www.safepassagenetwork.org/

Austin

Charlie Jackson

Texans for Peace

Texas

http://www.texansforpeace.org/

Austin

Susan Van Haitsma / Hart Viges

Sustainable Options for Youth

Texas

http://www.peaceoptions.blogspot.com/

Bayside

Carl Stancil - Rob Hepburn

Veterans for Peace Chapter 56 (Humboldt Bay)

California

http://www.vfp56.org/

Belle Mead

Robert Colby-Witanek

NJ Youth United Against War and Imperialism

New Jersey

http://NJYouthUnited.org

Bellingham

Janet Marino

Whatcom Peace & Justice Center

Washington

http://www.whatcompjc.org/

Berkeley

Alan Senauke

Buddhist Peace Fellowship

California

http://www.bpf.org

Berkely

Ian Slattery

Soldiers of Conscience (documentary video resources)

California

http://www.soldiers-themovie.com

Bethesda

Pat Elder

Peace Action Montgomery

Maryland

http://www.peaceactionmc.org/

Bethlehem

Peter Simeon Bond

LEPOCO

Pennsylvania

http://www.lepoco.org/

Birmingham

Ashley Reynolds

Equal Access Alabama

Alabama

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/129-equal-access-alabama.html

Boca Raton

Mike Budd

The Truth Project

Florida

http://www.truthproject.info/

Boise

Liz Paul

Idaho Peace Coalition

Idaho

http://www.peacecoalition.us/idaho/

Boomer

Sally Ferrell

Alternative to Military/NC Peace Action

North Carolina

http://www.ncpeaceaction.org

Brooklyn

David Tykulsker

Brooklyn for Peace

New York

http://www.brooklynpeace.org/

Burlington

Jen Berger

Peace & Justice Center

Vermont

http://www.pjcvt.org/

Cambridge

Angela Kelly

Massachusetts Peace Action

Massachusetts

http://www.masspeaceaction.org/

Cambridge

Bill Sweet

UJP Counter-recruitment Coalition

Massachusetts

http://www.justicewithpeace.org/

Chapel Hill

Curt Torell and Pam Schwingel

NC Choices for Youth

North Carolina

http://www.ncchoicesforyouth.org/

Chicago

Ame Meyers

Chicago Coalition Opposed to Militarization of Youth (CCOMY)

http://www.ccomy.org/

Chicago

Arny Steiber

Veterans for Peace - Chicago

Illinois

http://www.chicagovfp.org/drupal/

Chicago

Darlene Gramigna

American Friends Service Committee- Chicago

Illinois

http://afsc.org/office/chicago-il

Cincinnati

Kristen Barker

Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center

Ohio

http://ijpc-cincinnati.org/

Claremont

Gerald Haynes

Alternative Ideas to Military Service

California

 https://claremont-courier.com/

Colonia

Tim Bigelow

Yap High School

Federated States of Micronesia

 https://time.com/archive/6949007/

Columbus

Fred Suter

Historic Peace Churches

Ohio

http://www.livingpeacecob.org/

Columbus OH

Deb Oskin

On Earth Peace

https://christianpeacewitness.org/counter-recruitment/

Corning

Gary McCaslin

Peaceful Gathering

New York

http://www.peacefulgatherings.org/

Corvallis

Rebecca Michelson

Veterans for Peace - Corvallis

Oregon

http://www.vfpcorvallis.org/

DeKalb

Cele Meyer

DeKalb Interfaith Network for Peace & Justice

Illinois

http://www.dekalbinterfaithnetwork.org/cms/

Dorado

Sonia Santiago

Madres contra la Guerra

Puerto Rico

http://madrescontralaguerra.blogspot.com

Duluth

Joel Kilgour

Truth in Recruiting

Minnesota

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/266-truth-in-recruiting.html

Edmond

Daniel Saunders

Military Free Oklahoma

Oklahoma

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/192-military-free-oklahoma.html

Encinitas

Rick Jahnkow

Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO)

California

http://projectyano.org

Eugene

Carol Van Houten

Truth In Recruiting (formerly the Committee for Countering Military Recruitment)

Oregon

http://www.calclane.org/1programs/counteringmiltrecruit.html

Eugene

Gordon Sturrock

Veterans Against Torture

Oregon

http://www.veteransagainsttorture.com/

Fort Collins

Cheryl Distaso

Youth and Militarism - an Affiliate of the Center for Justice Peace and Environment

Colorado

http://www.cjpe.org/youth/index.htm

Fort Myers

Nancy Howell/ Judy Alves

Wage Peace Lee

Florida

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/208-wage-peace-lee.html

Fort Wayne

Dave Lambert

Fort Wayne Peace Action

Indiana

http://www.fwagitator.org/military.html

Fort Worth

Diane Wood

Peaceful Vocations

Texas

http://www.peacefulvocations.org/

Fresno

Dan Yaseen

Central Valley Counter-Recruitment Organization

California

https://www.peacefresno.org

Glendale

Sharon Weisman

Glendale Education/Social Justice Advocates

California

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/186-glendale-educationsocial-justice-advocates.html

Grand Rapids

SDS

ACTIVATE (Grand Rapids Michigan)

Michigan

http://www.activategr.org/

Greenbelt

Lucy Duff

Broader Horizons Counter Recruiting Campaign of the Peace & Justice Coalition

Maryland

http://www.justpeace-pgmd.org/

Greenfield

Sher Sweet

Traprock Peace Center

Massachusetts

http://traprock.info/index.shtml

Hidden Valley Lake

Michelle Borzoni

South Lake Democrats Club

California

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/181-south-lake-democrats-club.html

Honolulu

Kyle Kajihiro

CHOICES (Committee on Helping Open and Informed Choices in Education and Schools)

Hawaii

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/136-choices-committee-on-helping-open-and-informed-choices-in-education-and-schools.html

Hood River/Columbia Gorge

Linda Short

Columbia River Fellowship for Peace: Project Full Disclosure

Oregon

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/167-columbia-river-fellowship-for-peace-project-full-disclosure.html

Houston

Bob Henschen

Houston Committee for Youth and Non-Military Opportunities

Texas

http://hpjc.org/event/winningthepeace

Irvine

Eliana Olivarez

Worker Student Alliance

California

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/213-worker-student-alliance.html

Irvine

Thu-Trang Tran

OC Recruitment Awareness Project

California

http://www.oc-rap.org/

Ithaca

Jim Murphy

NY Veterans Speak Out

New York

http://www.veteransforpeaceny.org/

Joliet

Bill Ruhaak

Pax Christi Will County

Illinois

http://www.paxjoliet.org/justeach/justeach_speakers.htm

Juneau

Amy Paige

Southeast Alaska Truth in Recruiting (SeaTIR)

Alaska

http://vfp-seatir.blogspot.com

Leesburg, VA

Michelle Grise, Don Eaves

Loudoun County Coalition on Recruitment Issues (LCCRI)

 Virginia

http://www.loudounforce.org/

Lincoln

Kevin Haake

Alternatives to the Military

Nebraska

http://www.nebraskagreens.org/atm

Linwood

Norm Cohen

Coalition for Peace and Justice

New Jersey

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/237-coalition-for-peace-and-justice.html

Los Angeles

Alyse Emdur

Photograph A Recruiter

California

http://www.photographarecruiter.com/

Los Angeles

Arlene Inouye

Coalition for Alternatives to Militarism in our Schools (CAMS)

California

http://www.militaryfreeschools.org/

Los Angeles

Michelle Cohen

Project Great Futures

California

http://projectgreatfutures.nnomy.org

Madison

Fran Weidenhoff

Veterans for Peace- Madison

Wisconsin

http://www.peaceactionwi.org

Madison

Michelle Nightoak

TaME (Truth and Alternatives to Militarism in Education)

Wisconsin

http://www.tamewisconsin.org/

Madison

Todd Dennis

Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice

Wisconsin

http://www.wnpj.org/

Memphis

George Grider

Mid-South Peace & Justice Center

Tennessee

http://www.midsouthpeace.org/

Middlebury

James Ross

Addison Country Citizens for Alternative to Military Service

Vermont

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/42-addison-county-citizens-for-alternative-to-military-service.html

Milwaukee

Becky Cooper

Peace Action- Wisconsin

Wisconsin

http://www.peaceactionwi.org/

Minneapolis

Larry Johnson

Veterans for Peace - Chapter 27

Minnesota

http://www.vfpchapter27.org/

Minneapolis/St. Paul

Mary Beaudoin

Women Against Military Madness

Minnesota

http://www.worldwidewamm.org/home.html

Monterey

MacGregor Eddy

Youth Rights Alternatives to Military

California

http://www.peacemonterey.org

Nashville

Joey King

Veterans for Peace Chapter 89

Tennessee

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/

New Windsor

Bob Gross

On Earth Peace

Maryland

http://www.onearthpeace.org/

New York

Amy Wagner

Ya-Ya Network

New York

http://www.yayanetwork.org/

New York

Barb Harris

Granny Peace Brigade -NYC

New York

www.grannypeacebrigade.org

New York

Debra Sweet

World Can't Wait

New York

http://www.worldcantwait.org/

New York

Erica Braudy

New York Civil Liberties Union

New York

http://www.nyclu.org/milrec

New York

Seth Rader

New York Collective of Radical Educators

New York

http://www.nycore.org/

New York

Stephanie

We Are Not Your Soldiers

New York

http://www.wearenotyoursoldiers.org/

Northampton

Jeff Napolitano

American Friends Service Committee (Western MA)

Massachusetts

http://www.afscwm.org/

Norwich

Joanne Sheehan

War Resisters League/New England Regional Office

Connecticut

http://www.warresisters.org/chapterprofile?chapterstate=Connecticut&go=go

Oklahoma City

Rena Guay

Oklahoma Center for Conscience and Action

Oklahoma

http://www.centerforconscience.org/

Oakland

Susan Quinlan

Alternatives to War

California

http://www.baypeace.org

Oakland

Susan Quinlan

Bay-Peace: Better Alternatives for Youth

California

http://www.baypeace.org

Oxford

Dan Blazo

UM Constitutionalists

Mississippi

http://umfreedom.com/

Pacific City

Bruce Ryan

Pacific City/Nestucca High

Oregon

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/248-pacific-city.html

Pacific Palisades

Sandra Sunshine Williams

Palisadians for Peace

California

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/187-palisadians-for-peace.html

Paia

Ann Pitcaithley

Careers in Peacemaking

Hawaii

http://mauipeace.org/archives/old-content/careers-in-peacemaking-programs/

Philadelphia

Janine Schwab

American Friends Service Committee Peacebuilding and Conflict Prevention

Pennsylvania

http://www.afsc.org

Philadelphia

Jo Ann Zimmerman

Penn Army of None

Pennsylvania

http://www.pennpeace.ning.com

Philadelphia

Ruth Balter

Granny Peace Brigade Philadelphia

Pennsylvania

http://www.grannypeacebrigadephiladelphia.org

Philadelphia

Steve Gulick

Philadelphia War Resisters League

Pennsylvania

http://www.phillywrl.net/

Phoenix

Dolores Martinez

Native CRC

Arizona

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/262-native-crc.html

Port Townsend

Liz Rivera Goldstein

Teen Peace Project

Washington

http://www.teenpeace.org/

Portland

J. Grueschow

Military & Draft Counseling Project- War Resisters League

Oregon

http://www.peaceveterans.com/NWM&DC.html

Portland

Matt Guynn

On Earth Peace- Portland

Oregon

http://www.onearthpeace.org/

Poughkeepsie

Fred Nagel

Dutchess Peace Coalition

New York

http://www.dutchesspeace.org/

Rochester

Peter Debes

Rochester Against War

New York

http://www.rochesteragainstwar.org/

Rogue Valley

Don Chapin or Hal Anthony

Rogue Valley Peace Veterans

Oregon

http://www.rvpv.org/

Roseburg

Susan Shaffer

Career Alternatives Project

Oregon

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/215-career-alternatives-project.html

Salem

Emily Loberg

North Salem HS Peace Club

Oregon

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/252-north-salem-hs-peace-club.html

San Diego

Rick Jahnkow

Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

California

http://www.comdsd.org

San Francisco

Edward Hasbrouck

Resisters.info

California

http://www.resisters.info

San Francisco

John Lindsay-Poland

National Youth & Militarism Program/American Friends Service Committee

California

http://www.afsc.org/office/san-francisco-ca

San Francisco

Medea Benjamin

CODEPINK Women for Peace

California

http://www.codepink.org

San Francisco

Siri Margerin

Full Picture

California

http://thefullpicture.info/

San Jose

David Ledesma

One Voice!

California

http://www.one-voice.info

San Juan

Wanda Colon Cortez

Proyecto Caribeno de Justicia y Paz

Puerto Rico

http://pcjp.blogspot.com/

Santa Barbara

Daniel Seidenberg

Veterans for Peace Chapter 54

California

http://www.vfpsb.org

Santa Cruz

Irene O'Connell

Resource Center for NonviolenceTruth in Recruiting

California

http://rcnv.org/programs/truth-in-recruiting

Santa Rosa

Elizabeth Stinson

Peace & Justice Center of Sonoma County

California

http://www.peaceandjusticesonomaco.org

Seaside

Karen Araujo

Peace Resource Center Seaside

California

https://peacecentral.wordpress.com/

Seattle

John M. Repp

West Seattle Neighbors for Peace and Justice

Washington

http://groups.snowcoalition.org/westseattle

Seattle

Kathy Barker

Garfield HS PTSA

Washington

http://garfieldhs.seattleschools.org/modules/cms/pages.phtml?pageid=213199

Seattle

Marion Ward

Washington Truth in Recruiting

Washington

http://www.watir.org/

Seattle

Ruth Yarrow

Sound Non-Violent Opponents of War

Washington

http://www.snowcoalition.org/

Shafter

Daniel H. Shubin

Peace Church Challenge

California

http://www.peacehost.net/peacechurch

Silver Spring

Kevin Martin

Peace Action

Maryland

https://www.peaceaction.org/

Silver Spring

Paul Martin

Student Peace Action Network (SPAN)

Maryland

http://www.studentpeaceaction.org

Springfield

Jane Newton

Springfield Peace and Justice

Vermont

http://www.pjcvt.org/what-we-do/peace/

St. Petersburg-Tampa Bay

Dwight Lawton

Veterans for Peace

Florida

http://tampabayvfp.blogspot.com/

Syracuse

Syracuse Peace Council | Military Alternatives Education Project

New York

http://www.peacecouncil.net/programs/military-alternatives-education-project

Tacoma

Michael Collier

Micah Project First United Methodist Church- Tacoma: Washington

Washington

http://www.fumcot.com/index.php?m=3&s=83&c=208

Toledo

Peggy Daly-Masternak

Learning Not Recruiting

Ohio

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/176-learning-not-recruiting.html

Traverse City

Tim Keenan

Veterans for Peace - Chapter 50

Michigan

http://www.vfp50.org/

Troy

Steve Saelzler

Veterans for Peace - Chapter 74

Michigan

http://www.vfp74.org/

Tucson

Susan Thorpe | Deborah Livingston

Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Arizona

http://www.tucsonwilpf.org/

Tulsa

Joni Mazer

Tulsa Peace Fellowship

Oklahoma

http://tulsapeacefellowship.ning.com/

Twin Cities

Ty Moore

Youth Against War and Racism

Minnesota

http://yawr-mn.blogspot.com/

Volcano

Catherine Kennedy

Truth 2 Youth

Hawaii

http://www.myspace.com/cakikallas

Walnut Creek

Rick Sterling

Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center

California

http://www.mtdpc.org

Washington

John Judge

C.H.O.I.C.E.S. - Committee on High School Options & Information on Careers

District of Columbia

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/CHOICES.html

Washington

Maria Santelli

Center on Conscience & War

District of Columbia

http://www.centeronconscience.org

Washington

Phil Jones

Church of the Brethren Washington Office

District of Columbia

http://www.brethren.org

Washington D.C.

Eric Anderson

Yellowcake

https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/content_page/item/188-yellowcakewalk.html

West Bend

Tom Haebig

Peace Seekers of Washington County

Washington

http://thepeaceseekers.blogspot.com/

Wichita

Cathy Benton

Peace and Social Justice Center of South Central Kansas

Kansas

http://www.wichitapeace.org/

Wilmington

Sally Milbury-Steen

DE Pacem in Terris

Delaware

http://www.depaceminterris.org

Wilmington

Steve Lee

Wilmington Peace Meetup

North Carolina

http://www.meetup.com/nonviolence/

####

16 April 2024 / Wes O'Donnell / amuedge.com

The Following article IS A LESSON in representative clarity of US America as an unrepentant empire, with all the resulting nationalism and militarism that extends down from that and with those manifestations embraced. Invisible to most, an unobstructed view of the language of that nationalism and, by the nature of this beast, the foundation of all permanent war.

And the remorse of a vision unfulfilled!

- NNOMY

10/19/2021 /  Wes O'Donnell / Managing Editor, Edge. Veteran, U.S. Army & U.S. Air Force - If we don’t figure out why soon, it will become a national security crisis.

Movies have always had an unhealthy influence on me. I came of age in Ronald Reagan’s neon-tinted 1980s, complete with big hair and big action heroes. My role models were people like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, and Carl Weathers in Predator.

Even James Cameron’s Colonial Marines from 1986’s Aliens made militarism cool well before the word “tacticool” (a portmanteau of tactical and cool) was invented in 2004.

These over-the-top action heroes glorified the unstoppable might of the American military; no doubt an effort to save face after the Vietnam War. Even Oliver Stone’s Platoon, arguably an anti-war movie, taught me about self-sacrifice.

For me, joining the military was a grand adventure – A hero’s journey

Joining the Army seemed like an adventure; I thought “I’ll live my action movie fantasy and get college money while I’m at it.” At that age, I didn’t give a millisecond of thought to my own mortality. After all, as 80’s action movies illustrated, bad guys have horrible aim.

When my Army recruiter in Texas used to talk about his job in artillery, his eyes sparkled. It was clear that he loved his job (or at least loved blowing things up). But my mind was firmly set on the infantry, due in part to some weird fascination with hyper-masculine men saying catchphrases and shooting bad guys from the hip.

Kids from my generation rushed into military service. Morale was high. By the mid-90s the Soviet Union had collapsed, and our military had just defeated the fifth-largest army in the world in Desert Storm. Twenty years after the end of Vietnam, America was back in the winner’s circle.

But only a shockingly small percentage of today’s young people are considering joining the military. To be clear, my generation, GEN X, was born between 1964-1981, Millennials 1981-1997, and Gen Z 1997 to present.

So, as a member of Generation X, how does my decision to join the Army, (and later the Air Force), differ from today’s youth? And what’s stopping them from considering the military as a viable career option, or at least considering the military as a transition between high school and college?

A perfect storm is brewing

 First, some numbers that keep military recruiters awake at night:

71% percent of young people are ineligible to join the military, according to 2017 Pentagon data.

The reasons: obesity, no high school diploma, or a criminal record.

That number is staggering! Only 29% of Gen Z are eligible for military service. Of those young people who are qualified, only 12.5%, the lowest number in a decade, shows any interest in the military.

In a recent panel discussion on this looming crisis, Army Major General Malcolm Frost, the commander of the Army’s Initial Military Training Command said, “I would argue that the next existential threat we have…is the inability to man our military.”

Indeed, the 2019 three-quarters-of-a-trillion-dollar defense budget included a 3.1% military pay raise, the largest in 10 years, to attract more young people.

What’s more, the Army is offering recruits bonuses of up to $40,000, (Now $60,000 post COVID) as well as incentives that include student loan repayment.

My enlistment bonus was a measly $2,800 after taxes!

Even the Marine Corps, a branch that never had a problem filling its ranks before, has lowered its standards and, in 2017, started handing out 25% more medical, mental health, recreational drug, and misconduct waivers to be able to reach its enlistment goals.

Adding to the military’s staffing woes, the service branches are preparing to boot service members who refuse the COVID vaccine. How much this will impact force readiness remains to be seen, but it certainly can’t help.

Clearly, the Pentagon must recognize that it has a problem on its hands.

So, what’s going on here?

Value-based generational differences are likely the main culprit

Action movies aside, Generation X and Boomers have similar value systems; so similar in fact, that marketers often group these two generations together for segmentation and targeting purposes: something called the Cohort Effect.

Boomers were six times as likely to serve in the military as Millennials and seven times more likely to serve compared to Gen Z.

Also, Gen Z holds more progressive views on issues like the legality of marijuana and the morality of same-sex marriage. On the flip side, the majority of Gen Z sees the military as a bastion of conservative values like tradition, duty, and sacrifice.

The misconception that all military members and veterans are far-right Republican conservatives is a topic for another essay. But the fact remains that even right-leaning members of Gen Z are politically progressive.

I asked my kids, all Gen Z’ers, why they wouldn’t consider the military as a viable career option:

• One said she was afraid to die, (Understandable)

• Another said he didn’t want to die for no reason, (Getting warmer)

• And the other said he didn’t want to fight in a war that had no meaning. (BINGO!)

Makes sense, I suppose. Coming of age after 9/11, Gen Z is too young to know what real terrorism looks like. From their point of view, they simply see an endless rotation of troops to Iraq, Syria, Africa, and, until recently, Afghanistan.

And remember, these are kids who come from a military family! Their father served on active duty for 10 years. Imagine the responses from kids with no military affiliation.

When I tried to explain to my kids that there were jobs in the military that would keep you relatively safe, like Cyber Systems Operations, they weren’t interested.

I tried to point out that every job is not a “combat arms” job.

Crickets…

It seems clear now that the 20-year-long Global War on Terror severely hurt the Pentagon’s brand. Maybe it’s time for some brand repositioning? You know, the way Lincoln hired Matthew McConaughey to convince us that Lincoln cars aren’t just for grandpa anymore.

If the Pentagon wants to get a handle on this growing crisis, they need to spend their recruiting dollars on campaigns that appeal to this pragmatic, tech-savvy, progressive group.

In theory, the military is the ideal place for Gen Z

Gen Z is extremely comfortable with diversity and inclusion, a well-known trait of the military.

Heck, the armed forces desegregated six years before Brown versus Board of Education. When your life depends on the person next to you, and the bullets start flying, you stop caring about their race, religion, or gender.

Likewise, Gen Z is the world’s first digital native. Exceedingly comfortable with technology, the U.S. military is a playground for the most expensive, bleeding-edge technology on the planet. A fellow soldier, and good friend of mine, left the military to work for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I asked him what he did there and what he said continues to capture my imagination to this day: “Wes, all I can say is that Star Wars isn’t just a movie.” Indeed, America’s newest military branch, the Space Force, has some pretty sci-fi jobs.

Finally, with so many in Gen Z worried about healthcare, homeownership, and finances in an age of inflation, the military is an amazing head start that allows young people to build their credit while benefiting from free housing and food allowances.

Not to mention the military’s single greatest benefit of all, the Post 9/11 GI Bill.

When I tell my students that I have a Bachelor’s, an MBA, and I’m working on a terminal degree, all without a single penny out of pocket, young people are both shocked and envious. I feel bad for the student debt situation in America right now, but I can’t relate. I got free college for simply showing up and doing my job with honor.

hat happens if we screw this up?

The Pentagon has been investing heavily in automation, crew-less ships, drones, and robot weapon systems. But this investment in technology doesn’t mean the military needs fewer personnel.

Quite the opposite.

The most technologically advanced military in the world needs maintainers, coders, technicians, and infantry.

Yes, infantry. Ultimately, a human must hold the ground; at least until Congress votes to give the robot weapon systems the ability to make the kill-decision ala Skynet.

If we don’t turn this around soon, I see two things happening:

First, the draft will make a comeback

Want to scare a kid worse than Annabelle Creation? Tell him that he must register for the selective service when he turns 18.

America’s post-war reaction to the end of Vietnam gave birth to the all-volunteer force in 1973 and killed the draft.

The idea of an all-volunteer force has the overwhelming support of most Americans and military leaders. After all, I don’t want the person that’s fighting next to me to not want to be there.

“Trust” in combat is a life-or-death proposition.

Nobody wants the return of conscription. But if a major war kicks off and Uncle Sam doesn’t have the warm bodies that he needs to keep the peace, the draft will return, along with all the social unrest that comes along with it.

Second, the only young people who join the military will be people who come from military families

This, in turn, creates military dynasties and a self-contained “warrior-class” in our society. Even today, there is an ever-shrinking percentage of Americans – a growing warrior class – who must carry the burden of our country’s ongoing Global War on Terror and new pivot to Russia and China.

In many cases, service-members serve because a member of their family served. It’s typical to meet service-members whose military heritage goes back for generations.

But shouldn’t an entire nation bear the burden of its government’s foreign policy? Instead, there is now a sub-culture of warriors that, despite high public approval ratings, the general population understands less and less.

This makes the military-civilian divide even more perilous.

We need more data to understand why young people aren’t interested in the military

We need to have an honest conversation about military service with today’s young people, specifically the benefits and the dangers of service.

In fact, I challenge you to have a conversation with a young person in your family and ask them what their thoughts are about military service. I’m curious what their response will be.

I never did turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger, say cheesy catchphrases, or shoot any weapons from the hip. But joining the military was the single best decision of my life.

It has had benefits that I am still realizing today: Composure under pressure, habitual goal orientation, integrity, leadership, diversity, and inclusion… I could go on.

As for the Pentagon and their $3.1bn recruiting budget, it might just be time to bring back the muscle-bound action heroes of the ‘80s to influence today’s youth. Or, better yet, communicate clearly the benefits of service to young people.

Whether from a national security perspective or a cultural one, our nation can’t afford an entire generation opting out of military service.

The opinions and comments stated in the following article, and views expressed by any contributor to AMU Edge, do not represent the views of American Military University, American Public University System, its management, or employees.

Wes O'Donnell    

Wes O’Donnell is an Army and Air Force veteran and writer covering military and tech topics. As a sought-after professional speaker, Wes has presented at U.S. Air Force Academy, Fortune 500 companies, and TEDx, covering trending topics from data visualization to leadership and veterans’ advocacy. As a filmmaker, he directed the award-winning short film, “Memorial Day.”

Source: https://amuedge.com/why-dont-americas-young-people-want-to-join-the-military/

Edward Hasbrouck / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles /16 March 2024 

The “opt-out” provision in SB-1081 is deceptive and entrapment 

March 10, 2024 / Edward Hasbrouck / Resistance News - A bill to automatically register draft-age applicants for California driver’s licenses with the Selective Service System (SSS) has been set for its first first hearing in Room 1200 of the State Capitol Annex “Swing Space” building, 1021 O St. in Sacramento (2 blocks south of the Capitol) in Sacramento at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 9, 2024, before the Senate Committee on Transportation. Only in-person testimony will be accepted, with no remote testimony or livestream, but written testimony can be submitted until April 1, 2024.

The hearing on April 9th will be only the first of several, if the bill moves forward, but will set the tone for debate on the bill.

Here’s what you can do:

•  Testify in person at the hearing in Sacramento on April 9th. (Witnesses typically are allowed only 2-3 minutes each at the open mike at a hearing like this, but while you are in Sacramento you can visit your state Senator and Assembly representative to ask them to oppose SB-1081. If you have more than you can say in two minutes, you can submit a more detailed statement in advance, and summarize it in person, which calls more attention to your written submission.)
  
  

• Organizations (including California and national organizations) and individuals can submit letters of opposition to SB-1081 by April 1st.
  
  

• Californians can contact your state Senators and Assembly members (at their district offices if you can’t make it to Sacramento), to urge them to oppose SB-1081 or any similar bill in the Assembly. It’s especially important to contact members of the Senate and Assembly Transportation Committees.

Written testimony or statements can be submitted by individuals or organizations until April 1, 2024. Typically all organizations submitting position statements for or against a bill are listed in the report published by the legislative analyst and attached to the bill, so it’s useful to send a statement recording your opposition, even if you say only, “Our organization opposes SB-1081.”

To submit a letter, you need to create an account on the Web-based advocacy portal for the California legislature. No letters are accepted by e-mail. See these guidelines for position letters. Individual letters must include your name and address. Organizational letters must include the name of a contact person. To be counted, letters must refer to SB-1081 and state explicitly that you “oppose” this bill (even if your opposition to the bill should be obvious from your statement).

Here’s a legal analysis and critique of SB 1081 submitted to the legislature by the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, and a shorter summary of talking points in opposition to SB-1081.

Of course being opposed to war and conscription are sufficient reasons to oppose preparations for a military draft. But there are many reasons, even for those who aren’t per se antiwar, why this and similar laws in other states are a bad idea.

Let me count the ways:

1. Draft registration is a failure. Linking it to California driver’s licenses won’t salvage it.

An actual draft requires a complete and accurate database of names and current addresses for provable delivery of induction notices. Men ages 18-26 are required to notify the Selective Service System (SSS) within 10 days of any change of address, but few young men do. The SSS exaggerates compliance by counting as “in compliance” anyone who ever registers, even if they register years late and/or move without notifying the SSS. At a Congressional hearing in 2021, the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee noted that, “Under the law you are required to basically let the government know where you are between the ages of 18 and 26, which I can assure you virtually nobody does.”

A summary of issues identified by the SSS in a 2018 induction exercise predicted that, “Almost 50% of inductees WILL NOT receive Reporting Orders…. Results will be massive Undeliverable/Returned to Sender.” Dr. Bernard Rostker, Director of the Selective Service System from 1979-1981, testified in 2019 to the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) that the database is so incomplete and inaccurate as to be less than useless for a draft, and that the registration requirement and the entire Military Selective Service Act should be repealed.

Draft registration proved unenforceable, and an actual draft would be similarly unenforceable. Federal criminal prosecutions of nonregistrants (including in California) didn’t work, and were abandoned by Federal prosecutors in 1988 after only a handful of test cases were brought. Too many young people don’t comply for more than a handful to be prosecuted. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has no plan or budget for enforcement of draft registration. In Fiscal Year 2021 (the most recent year reported), the SSS referred 238,679 names of nonregistrants to the DOJ. None were investigated or prosecuted.

Nonregistration is only a crime if it was “knowing and willful”. Proving knowledge and willfulness requires labor-intensive personal notice before each prosecution. Most non-registrants didn’t know they were supposed to register, have committed no crime, and couldn’t be prosecuted.

2. The negative consequences of nonregistration have been exaggerated and don’t justify this bill.

Congress repealed the requirement to register with the SSS for Federal student aid in 2020. California repealed the requirement to register with the SSS for state Cal Grants for higher education in 2021. Legislation has been proposed in Congress to end registration and abolish the SSS.

Denial of Federal jobs or naturalization requires evidence that nonregistration was “knowing and willful”. In most cases, there is no such evidence, and nonregistrants are eligible for Federal jobs if they swear they didn’t know they were supposed to register. According to the Federal Office of Personnel Management, only 1% of cases of nonregistrants adjudicated by OPM result in denial of Federal employment.

3. California should not be using state resources to enforce the Military Selective Service Act.

Federal laws should be enforced by the Federal government, at Federal expense. If the Federal government chooses not to enforce the provisions of Federal criminal laws, California should not try to take over enforcement of those Federal laws. This would set a dangerous precedent for claims of “states rights” and overreach of state authority.

Registration for a military draft is irrelevant to the purpose of driver’s licenses: road safety. The only reason to use driver’s licenses as the primary mechanism for enforcement of draft registration is as a short-cut to evade Federal court proceedings and due-process rights.

Selective Service registration data is given automatically to military recruiters. The Department of Motor Vehicles shouldn’t be used as a military recruiting agency.

California is not alone in choosing not to use its state Vehicle Code to enforce the Military Selective Service Act. Other states that don’t link driver’s licenses to Selective Service registration include Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

The California Constitution prohibits using vehicle funds for unrelated purposes. SB-1081 would require startup funding from the Federal government, but no such funds are available, and the bill makes no provision for ongoing funding after the startup.

4. Extrajudicial state sanctions for nonregistration with the SSS deny due process and other rights.

SB-1018 does not recognize the presumption that applicants for driver’s licenses are innocent of Federal crimes (with which they have neither been charged nor convicted) or give them their day in court.

The requirement to register with the SSS would be enforced by the DMV with no opportunity for judicial review of the Constitutionality of the underlying registration requirement or of preparation for a military draft for undeclared wars.

5. The “opt-out” provision in SB-1081 is deceptive and entrapment.

Opting out of registration with the SSS would require signing a written admission of notice of the registration requirement. This would amount to a written confession of a Federal crime, obtained by the DMV without providing legal counsel or Miranda warnings. The DMV should not be interrogating driver’s license applicants about unrelated Federal crimes.

SB-1081 purports to restrict access to records of who opts out of being registered with the SSS, but this provision could be overridden by a Federal subpoena for evidence of knowing and willful nonregistration.

The state of California should not use false assurances of confidentiality to trick applicants for driver’s licenses into signing confessions of Federal crimes without benefit of a lawyer’s advice, Miranda warnings, or the right to remain silent.

6. Selective Service registration is a bad policy choice.

Draft registration is not needed. There’s no realistic scenario for a war the U.S. should be preparing to fight, but for which there wouldn’t be enough volunteers.

The only reason for draft registration is to enable and prepare for a draft. There are Constitutional objections to a draft for undeclared wars, pacifist and anti-war objections to preparation and planning for war, and civil libertarian objections to any system of conscription.

Many people have sincere religious objections to registering for the draft. This bill would force them to violate their conscience or sign a confession of a crime to get a driver’s license. There’s no provision in Federal law or SB-1081 for conscientious objection to registration.

Draft registration promotes the illusion that a draft is available as a “fallback”, which leads to unrealistic mobilization planning and enables planning for endless, unlimited wars that people would not volunteer to fight. Ending draft registration would deter war-making.

7. Only males (as assigned at birth) are currently required to register with the SSS. This is discriminatory.

California should not use state resources in support of a program that is explicitly anti-trans and that explicitly discriminates on the basis of gender.

Even if requiring only males (as assigned at birth) to register with the SSS is permitted under Federal law, using California state resources in support of such a discriminatory program would violate the California Constitution. Defending this bill against the inevitable lawsuits would require the state of California to argue in favor of sex discrimination and set dangerous state law precedents rolling back protections against sex discrimination in California.

Edward Hasbrouck maintains the Resisters.info website and publishes the “Resistance News” newsletter. He was imprisoned in 1983-1984 for organizing resistance to draft registration.

Source: https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2024/03/10/california-selective-service-bill-set-for-hearing-in-sacramento-april-9th/

November 21, 2023 / Nancy Goldner and Rosemary Kean / Massachusetts Peace Action

When the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2002, US military recruiters gained access to American high schools on a basis equivalent to recruiters for colleges and civilian employers. The Act also mandated that the contact information of high school juniors and seniors be given to military recruiters at the start of each school year. These requirements represented a significant expansion of the military’s presence in American high schools, although they were predated by the presence of Junior Reserve Officers Training Programs (JROTCs) established in 1916. JROTCs are now offered in 3500 high schools across the country and enroll half a million students. JROTC classes are taught by retired military personnel.  

The increased presence of the military in American high schools has brought about a disturbing development. A NY Times investigation has found that in a great number of schools, predominantly in low-wealth communities, the JROTC programs have been made mandatory and, in others, more than 75% of students in a single grade have been steered into them. Underlying this trend is a steep drop in the number of annual enlistments, compared to those needed to maintain the military’s all-volunteer forces.

The decline in enlistments stems from multiple factors: fewer than one in four young people are eligible to enlist while about one in 10 believe military service will harm them in some way. Tellingly, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Stephanie Miller, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Personnel, stated that “uninformed messaging by non-military organizations highlights the risks of military service.”

Rather than conducting “uninformed messaging,” counter-recruitment activists are informing young people of their right to protect their privacy and of their right not to be to be placed in JROTC classes without their consent. This was our objective in organizing a leafleting action at four City of Boston High Schools in September 2023.

Volunteers from MAPA, Veterans for Peace, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom handed out hundreds of palm cards at the beginning of the school day at English High School, Jeremiah Burke High School, Madison Park Technical-Vocational High School and the Charlestown High School. These schools have high percentages of students classified as “economically disadvantaged.”  Since the campus of the O’Bryant School for Math and Science abuts Madison Park, many O’Bryant students also took our cards. O’Bryant has a naval JROTC as well as military personnel teaching “leadership skills” and physical education. 

The front of the palm card gives the “opt out” procedure to prevent the release of student contact information or forced enrollment in JROTC classes. The back lists “peaceful careers” that provide a sense of purpose and self-discipline as well as financial support, food and housing security, a career pathway, job experience, and tuition costs just as the military claims it offers.

The palm card can be viewed digitally here.

At the high schools, we deployed ourselves on the sidewalk by the school entrance or nearby.  As students hurried by us, we handed our palm card to those willing to take it. On two mornings, we were thanked by parents who were dropping off their children for the information we provided, one of whom also said she wondered about the presence of military recruiters. Unfortunately, we have no way of determining what our overall impact was, especially on students’ exercising their right to “opt out.”  

Given the low rate of enlistment by high school students, military leadership is proposing to focus on community college students.  Although not yet funded, the “Enlisted Training Corp” will be modeled on the ROTCs at colleges and universities. (Military Times, July 19, 2023).   Counter recruitment will continue to be a priority of MAPA’s demilitarization campaign but, perhaps in the future, we will be on the campuses of community colleges.

—Nancy Goldner is a longstanding member of MAPA’s Racial Justice / Indigenous Solidarity working group. She first became engaged in counter-recruitment activism in the early 2000s with Brooklyn for Peace. Rosemary Kean is a co-convener of the same working group and co-chair of MAPA’s Board of Directors. 

National Network Opposing Parent Category: NNOMY Articles 26 September 2023

Michael Knox, US Peace Prize, US Peace Memorial  - The 2023 US Peace Prize has been awarded to National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) “For National Efforts to Stop U.S. Military Influence on Young People, Saving Lives Here and Abroad.”

The US Peace Prize was presented on September 19, 2023, at the Peace Resource Center of San Diego by Michael Knox, Chair and Founder of the US Peace Memorial Foundation. In his remarks, Dr. Knox said, “National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth shields young lives from some of the strongest influences of militarism. Your work not only saves U.S. lives by dissuading young people from joining the military - it also saves the lives of people in distant countries who they could harm once they were part of the U.S. war machine. NNOMY positively impacts countless young adults, and its nationwide efforts involve the contributions of many stellar antiwar figures and organizations. The US Peace Prize is a prestigious honor that will help call attention to and reinforce your important work for peace.”

The award was accepted by Rick Jahnkow, the organization’s Steering Committee Representative, and several network members. Mr. Jahnkow responded, “NNOMY is grateful for receiving this award and the recognition it will, hopefully, bring to the urgent need to counter the militarization of young people. Protesting war once it begins is never enough; if we are ever going to have a truly effective peace movement, it must include proactively reaching out to and engaging with younger generations in order to groom them to become activists for peace, instead of war. It is this long-term vision that NNOMY brings to the peace movement.”

Rick Jahnkow responded,

“NNOMY is grateful for receiving this award and the recognition it will, hopefully, bring to the urgent need to counter the militarization of young people. Protesting war once it begins is never enough; if we are ever going to have a truly effective peace movement, it must include proactively reaching out to and engaging with younger generations in order to groom them to become activists for peace, instead of war. It is this long-term vision that NNOMY brings to the peace movement.”

NNOMY is an organization that brings together national, regional, and local groups to oppose the military’s growing intrusion into young people’s lives, focusing on trying to slow the process of militarization in schools by Pentagon programs designed to promote recruitment into military service. By training and sending antiwar counter-recruiters to speak with high school students, NNOMY attempts to change the minds of young adults considering joining the U.S. military. NNOMY also offers alternatives to entering the military and its wars, focusing on communities significantly affected by military recruiting and the violence of militarism.

Ending U.S. Wars by Honoring Americans Who Work for Peace

I travel frequently and have seen the many monuments to soldiers and to wars that occupy our city squares and parks. In the summer of 2005 my son James and I visited Washington, DC, after he finished his first year of college. We made the standard tour of the city, visiting museums, the White House, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the newly dedicated World War II Memorial. These memorials exist to reinforce the notion that war efforts or activities are highly valued by our society. In this and other visits to the National Mall, I encountered dozens of war veterans discussing their experiences with their children, grandchildren, and other relatives and friends. I imagine that most of the listeners are proud of the speaker’s military record and some view the war veteran as a role model.

Suddenly, with my son present, I realized that all of my own personal memories and stories in this realm were of antiwar activities. I was immediately struck by the fact that there are no national monuments here to convey a message that our society also values peace and recognizes those who took action to oppose one or more U.S. wars. There is no public validation of antiwar activities and no memorial to serve as a catalyst for discussion regarding courageous peace efforts by Americans over the past centuries. This realization led to the organization of the US Peace Memorial Foundation in 2005 and my retirement in 2011 so that I could devote the remainder of my life to creating this monument to peacemakers, initially online and later as a physical structure in our nation’s capital.

It is time to dedicate a national monument to peace and those who work for it. Our society should be as proud of those who strive for alternatives to war that save innocent lives as it is of those who fight wars and often take innocent lives. Demonstrating this national pride in peacemakers in some tangible way may encourage others to explore peace advocacy during times when only the voices of war are being heard. By presenting the antiwar sentiments of many American leaders—views that history has often ignored—and by documenting contemporary U.S. peace activism, the US Peace Memorial will send a clear message to our citizens that advocating for peaceful solutions to international problems and opposing war are honorable and socially acceptable activities in our democracy.

War is part of our culture. Because war has historically featured both personal and collective acts of valor and sacrifice amidst hellish violence and tragedy, it is understandable that memorials are erected to acknowledge war’s momentous impacts and honor the participants’ dedication to causes that were deemed to be in our national interests. In this sense, war memorials honor the ultimate inability to resolve conflict and differences through nonviolent means. These memorials recognize the horrific, deadly, and sometimes heroic results of that failure, results that are starkly tangible.

By contrast, Americans who oppose war(s) and who advocate instead for alternate, nonviolent solutions to conflict help to prevent or end wars. They engage in prevention of war and create life-saving results that gain little public attention. Unlike wars, successful peace actions do not create the kind of visceral and emotional foundation on which war memorials are instinctively built. A similar dynamic happens in healthcare where disease prevention (which saves many more lives) is poorly funded and often unrecognized, whereas medicine and surgery that have a tangible life-saving impact on people and their families is gratefully acknowledged and well- funded.

Fortunately, the horror and tragedy that mark war are not usually components of working for peace. Yet like war, peace advocacy does include dedication to cause, bravery, serving honorably, and making personal sacrifices, such as being shunned and vilified, losing friends, a job or promotion, putting oneself on the line in communities and in society, and even being arrested and jailed for antiwar actions. The honor that antiwar activists merit is long overdue. So too is a healthy respect for the cause of peacemaking.

In April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. condemned U.S. militarism, referring to “a society gone mad on war.” He labeled the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Nothing has changed since then, except for the focus of our unbridled and incessant aggression. We continue to unleash the horror of our war-making toward persons living in devastating poverty in other parts of the world.

The need to end our culture of war is more urgent than ever. In 2019 the U.S. unilaterally pulled out of the historic Iran nuclear deal and Congress passed the largest war budget ever in the history of United States, giving
the military $738 billion for the 2020 fiscal year. That’s over $84 million an hour for war. And, this figure may be grossly inaccurate. At $1.21 trillion, the actual national security budget is much larger than what the Pentagon reports.2 Also consider the costs associated with C.I.A. clandestine wars— expenditures that are kept secret from the American people.

We saw the release of the Afghanistan Papers,3 which make it clear how much our government lies to us, just as it did when we waged war against the people of Vietnam. A December 2019 State Department report4 found that the U.S. is responsible for 79 percent of the global arms trade, or an average of $143 billion annually, with the United States exporting four times more arms around the globe than the next nine countries combined. As 2019 ended, President Donald Trump signed a bill establishing the United States Space Force as the sixth branch of the military. During the signing ceremony he said, “Space is the world’s newest war-fighting domain.” As 2020 began, the president brought the nation to the brink of war with Iran, a country that we have attempted to dominate during most of my lifetime.

After decades of creating police officers and departments with a war mentality, rather than a guardian mentality, the murder of George Floyd ignited months of nationwide demonstrations. The military was brought in and used against our own citizens as they protested widespread police brutality against black people. Today we continue to kill, maim, and make refugees of innocent impoverished people in Africa and the Middle East, to take hostile actions against Latin American countries, and to threaten Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia.

The inadequacies of our healthcare and public health systems and the persistent shortages of equipment, supplies, hospital beds, and timely testing during the COVID-19 pandemic underscore the fact that military related activities are the highest priority of our government. That’s where the tax dollars go and that’s where the resources are; spread around the world to intimidate and do harm, rather than good. It’s interesting to note a recent observation by Jimmy Carter: “China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”

In July 2020 Democrats and Republicans worked together to defeat a bill that would have cut the Pentagon budget by ten percent ($74 billion) and redistributed the money to fund much needed domestic programs. The nation’s priorities are clear.

In a culture that funds and esteems war-making, the overdue respect for peacemaking must be taught and modeled. A national monument to peacemakers can help do that. The US Peace Memorial can change our cultural mindset so that it will no longer be acceptable to label those who speak out against a U.S. war as un-American, anti-military, disloyal, or unpatriotic. Rather, they will be recognized for their dedication to a noble cause.

The US Peace Memorial Foundation is providing education about living peace activists and thoughts about our nation’s long history of brave citizens and leaders who have actively opposed U.S. wars. The memorial will help decrease the social barriers that Americans must overcome before they publicly oppose a war. Active public opposition to war is crucial to world peace and to ending U.S. war and militarism. If we as Americans don’t end it, other countries might take action. The results of another world war, with current technology, are unthinkable.

It has been seventy-five years since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan. On August 9, 2015, during a ceremony to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, the Foundation awarded the US Peace Prize to the Honorable Kathy Kelly. The event was held on the stage at Ashley Pond, Los Alamos, New Mexico. This is the place, geographically, where the first atom bombs were constructed.

As I prepared my remarks for the award presentation, I realized a personal connection that had never registered before. On August 9, 1945 our military bombed Nagasaki. Exactly nine months later, on May 9, 1946, I was born. I have tried to imagine how my parents, stationed at an Army Air Force base in Texas on that day, must have felt. Perhaps there was real hope for peace; time to get on with their lives, start a family, and conceive their first child.

Unfortunately, peace was not the direction the U.S. chose to take after World War II. I say chose, because war is not a natural phenomenon like a hurricane or pandemic—it is aberrant human behavior. It requires thought, planning, public support, resource allocation, training, and implementation. If people refuse to support, fund, kill, or participate in the process at any level, there can be no war. We have an obligation to change the course that our country has chosen to take during much of its existence. We need to take responsibility, reset, and have a fresh start. I hope that this book will contribute to the discussion.

If you want world peace, your first obligation should be to demand that your own country stop destabilizing, invading, occupying, and bombing other countries. As you will read, there are many peaceful alternatives to aggression, and we must be willing to advocate for them. You will learn about the actions of courageous Americans who have spoken out publicly against war and worked for peace. Follow their lead and example. Significant contributions to peace on earth are within our power. - Source: uspeacememorial.org/the_idea.htm

National Network Opposing / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 22 September 2023

The steering committee and staff of The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth wish to send our condolences to the family, friends, and activist collaborators of Barbara G Harris on her recent passing after a long illness in New York City. Barbara served as a valuable member of the NNOMY Steering Committee and provided informed guidance for our network's projects and campaigns since her joining our organizing committee in 2014 as a representative of the Granny Peace Brigade of New York City.
NNOMY Steering Committee and staff

My own story of Barbara was visiting the Manhattan apartment of her and her husband, Gerald, on a visit to see family in Brooklyn. Beyond our kind reception for a visit in their dining room, where we shared an afternoon refreshment and conversation, was a small room that was Barbara's space that was a kind of history in pictures and memorabilia representing her 50 plus years of activism for peace, woman's rights, and the environment. She explained some of the things on the walls to my wife, Sandra, and I felt Barbara's history and commitment to activism from her school years through adulthood. It was a special place for me to share that likely few have experienced and it stood as a humane and personal reflection upon her. Barbara was a rare example of an activist and advocate in NYC schools countering the deceptive military recruiter narrative of the benefits of joining into war and doing the important work of youth demilitarization.

Below are a series of excerpts, and links to read the rest, of articles about her activism in our schools reaching out to youth to promote with them a future for peace and not a personal legacy of war.
Gary Ghirardi - NNOMY Communications Staff 

Barbara Harris discussing ways to educate parents about their right to keep information on their children from the military. Credit...Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Barbara Harris and "counter-recruitment" in NYC

The New York Times ran a story today about Barbara Harris, 71, of CODEPINK NYC, "a retired teacher and longtime peace advocate ... on a personal crusade to block recruiters for the United States military from contacting New York City high school students."

She'll be out at a New York City high school tonight -- other volunteers will be at 52 other schools -- at Parent Teacher Conference night, talking with parents about how they can "opt-out" from having the school send their children's private information to the military under a small provision of No Child Left Behind.

“You give them the information, you see them change their minds,” she said. “They know their kids are vulnerable. They say: ‘They’re calling my baby and I don’t want them to speak to my child. What should I do?’ ”

Barbara is amazing -- so intelligent, strong, organized and kind. She has a heart of gold and has made this cause a top priority in her life. What do you think of recruiters in schools?
Posted by CODEPINK Staff - 23 October 2008 - https://www.codepink.org/barbara_harris_and_counter_recruitment_in_nyc

Law & Disorder Radio: The Granny Peace Brigade

If you’ve attended NYC protests over the past few years you might have seen a group of women that stand out from the crowd. A lot of credit is given to younger generations for their increasing presence in marches and protests, but this group is made up of women who have been protesting for decades. They call themselves the Granny Peace Brigade. The name is fitting in every way as the group is comprised of all older women who have been at the forefront of many anti-war, anti-military and counter recruitment movements.

After a group of them were arrested at the Times Square recruitment center in 2005, they made their official debut as the Granny Peace Brigade to defend their civil rights in court. In the next 13 years as new members joined, their message only grew louder. In conjunction with other groups over time, such as Code Pink and the Raging Grannies, the Granny Peace Brigade has worked to denounce and resist both local and global militarism, war and endless devastation to civilian life. Granny Peace Brigade Blog

Guests – Joan Plune and Barbara Harris, two longstanding members of the Granny Peace Brigade.

Why Counter-Recruitment?

On a series of chilly evenings in November 2014, Barbara Harris, the counter-recruitment coordinator for the New York City chapters of Code Pink and Granny Peace Brigade, braved the cold to share a sidewalk with other group members, mostly women in their 50s and 60s. At one high school in Staten Island, she was also joined by what she described as “apprentice activists”: students from the school’s sociology class. “It was their first time doing a street action,” Barbara later recalled, “and they were effective in making a difference by adding their voice to the conversation.” It was “parent-teacher conference” night at the school, and Barbara and her friends were there to provide information to parents about non-military options for their children and to pass out flyers like Questions to Ask and Points to Consider Before You Enlist. While the venue did not encourage much interaction with parents, many of whom were in a rush to get inside, there were some highlights. “I met with a mother,” Barbara later recalled, “who was thankful for that flyer and noted that the questions posed and answers provided were very pertinent.” She told Barbara, “Few kids know what enlistment really means. I want to show this to a few boys I know.”

Like many activists, Barbara Harris initially came to counter-recruitment out of anger over the Iraq War. A retired New York City public school teacher currently involved with a number of organizations, Barbara has more than 50 years’ experience in progressive activism. In the past she campaigned to end the war in Vietnam, stop nuclear disarmament, and to shut down Indian Point (a nuclear power plant 38 miles north of New York City). Through her involvement with nuclear energy issues, she came into the orbit of Code Pink. Recently retired and with more free time on her hands, Barbara’s participation deepened as the Bush administration made moves to invade Iraq. During her anti-war activism in 2004 and 2005, she experienced a turning point.

"I just had a realization that the lies the government told us about getting into the war were the same lies that recruiters were telling kids to get them to enlist. And I stepped back and said, this is really important because the wars will continue forever as long as they keep getting these kids in."

Read More
Scott Harding & Seth Kershner - Chapter 5: Counter-Recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools 

Counter Recruiting on Parent Night

Members of the Granny Peace Brigade and CodePink explain that the "No Child Left Behind" act requires schools to send students' contact information to the military. Students can opt out and we tell them how.

Granny Peace Brigade: Parent Teacher Conference Night – November 5, 2014, New York City

Twice a year, at New York City high schools, volunteers distribute non-military informational flyers to parents and students during parent teacher conference night. Following is the report for the November 5, 2014 action.

As volunteers handed out flyers to parents and students entering high schools for a meeting with teachers, the White House was deciding to send 1500 more troops to Iraq.

The information being shared with parents includes Non-Military Options for Life After High School as well as Questions to Ask and Points to Consider Before You Enlist.

How very important this action continues to be as wars are endless and new military recruits are needed.  For the military - where best to look than in the high schools.

To respond, we're at high schools to counter military promotions and offer pro-peace alternatives.

At a couple of schools, the Questions to Ask Before You Enlist flyer was received with greater interest than in the past.  A volunteer noted that it seemed avoiding the military was as important to parents as education after high school for their child.   I met with a mother who was thankful for that flyer and noted that the questions posed and answers provided were very pertinent. “Few kids know what enlistment really means. I want to show this to a few boys I know.”

In Staten Island, 3 students from a sociology class joined the volunteers at New Dorp High School.   It was their first time doing a street action, and they were effective in making a difference by adding their voice to the conversation. Youth helping to build the movement as apprentice activists.

Members of the Robotics team at Murry Bergtraum Campus were psyched over the Options flyer.  Their plans are focused on college.  While speaking with the guidance counselor at this high school, she mentioned that career counseling is the last item on her agenda.  A shortage of guidance counselors leaves many students in the dark concerning future goals and non-military options. She took our handouts as well.

All those who volunteered, although they had little time for conversation with parents, made a difference.  It is appreciated when someone cares about their child's future, is willing to stand in front of a high school, and generously reaches out with educational and informational advice that they rarely receive.

Feel free to download our flyers and give them to friends, students, and teenagers you meet along the way.  You never know – you may well provide the information they are seeking and change their future direction.  Check out: www.grannypeacebrigade.org, Counter-Recruitment page,  scroll to the end of the page for links to the Options & Questions to Ask documents.

Many thanks to all the volunteers - in Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island.

Barbara Harris
Coordinator
Granny Peace Brigade - Counter Recruitment

Exchange of Letters Between the Granny Peace Brigade and Chancellor Fariña’s Office re JROTC

In early December the Granny Peace Brigade sent the following letter via snail mail to Chancellor Carmen Fariña and also to members of New York City Council.

December 2016

Dear Chancellor Fariña,

One and one half million dollars of New York City taxpayer money is spent to fund Junior Reserve Officers Training programs in eighteen New York City high schools.

In addition to being opposed to the militarization of our children, we in the Granny Peace Brigade would like to point out that the JROTC programs glorify the use of weapons within the schools and at public events.

This is not in compliance with New York City policy prohibiting real or imitation weapons in schools.

(Citywide Behavioral Expectations to Support Student Learning, p.19)

We call upon you to do the right thing and defund all military programs in New York City high schools.

We can find better things for our children to hold.

Barbara Harris - Granny Peace Brigade

Read More

 Observances

• A Tribute to Counterrecruitment Activist  Barbara Harris - We are Not Your Soldiers - 10 October 2023

• A Tribute to Counter-recruitment Activist Barbara G Harris,  NNOMYPeace.net,  22 September 2023

• Barbara Harris: Rest in Power - CODEPINK - Women for Peace - September 18, 2023  

• BARBARA HARRIS Obituary, New York Times, September 14, 2023 - 

Activist Counter-recruitment Reports by Barbara G Harris from the Granny Peace Brigade Website

• Military Recruiting and the Pandemic, Barbara Harris, April 19, 2020

• Stopping Trump’s Catastrophic Election Ploy, Barbara Harris, January 4, 2020

• Parent-Teacher Conference Night Peace Action, Barbara Harris, November 27, 2019

• Parent Teacher Conference Night Action, Barbara Harris, March 8, 2018

• An update on GPB JROTC campaign activities, Barbara Harris, November 1, 2017 

• No Military Rifles in NYC schools!, Barbara Harris, March 10, 2016

• Students’ Privacy Extends to Military-Recruitment Tools, Barbara Harris, December 11, 2015

• Dear NY City Council: Don’t spend $1.5 million on Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, Barbara Harris, April 8, 2015

• Counter Recruitment at the East Harlem Youth Fair, Barbara Harris, August 28, 2014

• Protect High School Students’ Privacy Rights – ASVAB Test Option 8, Barbara Harris, June 27, 2013

• Books not Bombs, Students not Soldiers, Barbara Harris, October 28, 2012

• Parent Teacher Conference Night at NYC High Schools, Barbara Harris, April 6, 2012 

• Partners For Peace At The East Harlem Youth Fair, Barbara Harris, September 8, 2011 

• Parent Teacher Conference Night Action, Barbara Harris, March 18, 2010

• Counter-Recruitment-Parent Teacher Conference Night Opt Out Action, Barbara Harris, November 6, 2009

• A Positive Reception for Counter-Recruitment Volunteers. Barbara Harris, April 4, 2008 

Additional Links Including mention or association of Barbara G Harris

• NNOMY Conducts National Steering Committtee retreat online to explore strategies for network's future, NNOMY Steering Committee, December 28, 2021

• Dismantling the School-to-Soldier Pipeline, An Interview with Nancy Cruz, Barbara Harris, Rick Jahnkow, and Seth Kershner, Jacobin, June 25, 2020

• Divest “Your Body” from the War Machine, NNOMY, October 23, 2017

• How to Counter Recruitment and De-Militarize Schools, David Swanson, February 12, 2016

• Linchpin of Pentagon’s School-based Recruitment: Student Testing Program (ASVAB) Rife with Errors and Contradictions, Pat Elder, NNOMY.org, January 18 2014

• Counter-Recruiter’ Seeks to Block Students’ Data From the Military, Javier C. Hernández, New York Times, Oct. 22, 2008

• TARGET: NO MORE WAR TOYS, Phyllis Cunningham, Granny Peace Brigade, December 20, 2009 

 Granny Peace Brigade

• Granny Peace BrigadeNYC  website - https://grannypeacebrigade.org

• Granny Peace Brigade NYC on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/GrannyPeaceBrigade

• Granny Peace Brigade NYC listing on NNOMY - https://nnomy.org/en/content_page/item/887-granny-peace-brigade-nyc.html

Ruben Abrahams Brosbe / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 27 July 2023

Across the U.S., anti-war veterans and their allies are working together in an effort to stop the U.S. military from reaching its recruitment goals, writes Ruben Abrahams Brosbe.

July 27, 2023 / Ruben Abrahams Brosbe / Consortium News - March 20 marked the 20th anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The war took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, with some estimates of Iraqi casualties putting the number at over 1 million. More than 4,600 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq during and after the invasion, and thousands more have died by suicide.

Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the U.S. military is facing its worst recruitment crisis since the end of the Vietnam War. The Defense Department’s budget proposal for 2024 outlines a plan for the military to slightly cut back on its ranks, but to reach its projected numbers, it will still need to embark on a heavy recruitment push.

Across the country, anti-war veterans and their allies are working together in an effort to stop the U.S. military from reaching its goal.

We Are Not Your Soldiers is a project of New York City-based nonprofit World Can’t Wait. The organization sends military veterans into schools to share honest stories of the harm they have caused and suffered. In doing so, they hope to prevent young people from signing up.

“I wish I had somebody who told me when I was young,” says Miles Megaciph, who was stationed in Cuba and Okinawa with the U.S. Marine Corps from 1992 to 1996. “The experiences I’ve lived, as painful as they are, and as much as I don’t like to relive them, are valuable to help future adults not live those experiences,” Megaciph told me.

“We wanted to get to the people who were going to be the next recruits,” says Debra Sweet, the executive director of World Can’t Wait. When We Are Not Your Soldiers launched in 2008, the experience was often intense for veterans.

“They were all fresh out of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Sweet remembers. “It was very raw, it was very hard. [It was] really hard for them to go talk to people in public about what had happened. And we learned a lot about PTSD, up close and personal, and how it was affecting people.”

Since then, over 50 veterans have participated in We Are Not Your Soldiers. Currently, the project relies on a group of nine veterans, who receive a stipend of $125 for each visit. Teachers affiliated with World Can’t Wait also offer curricular support to veterans so they can connect their stories to class lessons.

Sarah Gil, a school teacher at the City-As-School, a transfer high school in New York City, has brought veterans from We Are Not Your Soldiers to her classroom to speak to students in classes focused on just war, race and racism, economics, and moral responsibility. “They share their vulnerability, and it’s more than I could ever do with any of my lessons,” Gil says of the veterans’ visits.

Joy Damiani, an Iraq War veteran who served six years in the U.S. Army, has learned how to use that vulnerability more selectively over time. “I used to go into the classroom and spend a lot of time talking,” Damiani says. “[I was] trying to scare kids into not joining the military, because I was still so freshly traumatized from that.”

More recently, Damiani says her role is less about trying to scare young people and instead providing an alternative perspective. “I’m trying to respect these kids by telling them the truth that other people are not telling them. I’m trying to give them something I didn’t have, which was somebody to bring the real talk right into my face where I needed it.”

“Usually, the students don’t have any idea of what it’s actually like,” Megaciph says.   “Their narrative really comes from television and comes from the national narrative. ‘Thank you. Thank you for your service. It’s an honor to be a member of the military. Travel the world’ stuff.”

Shifting View of Military

While most students have a generally positive view of the military, Megaciph has noticed a shift in recent years. “I think in the past two years, maybe since the pandemic, there’s been a lot more talk about mental health in our country. And so, I think in the past two years, I’ve seen more students aware of the trauma that veterans have.”

Susan Cushman is a professor at Nassau Community College and Adelphi University on Long Island, where military recruiters have a heavy presence, particularly on the Nassau campus. She hosts veterans from We Are Not Your Soldiers to help her students “think about alternative ways to achieve an education and get a pension and get a job and travel, without feeling the only option is to join the military.”

A Piece of Property

In order to counter both the narrative and incentives that military recruiters offer young people, veterans try to share the truth about traumatic personal experiences as well as practical information.

“It’s very meaningful to hear from a veteran that when you enlist, that you are the property — literally are seen as the property — of the U.S. government,” Gil says. Damiani works to put the seemingly attractive military salary and benefits in context for students.

“Considering you’re on duty 24 hours a day or on call 24 hours a day, you’ve sold them your body, mind, and soul, essentially. You might not get it back.”

Megaciph also tries to place the role of the military in the context of broader social issues that he knows students care about, including police violence and climate change.

“The U.S. military is the global police, so I like to put that in the students’ head that the way that the police treat Black and Brown and poor people in this country is the way that the military treats people around the rest of the world,” he says. He also tells students that the U.S. military is the largest single contributor of greenhouse emissions in the world.

Ultimately, stories told by veterans like Megaciph and Damiani can be an effective tool to disrupt the mainstream narrative about militarism. But is it enough?

Rick Jahnkow is a steering committee member and an administrative staff volunteer and organizer at the nonprofit National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY). “Simply having veterans doesn’t take into account the way that military recruiters have been trained to convince young people to want to go in the military,” Jahnkow says.

“The recruiters have been trained to use basically psychological methods to turn people around if they’re being reluctant to enlist, and if a recruiter knows that a veteran has visited the same class, they have ways to negate that.”

The Pentagon’s Advantage

In addition to the military’s preparedness for counter-recruitment, there’s also the issue of simple math. The Pentagon has a multibillion-dollar budget for recruiting alone. By contrast, We Are Not Your Soldiers has an annual budget of $25,000. Meanwhile, Megaciph, Damiani, and the seven other volunteers are up against a much larger body of veterans who generally support military recruitment.

According to a 2019 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 81 percent of post-9/11 veterans would advise a young person to join the military.

With these challenges in mind, NNOMY produced a video called “Before You Enlist!”

The 16-minute video seeks to lay out a case against military service that preempts the military’s psychological recruitment tactics. With veteran stories and statistics, the video debunks perks, such as “free education” and job training, that the military uses to appeal to potential recruits.

The video explains that college benefits are not guaranteed and a “general” discharge can completely disqualify a veteran from receiving benefits. Furthermore, a college education paid by the U.S. military still bears a cost, even if it is not financial.

As Matt Stys, a U.S. Army veteran featured in the video, says,

“You might not be paying monetarily, but you’re paying with your body, you’re paying with your soul, you’re paying with your mind.”

Other veterans share stories of struggling to find meaningful, well-compensated work after their service. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics figure cited in the video, unemployment for young veterans aged 25 to 34 was 42 percent higher than for non-veterans of the same age.

The video also offers a way to bring this message into a greater number of classrooms given the limited number of veterans who are able to make classroom visits. Jahnkow also describes the video as a training tool to develop students’ critical thinking skills so they will be prepared to handle recruitment conversations themselves.

Also central to the video’s message is an explanation of the idea of the “economic draft” or “poverty draft.”

The video ends by directing viewers to Peaceful Career Alternatives.

Jahnkow and others explain that understanding the economic constraints of young people and offering alternative pathways is essential to counter recruitment efforts.

“I feel like empathizing with them is the first step,” Damiani says. “Acknowledging that right now they don’t have a lot of choices and the military offers a lot of at least money. It seems to them to be a lot. A $10,000 signing bonus sounds like a shitload of money to a teenager.”

The Education System

Transforming the pre-K-12 education system is an important component of countering recruitment drives. The ways in which students are filtered and tracked into remedial courses starting from an early age has a limiting effect on their post-secondary options.

Students who have been excluded from higher-level courses and the college and career pathways that accompany them become ripe targets for military recruiters.

Other resources educators can tap include texts like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and the Zinn Education Project, which present U.S. history with a more honest context.

Aside from creating more opportunities for poor and working-class students, targeting policy changes at the school and district level to protect students from recruitment is another important tactic.

Jahnkow cites victories by the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities’ Education Not Arms campaigns to limit recruitment activity at schools that other communities could replicate.

At the same time, the curriculum itself has a role to play. Currently, the standard school curricula often valorizes war and soldiers, while leaving out the U.S. military’s historical role in genocide and colonization.

“You know, the Department of the Army was started for clearing Natives off their land and eradicating them, and that still goes on today,” Megaciph says, referring to the original Department of War established in 1789.

Lastly, veterans and organizers such as Jahnkow say there is an urgent need to build up the capacity of anti-war, anti-recruitment organizing. Damiani says that includes “finding ways to de-stigmatize sharing the dark side of the military so that more veterans, when they get out, feel safe and comfortable talking about the real shit rather than continuing to glamorize it.”

But growing the pool of veterans — and starting other counter-recruitment strategies — will take money. Counter-recruitment organizing efforts are severely underfunded, Jahnkow says.

At the same time, many counter-recruitment and anti-war organizations are being outmaneuvered by the military in digital and social media spaces. This is partly an issue of funding, but Jahnkow adds that the volunteer base for anti-war organizations also skews older.

Fighting recruitment online more effectively will require more younger volunteers with the skill set to use Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms in ways the counter-recruitment movement currently does not.

Meanwhile, Jahnkow believes that in today’s poor recruiting environment, the military will “pull out all the stops” in both digital and personal recruitment.

“I think it’s super trippy, that there are children who are old enough to be in the military and being deployed to Iraq, who were not born when the war started. That is something that is just devastating and tragic to me,” Damiani says. “It fuels my fire to keep talking to the kids, because they need to know.”

Source: https://consortiumnews.com/2023/07/27/us-vets-try-to-stop-students-from-joining-up/

Annette Gunderson / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 07 July 2023

NNOMY office invited Annette Gunderson to tell her story for our website and newsletter. She was referred by Tori Batemen of the Military Recruiter Abuse Hotline of the American Friends Service Committee who was contacted by Annette to seek some support. Tori then recommended that Annette contact NNOMY to tell her story which she did. https://afsc.org/hotline

 June 30, 2023 / Annette Gunderson / Bend, Oregon - I am sharing to the public my Navy “Me Too” story in hopes it will shed light of the corruption and imminent danger I faced during my military enlistment and service.

I was raped by my recruiter Trace Oliver Harris, his age 26. I was 17, still in high school at the time. I didn’t even have my drivers license yet. My childhood died in his California king sized bed. The age of consent in Oregon is 18, and I was a minor when I signed an enlistment contract with Harris’s signature. Harris was aware I was a minor and aware of fraternization policies. My mother’s signature is also on the document, adding her to the lists of credible witnesses.

 
The blackmail, mental and sexual abuse continued over the course of about 8 months while in Delayed entry program. I was in denial of the abuse and ended up with Stockholm syndrome. He blackmailed me with my medical history. Most recruiters, tell you to lie at MEPs so you can get into the military. Former, Petty officer Harris encouraged me to lie at MEPs. Shortly after MEPs Harris groomed me and lured me into his apartment. Pressured me to drink alcohol, his drink of choice: Angry orchard.

 It was the first time I had ever been in his apartment. The minute I walked into his room he forcibly kissed me and firmly grabbed my butt and breasts. I could feel fear bubbling up in my chest, I went into freeze and fawn survival mode. After drinking two ciders, the details get fuzzy. I can’t remember how my pants came off. But I remember him talking about how he owns a gun. I remember my heart dropping to my stomach. At that moment I knew I was willing to do anything I could to survive.

I recall making small talk although I was quick to change the subject. I remember him getting on top of me and he entered inside of me even though he knew I was terrified. My body went into shock. I told him I finished two minutes in, hoping he would stop. I was unfortunately wrong, he accused me of lying and forcibly went faster. I allowed myself to fall deep within my body, I disassociated while staring at the ceiling until he finished.

Harris rolled over without a word and went to sleep. I slept on the edge of his bed with my back facing him as silent tears streamed down my face. A piece of me was lost that night, a piece I have been unable to get back. I didn’t accept that he raped me until months later after sobbing to my friend Aubry while at the Summit high school parking lot in her car.  I remember her words, she was able to finally get me to say, “I was raped”, I hadn’t heard myself say that out loud before. There is something about those three words, they hold a weight that sits on your chest and burns in your lungs. We skipped class so she could take care of me. Even then I was still deep into denial. I am still in contact with my friend today, and she is willing to testify as a witness on my behalf.

I reported Harris approximately eight months later. A fellow recruiter alongside Harris told me that Harris had been sexually harassing other recruits. He described Harris as weird and creepy. I trusted this recruiter when he confided in me about Harris’s perverted actions. I believed him, and my heart stopped. I started sobbing and told him what Harris did to me. I didn’t want this to happen to another recruit. I reported my assault while I was in the car on my way to MEPs to ship out to basic training. I was delayed about 1 year later after making this report.

Deschutes county police stepped in to handle the case because they had jurisdiction due to the fact, I was a minor at the time of the assault. If it weren’t for bend police taking care of me, I wouldn’t have seen any justice at all. (Thank you Bend, Oregon Police.) The military would’ve covered it up if they had full control over the case. NCIS worked with Bend police to investigate the crimes.

I eventually went to basic training after volunteering my privacy away and giving bend police my phone to download all the evidence. While working with NCIS they said I should reach out to Saving Grace before leaving for bootcamp, they explained it wouldn’t affect me getting into the Navy because my MST report was restricted at the time. I went to saving grace three times before shipping out, I told one of their therapists my story and how becoming a sailor was still my childhood dream despite what Harris did to me. She told me I deserved a purple heart. I can’t remember her name, but I remember her powerful words. She did her best to mentally warn me for the hell I was about to endure.

The day before finally shipping out to basic, I went to headquarters in Portland where I talked to a Master Chief, he urged me to not tell anyone about the recruiter abuse during training or they would send me home. He then showed me a video of the moment of truth so I wouldn’t be caught off guard during it. I complied out of fear, awaiting my flight out at MEPs.

I arrived at Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes Naval station, North Chicago, IL. I snuck in lavender essential oil to help with stress. I would smell it at night before falling asleep to help calm me down. I would secretly let other recruits smell it too if they were sad. It was comforting to them.

I didn’t know then that I would later change my name to Lavender. Deep in my subconscious I think I already knew I had a purple heart.

During week one, we were given vaccines. We were briefly informed that some people could have seizures. A few minutes after being given vaccines, the male recruit next to me had seized. The shot I hated the most was the “peanut butter shot”. A group of 10-15 other female recruits lined up and were ordered to lean over a table and expose half of our glute to receive the shot. Some of the Hospital Corpsman were males, I didn’t want to bend over the table and expose myself to male for him to stab a long thick needle into my glute with no warning or consent. I would have preferred a female HM to administer this vaccine, of course this was never given as an option. The military did not tell us what was in the vaccines, just that they would prevent us from getting sick and that we might have adverse reactions. We were lab rats. Consent doesn’t matter when you are government property.

I was ill from all the vaccines I was given.  I was about to pass out when a Recruit Division Commander (RDC) told me I would be put in handcuffs for disobeying a direct order during a workout. I remember hearing sirens of ambulances every day. I witnessed a fellow recruit collapse right in front of me, she was walking from the head (the bathroom) as I was standing in line waiting to talk to a priest. I asked her if she was okay, she looked ill and wasn’t walking properly. She then collapsed on the floor, as if she was having a seizure. Her eyes rolled in the back of her head. I helped her get to the floor safely. I began screaming “TRAINING TIME OUT!” Two female RDC’s heard me screaming for help. They ignored me and continued walking the other way, disregarding someone’s life. The other recruits in line started screaming with me, making it apparent there was something wrong. Another RDC heard us screaming from the other room down the hall. He was with a separate division and started sprinting to us. He called and waited for paramedics to arrive and told us to turn and face the wall to give some privacy. The priest arrives as the paramedics are leaving with the recruit in a gurney. The priest tells everyone in line to join the room to pray for the recruit.

I would grit my teeth often, to show no emotion while standing at attention with a thousand-yard fluoride stare. The water was cloudy and tasted like chemicals. Gritting my teeth was the only way to be an emotionless robot.  At night I would grit my teeth in my sleep due to stress. My TMJ disorder became so out of hand I was unable to open my mouth to eat. I found myself at dental, at first the dentist didn’t believe that I couldn’t eat. I explained that I was a survivor of SA abuse at the hands of my recruiter. He then believed my pain and ordered x-rays and explained that if it worsened, I would need jaw surgery. I told him I wanted to pass basic. He gave me a numbing shot in my jaw to alleviate pain so I could eat. The military should have removed my wisdom teeth and didn’t. I got my wisdom teeth removed after discharging from the Navy due to them being impacted on my nerve causing TMJ disorder.

I was a couple days away from graduating, I completed firefighting training, I made it through the tear gas chamber. I kept repeating training because I couldn’t pass my run. When I first arrived at basic, I was a slow runner. Throughout the four months of basic training, I ran faster. I ended up injured, with severe shin splints and stress fracture on my right heel. I was told to keep running, or I wouldn’t graduate. Leaving me without access to a lawyer, SAPR so I kept pushing.

A female RDC, knew my story and assured me she would run beside me in support. I ran ahead of her as she advised me to do. Until I got to the finish line, I was seconds away from passing. I couldn’t imagine graduation, all that ran through my head was my military lawyer telling me she couldn’t help me. I couldn’t stay motivated with the abuse I endured, the sexual abuse from the recruiter was traumatizing. However, the Navy’s retaliation after reporting recruiter abuse was a more sadistic type of hell. Leading to an ongoing, daily battle with diagnosed complex PTSD. When I slowed down and started walking towards the finish line, I could hear the RDC shouting and cussing at me to run. My heart wasn’t in it anymore, so I walked to the finish line. I knew then that I was the flaw in a broken system. I couldn’t fix the policies that abused me while being in the military, I had to fight the system leaving my dream behind. The RDC wouldn’t look me in the eyes, I could feel her disappointment radiating off her. I felt ashamed, I knew I could have passed the run, even with my injuries. I was seconds away from beating it and graduating. Every time I would get close, alarms would go off in my head, acting as a warning against the abuse and gas lighting from the military. There was only a handful of RDC’s that cared about my situation, but like me they couldn’t stand up to the system. Some RDC’s believed I only joined the military for a disability check. One male RDC hated me. He knew of my report and didn’t believe me. He made me work harder and treated me differently because of it.

I remember needing to call my SAPR advocate to receive updates on the civil lawsuit at hand. I needed to go down to an office to make a phone call. I didn’t know how to address the Petty officer in the correct military lingo. He made me exit the office two times, while cussing me out. Stating “read the fucking sign, it tells you how to say it”. On the third try of reentering the room I began to cry. He then asked me in a firm tone, “why are you crying recruit?”. I began to sob, “I need to call my SAPR advocate” from there I began having a panic attack. From the shocked look on his face, he apologized, then allowed me to make a private call to SAPR. Most calls to SAPR consisted of me breaking down and getting updates on court proceedings. There should be a hand signal for RDC’s to be trained on, to let them know a recruit needs to talk to SAPR. No recruit should have to endure being screamed at while trying to ask for help. There should be trained therapists and legal counsel readily available, on hand at every basic training for recruiter abuse survivors like myself. I found myself seeking asylum from priests, as I had no one to turn to. One priest asked me “Do you regret what happened or feel ashamed because you could’ve prevented it.” He was victim blaming me, I then returned to training, being forced to comply with all orders or face jail time, leaving me emotionless robot and numb to the world.

I couldn’t walk anymore and needed crutches. My military lawyer explained to me in the middle of training over the phone that I didn’t qualify for sexual assault counseling, A SAPR advocate, or a military lawyer once discharging the Navy. Leaving me on my own with absolutely no support to navigate the injustice. However, the Navy gave Trace Oliver Harris legal aid and support.

I had a mental breakdown and cut myself at night in training. I wanted to die but I couldn’t find anything sharp enough to cut deeper. I ended up in a VA mental hospital where I was abused and stripped of my rights as a human being. I was being heavily drugged with Trazadone throughout the day. The meds made me disassociate all day at stare into space for hours. My reality was blurred. The day I asked my female licensed psychiatrist to switch meds because they made me feel loopy. She then threatened me, stating “I will get a court order to allow electric shock therapy if you do not follow my treatment plan.” Then the psychiatrist told me I needed to testify in the next room over facetime, at a grand jury hearing against the recruiter. I went into the next room and my lawyer told me the hearing was to determine if there was enough evidence to go to trial. My psychiatrist walks by with two other females, and I scream at her that she is a fucking bitch.

Door closes and my lawyer hands me the phone and before I answer she told me I needed to remain calm and that she couldn’t stay in the room during my testimony. I answer the questions from the jury and told them I was on heavy medication and that it would be hard to remember certain events. I was smart enough to know to not say a word to the jury that I was in danger of electric shock therapy. I knew it was a tactic from the Navy because my psychiatrist was working directly with Captain Thor. I tried to sound as sane as possible even though I was testifying while inside a mental hospital.

After the call with the Jury, I asked to call my mom, I went into a separate room for privacy and pretended to call her after dialing 911, I told the operator as much as I could before nurses were screaming at me to get off the phone. I blocked the door with my body so they couldn’t get in so I could report to the operator that the Navy threatened me with electric shock therapy, my recruiter raped me, and the Navy was trying to silence me.

I then ran away with the phone waiting for police to arrive as I am running away from doctors with syringes, they were telling me to give them the phone or I would be restrained, drugged, and forcibly put asleep. Two officers arrive and I made the report. They told me they would file it. But they couldn’t help me because I am still on active duty and government property. After speaking to the police, the doctors gave me a choice, shot or pill. I chose the pill and knocked out.

The jury found enough evidence and it went to trial, when the Navy and Captain Thor found out the news, they agreed to send me on an immediate flight home from the hospital if I agreed to sign discharge papers stating I had borderline personality disorder and that was why I was medically separating. My psychiatrist told me “I can’t diagnose you with PTSD because the Navy doesn’t want to get sued. Your fastest way home is a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. You already had a waiver for depression going into the Navy so you can’t separate from the Navy with that discharge.” I signed it because my mental health was deteriorating from the two months I had spent in the hospital.  During that time, I would scream at staff “What are my rights!” And asked repeatedly for a different psychiatrist. The hospital refused.

Later I was informed that if I had told the Jury about the electric shock therapy, it would’ve ended the trial because I wouldn’t have been “sound of mind” or mentally stable enough to withstand trial. The Navy tried to cover up the fuckery of a mess they created. And failed.

One month after discharge I tried killing myself with hypothermia in the Deschutes River.

Police found me with my families help by tracking my phone’s location. When the search and rescue team found me my body temperature was at 90 degrees. I went to another mental hospital and my family put me in Wilderness therapy. I was in wilderness therapy for a month and a half and failed it because I got pissed at the program and walked 20 miles in a random direction to go home. I started working with a therapist in bend for a year, then transferred to the program I am in now. I have been in therapy for about 5 years and counting. I turn 23 in August this year. Thank you Deschutes County YAT team for helping me battle my mental health issues and giving me hope.

To this day I still struggle with TMJ disorder, headaches, migraines, anxiety, depression, CPTSD, severe insomnia, flashbacks, nightmares, disassociation, paranoia, hypervigilance, nicotine addiction, and a history of multiple suicide attempts.

I also survive paycheck to paycheck and use Food stamps to keep a roof over my head.
I am an MST survivor, and I am the first woman in naval history as a recruiter abuse victim to have gone to basic training with an unrestricted report, The whole chain of command knew about my abuse, I would have weekly meetings with Captain Thor, he knew about my whole case and did yet did nothing to help change policies for recruits.

I have been seeking ways to ensure that the US military will never let this happen to another recruit, So I reached out to IG (Inspector General) office, which was suggested by Navy Recruiting command. In my initial conversations on their “hotline” I was told that they could do little to help me but that if I wanted to still make a report that I should sign an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) with them. This didn’t seem right, so I asked my civilian attorney to contact the investigator and find out why they were asking me to sign an NDA. My attorney was told by IG that completing the NDA was “optional” this turn of events did not give me any hope that IG or the US military would be willing to do anything to stop recruiter abuse or to even help me. The Navy continues to play games while recruits are suffering in silence.

I feel very isolated, I was unable to research recruiter abuse lawyers as they don’t exist. That makes me a whistleblower.

Dear United States Navy,

“SUCK MY FUCKING CLIT, Hooyah! WHERE IS YOUR HONOR, COURAGE, AND COMMITMENT?”

Sincerely, The real-life G.I Jane- Veteran Seaman Gunderson

 I am a spiritual witch and a hippy 🧿🌿🪬

I am also a licensed Massage Therapist and I am about to graduate with my AAS degree from Central Oregon Community College. I'm a proud Bobcat! I decided to become an LMT to work with trauma survivors and help them learn what safe, healing, and therapeutic touch is. I want to praise COCC massage program for helping me work through my own trauma with touch so I would be able to help other survivors like me. I learned how to guide others towards healing the mind, body, and spirit. 

There are days where I cannot provide bodywork when my anxiety is bad due to PTSD. On those days I give myself compassion and grace to take care of myself. 

I want to thank my 🌸Mental health team, family, friends, and my soulmate for getting me through tough times. 💜

Annette Gunderson- Lavender

Related links:

• Military Sexual Trauma (MST) and military recruiting abuse survivor seeks redress, Courage to Resist, September 20, 2023

• UPDATE: Interview with Lavender Gunderson: End Recruitment Abuse and Support MST Survivors, Courage to Resist, September 18, 2023

• “Navy recruiter sentenced for coercing Bend high school student” By Garrett Andrews, The Bulletin, Bend Oregon

• Dead Men Don't Rape Tik Tok video

• Spotify Playlist: Survivor - Account Name: Lavendar Leto / Songs that kept me alive. I suffer daily with PTSD, MST due to recruiter abuse. Survived retaliation @U.S Navy. My G.I Jane, me too movement.

 Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 26 June 2023 

Legislation Would Protect JROTC Recruits from Abuse, Forced Enrollment and Increase Oversight of Program

June 15, 2023 / Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) / Senate.gov - Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee, and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, introduced the Junior Reserve Officer Training (JROTC) Safety Act of 2023 to better protect JROTC recruits following reports of program instructors sexually assaulting and harassing high school students. The legislation would also increase oversight of the agencies charged with running the program and prohibit mandatory enrollment of students into the program. 

In December 2022, a New York Times investigation found that “dozens of schools have made the program mandatory or steered more than 75 percent of students in a single grade into the classes,” raising major concerns over the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Education’s (ED) oversight of the program. Earlier that year, another investigation found that at least 33 JROTC instructors have been charged in criminal cases involving sexual misconduct.

“The JROTC program is meant to show the next generation the best of what our nation’s military has to offer, not be a place where young people have to fear harassment or assault from their instructors,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren. “I’m glad to be partnering with Senators Sanders and Hirono to ensure accountability for schools that fail to report abuse in the program and increase oversight of our agencies in charge.”

“The reports of abuse, mistreatment, and compulsory enrollment in JROTC programs nationwide are deeply disturbing and must be addressed immediately,” said Senator Mazie Hirono. “JROTC students and their families should be able to trust that they will be safe and respected in the JROTC program, and this legislation will help ensure they can. I will continue working to ensure that the more than 500,000 students participating in JROTC programs across the country—and the students who follow—are safe and protected.”

Specifically, the JROTC Safety Act would mandate:

1. Accountability for Schools that Fail to Report Abuse: Schools failing to report allegations of sexual assault and harassment allowed those instructors to stay in place and hurt other students. DoD must suspend any JROTC unit that fails to notify DoD and ED of allegations that an instructor sexually harassed or assaulted a JROTC student within 48 hours after the school received the allegation.

2. Enhanced Reporting: Many survivors of sexual assault are afraid to come forward to report abuse. DoD must conduct climate surveys to better understand and address discrimination in JROTC programs;

3. Clear Processes to Report Civil Rights Violations: There is not a clear and consistent understanding of JROTC students’ rights. DoD must certify that any school with a JROTC program has a process for students to report Title IX violations and training for students on sexual assault and harassment prevention and reporting;

4. Standardized Annual Reports on Abuse: Until recent investigations, there has been no reporting to Congress or the public about known violations of students’ rights. DoD and ED must submit annual reports on discrimination and harassment in JROTC programs and the programs’ policies and compliance on preventing harassment and discrimination;

5. An End to Mandatory Enrollment in JROTC: Investigations revealed schools have forced students to participate in JROTC. Under this bill, schools may not enroll students without informed consent and DoD must suspend units forcing students into JROTC; and

6. Increased Oversight of Agency Efforts to Prevent Abuse: The Government Accountability Office must submit a report to Congress on the bill’s implementation and DoD and ED efforts to prevent sexual violence in JROTC.

The legislation is endorsed by Protect Our Defenders, the National Women’s Law Center, and the Service Women’s Action Network.

“Protect Our Defenders is committed to the safety and support of all servicemembers and those who look to serve our nation,” said Josh Connolly, Protect Our Defenders (POD) Senior Vice President, former Chief of Staff for Rep. Jackie Speier. “It is deeply troubling but not surprising to see the findings of hundreds of allegations of abuse and harassment. We must demand accountability and change as many of our future leaders start with JROTC. POD supports bicameral efforts to prevent future abuses under the JROTC Safety Act of 2023 and thanks Senator Warren for her work on this important legislation.”

“Sexual abuse and other forms of discrimination continue to be swept under the rug in Junior ROTC programs which perpetuates a harmful culture among the next generation of military leaders, well beyond ROTC,” said Emily Martin, NWLC’s Vice President for Education & Workplace Justice. “We’re glad Senator Warren is intervening with a bill that provides protections against discrimination and harassment, creates transparency and accountability at Junior ROTC programs, and requires the relevant government agencies to develop best practices for preventing and responding to harassment. The National Women’s Law Center is proud to support this bill and will continue to fight all forms of harassment in our schools and workplaces.”

“This bill is absolutely essential to making sure the Defense and Education Departments are helping to protect young students from being assaulted by instructors wearing the uniforms of our armed forces,” said Lorry Fenner (Colonel, USAF, Retired), Service Women's Action Network Director of Government Relations. “These instructors must be held accountable.”

As Chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, Senator Warren has led extensive oversight efforts to hold the Department of Defense and the Department of Education accountable for their management of the JROTC program.

1. In May 2023, Senators Warren and Hirono and Representatives Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.), Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), and Chrissy M. Houlahan (D-Pa.), applauded the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for launching a review of the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) program.

2. On March 15, 2023, chairing her first hearing of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) highlighted the importance of addressing existing failures in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC).

3. In February 2023, Senators Warren, Hirono, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), sent a letter to the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Education (ED) amid reports of students being forced to join the JROTC program.

4. On September 23, 2022, during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Warren questioned top DoD personnel officials on disturbing reports of widespread patterns of sexual misconduct by instructors in the JROTC program, where they admitted DoD’s lack of adequate oversight to prevent sexual misconduct by instructors and ensure the safety of students.

5. On September 21, 2022, Senator Warren, along with Senators Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Hirono (D-Hawaii), opened an investigation into the JROTC program, following  reports of widespread patterns of sexual misconduct by instructors in the program.

Source: https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senators-warren-sanders-hirono-introduce-junior-reserve-officer-training-safety-act

Pat Alviso / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 08 May 2023

May 8. 2023 / Pat Alviso / Peace Club Alliance - What to do when you are rained out of a parade? That was the dilemma Rachel Bruhnke and Pat Alviso, two high school peace club sponsors from the Los Angeles area, faced when 15 very disappointed students were told that they would have to reschedule their plans to march in the upcoming MLK Parade because the expected heavy rains meant that nobody would be gathering on the sidewalks to see them. Besides, they were told, their carefully painted signs would get ruined anyway. Undaunted, Rachel, who has a Peace & Planet Club at POLA HS in San Pedro, and a few of her stalwart students walked the whole parade route in the pouring rain anyway! (See pic). Now that’s youth activism at its finest.

Challenged, Pat and her peace club at Tracy HS in Cerritos, CA wanted a do-over.  Rachel suggested we choose the anniversary of Dr. King’s death since, “That’s the day peace was murdered,” she declared. And so, the idea for a unique and more interactive event was born. Rachel’s Peace & Planet Club, Pat’s Tracy HS peace club and students from Jefferson HS in Los Angeles under the leadership of community sponsor Jabar Stroud, made plans for the day. They couldn’t choose April 4th since school was in session on the actual anniversary of Dr. King’s death, so they picked the next closest date-the Saturday before the anniversary of Dr. King’s death. Local community organizations jumped on board with the idea, and with the support from the Long Beach Area Peace Network’s militarism committee and the Long Beach Chapter of Gray Panthers- pitched in for what they hoped would be both meaningful and memorable way for students to commemorate the work of the great peace and justice leader. The Peace and Planet students prepared to read parts of Dr. King’s Riverside Speech, also known as the Beyond Vietnam Speech. Students learned that Dr. King’s gave this historically important speech that showed how the issues of war, poverty and racism are inter-connected. The Peace Club students at Tracy were to share how the US military is a major contributor to climate change by sharing statistics on how the US military is the largest user of fossil fuels in the country.

Still worried about the non-stop rain that month, April 1st turned out to be a perfectly sunny day MLK Park. Students and a few onlookers gathered at picnic tables, and, after a nice lunch, everyone participated in an icebreaker led by students from Jefferson HS. ( see pic). That was followed by a discussion on gun violence. Then Alma, from the California Conservation Corps (see pic) shared how the CCC is a great alternative to military service because they really do help the planet and can provide the same thing as military recruiters promise students -that is, housing, a monthly income with only a high school diploma requirement, medical insurance, travel and even a uniform! The students had many questions for Alma. 

Students also learned that day about the Poor People’s Campaign and they wrote their own peace budget (see pics). The day ended with all the students holding their signs and gathering around the Long Beach art landmark, a statue of Dr. King statue at the entrance to the park. In an amazing feat, they commemorated the occasion with a tribute to Dr. King by managing to drape a flower lei around his neck. The statue was about 20 feet off the ground. “It was a such a meaningful event that none of us will ever forget”, said Tracy HS peace club president Eva Rodriguez. 

 Sam Biddle / Parent Category: NNOMY / Articles 17 April 2023

April 16 2023 / Sam Biddle / The Intercept_ - The Georgia Army National Guard plans to combine two deeply controversial practices — military recruiting at schools and location-based phone surveillance — to persuade teens to enlist, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept.

The federal contract materials outline plans by the Georgia Army National Guard to geofence 67 different public high schools throughout the state, targeting phones found within a one-mile boundary of their campuses with recruiting advertisements “with the intent of generating qualified leads of potential applicants for enlistment while also raising awareness of the Georgia Army National Guard.” Geofencing refers generally to the practice of drawing a virtual border around a real-world area and is often used in the context of surveillance-based advertising as well as more traditional law enforcement and intelligence surveillance. The Department of Defense expects interested vendors to deliver a minimum of 3.5 million ad views and 250,000 clicks, according to the contract paperwork.

While the deadline for vendors attempting to win the contract was the end of this past February, no public winner has been announced.

The ad campaign will make use of a variety of surveillance advertising techniques, including capturing the unique device IDs of student phones, tracking pixels, and IP address tracking. It will also plaster recruiting solicitations across Instagram, Snapchat, streaming television, and music apps. The documents note that “TikTok is banned for official DOD use (to include advertising),” owing to allegations that the app is a manipulative, dangerous conduit for hypothetical Chinese government propaganda.

The Georgia Army National Guard did not respond to a request for comment.

While the planned campaign appears primarily aimed at persuading high school students to sign up, the Guard is also asking potential vendors to also target “parents or centers of influence (i.e. coaches, school counselors, etc.)” with recruiting ads. The campaign plans not only call for broadcasting recruitment ads to kids at school, but also for pro-Guard ads to follow these students around as they continue using the internet and other apps, a practice known as retargeting. And while the digital campaign may begin within the confines of the classroom, it won’t remain there: One procurement document states the Guard is interested in “retargeting to high school students after school hours when they are at home,” as well as “after school hours. … This will allow us to capture potential leads while at after-school events.”

“Location based tracking is not legitimate. It’s largely based on the collecting of people’s location data that they’re not aware of and haven’t given meaningful permission for.”

Although it’s possible that children caught in the geofence might have encountered a recruiter anyway — the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act mandated providing military recruiters with students’ contact information — critics of the plan say the use of geolocational data is an inherently invasive act. “Location based tracking is not legitimate,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s largely based on the collecting of people’s location data that they’re not aware of and haven’t given meaningful permission for.” The complex technology underpinning a practice like geofencing can obscure what it’s really accomplishing, argues Benjamin Lynde, an attorney with the ACLU of Georgia. “I think we have to start putting electronic surveillance in the context of what we would accept if it weren’t electronic,” Lynde told The Intercept. “If there were military recruiters taking pictures of students and trying to identify them that way, parents wouldn’t think that conduct is acceptable.” Lynde added that the ACLU of Georgia did not believe there were any state laws constraining geofence surveillance.

The sale and use of location data is largely uncontrolled in the United States, and the legal and regulatory vacuum has created an unscrupulous cottage industry of brokers and analytics firms that turn our phones’ GPS pings into a commodity. The practice has allowed for a variety of applications, including geofence warrants that compel companies like Google to give police a list of every device within a targeted area at a given time. Last year, The Intercept reported on a closed-door technology demo in which a private surveillance firm geofenced the National Security Agency and CIA headquarters to track who came and went.

Although critics of geofencing point to the practice’s invasiveness, they also argue that the inherent messiness of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals means that the results are prone to inaccuracy. “This creates the possibility of both false positives and false negatives,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote earlier this year in a Supreme Court amicus brief opposing geofence warrants served to Google. “People could be implicated for a crime when they were nowhere near the scene, or the actual perpetrator might not be included at all in the data Google provides to police.”

It’s doubtful that potential vendors for the Georgia Guard have data accurate enough to avoid targeting kids under 17, according to Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely tracks the surveillance advertising sector. “It would also sweep up plenty of families with young kids who gave them phones before they turned 16 and who were using networks that had location-targetable ads,” he explained in a message to The Intercept. “Very, very few advertising networks track the age of kids under 18. It’s one giant bucket.”

In-school recruiting been hotly debated for decades, both defended as a necessary means of maintaining an all-volunteer military and condemned as a coercive practice that exploits the immaturity of young students. While the state’s plan specifies targeting only high school juniors and seniors ages 17 and above, demographic ad targeting is known to be error prone, and experts told The Intercept it’s possible the recruiting messages could reach the phones of younger children. “Generally, commercial databases aren’t known for their high levels of accuracy,” explained the ACLU’s Stanley. “If you have some incorrect ages in there, it’s really not a big deal [to the broker].” The accuracy of demographic targeting aside, there’s also a problem of geographic reality: “There are middle schools within a mile of those high schools,” according to Lynde of the ACLU of Georgia. “There’s no way there can be a specific delineation of who they’re targeting in that geofence.”

Indeed, dozens of the schools pegged for geotargeting have middle schools, elementary schools, parks, churches, and other sites where children may congregate within a mile radius, according to Google Maps. A geofence containing Hillgrove High School in Powder Springs, Georgia, would also snare phone-toting students at Still Elementary School and Lovinggood Middle School, the latter a mere thousand feet away. A mile-radius around Collins Hill High School in Suwanee, Georgia, would also include the Walnut Grove Elementary School, along with the nearby Oak Meadow Montessori School, a community swim club, a public park, and an aquatic center. Lynde, who himself enlisted with the Georgia National Guard in 2005, added that he’s concerned beaming recruiting ads directly to kids’ phones “could be a means to bypass parental involvement in the recruiting process,” allowing the state to circumvent the scrutiny adults might bring to traditional military recruiting methods like brochures and phone calls to a child’s house. “Parents should be involved from the onset.”

Source: https://theintercept.com/2023/04/16/georgia-army-national-guard-location-tracking-high-school/

 Ruben Abrahams Brosbe / Parent Category: NNOMY / Articles / 03 April 2023

The branches of the U.S. military have long seen high schools as optimal recruiting grounds. Some veterans are beginning to fight the propaganda and tell students the truth about military service.

April 3, 2023 / Ruben Abrahams Brosbe / Yes! Magazine - March 20 marked the 20th anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The war took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, with some estimates of Iraqi casualties putting the number at over 1 million. More than 4,600 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq during and after the invasion, and thousands more have died by suicide. 

Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the U.S. military is facing its worst recruitment crisis since the end of the Vietnam War. The Defense Department’s budget proposal for 2024 outlines a plan for the military to slightly cut back on its ranks, but to reach its projected numbers, it will still need to embark on a heavy recruitment push. Across the country, anti-war veterans and their allies are working together in an effort to stop the U.S. military from reaching its goal.

We Are Not Your Soldiers is a project of New York City-based nonprofit World Can’t Wait. The organization sends military veterans into schools to share honest stories of the harm they have caused and suffered. In doing so, they hope to prevent young people from signing up. 

“I wish I had somebody who told me when I was young,” says Miles Megaciph, who was stationed in Cuba and Okinawa with the U.S. Marine Corps from 1992 to 1996. “The experiences I’ve lived, as painful as they are, and as much as I don’t like to relive them, are valuable to help future adults not live those experiences,” Megaciph told me.

“We wanted to get to the people who were going to be the next recruits,” says Debra Sweet, the executive director of World Can’t Wait. When We Are Not Your Soldiers launched in 2008, the experience was often intense for veterans. “They were all fresh out of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Sweet remembers. “It was very raw, it was very hard. [It was] really hard for them to go talk to people in public about what had happened. And we learned a lot about PTSD, up close and personal, and how it was affecting people.”

Since then, over 50 veterans have participated in We Are Not Your Soldiers. Currently, the project relies on a group of nine veterans, who receive a stipend of $125 for each visit. Teachers affiliated with World Can’t Wait also offer curricular support to veterans so they can connect their stories to class lessons.

I’m trying to respect these kids by telling them the truth that other people are not telling them.

Joy Damiani

Sarah Gil, a school teacher at the City-As-School, a transfer high school in New York City, has brought veterans from We Are Not Your Soldiers to her classroom to speak to students in classes focused on just war, race and racism, economics, and moral responsibility. “They share their vulnerability, and it’s more than I could ever do with any of my lessons,” Gil says of the veterans’ visits.

Joy Damiani, an Iraq War veteran who served six years in the U.S. Army, has learned how to use that vulnerability more selectively over time. “I used to go into the classroom and spend a lot of time talking,” Damiani says. “[I was] trying to scare kids into not joining the military, because I was still so freshly traumatized from that.” More recently, Damiani says her role is less about trying to scare young people and instead providing an alternative perspective. “I’m trying to respect these kids by telling them the truth that other people are not telling them. I’m trying to give them something I didn’t have, which was somebody to bring the real talk right into my face where I needed it.” 

“Usually, the students don’t have any idea of what it’s actually like,” Megaciph says. “Their narrative really comes from television and comes from the national narrative. ‘Thank you. Thank you for your service. It’s an honor to be a member of the military. Travel the world’ stuff.” While most students have a generally positive view of the military, Megaciph has noticed a shift in recent years. “I think in the past two years, maybe since the pandemic, there’s been a lot more talk about mental health in our country. And so I think in the past two years, I’ve seen more students aware of the trauma that veterans have.”

Susan Cushman is a professor at Nassau Community College and Adelphi University on Long Island, where military recruiters have a heavy presence, particularly on the Nassau campus. She hosts veterans from We Are Not Your Soldiers to help her students “think about alternative ways to achieve an education and get a pension and get a job and travel, without feeling the only option is to join the military.”

In order to counter both the narrative and incentives that military recruiters offer young people, veterans try to share the truth about traumatic personal experiences as well as practical information.

“It’s very meaningful to hear from a veteran that when you enlist, that you are the property—literally are seen as the property—of the U.S. government,” Gil says. Damiani works to put the seemingly attractive military salary and benefits in context for students. “Considering you’re on duty 24 hours a day or on call 24 hours a day, you’ve sold them your body, mind, and soul, essentially. You might not get it back.” 

Megaciph also tries to place the role of the military in the context of broader social issues that he knows students care about, including police violence and climate change.

“The U.S. military is the global police, so I like to put that in the students’ head that the way that the police treat Black and Brown and poor people in this country is the way that the military treats people around the rest of the world,” he says. He also tells students that the U.S. military is the largest single contributor of greenhouse emissions in the world. 

Ultimately, stories told by veterans like Megaciph and Damiani can be an effective tool to disrupt the mainstream narrative about militarism. But is it enough?

Rick Jahnkow is a steering committee member and an administrative staff volunteer and organizer at the nonprofit National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY). “Simply having veterans doesn’t take into account the way that military recruiters have been trained to convince young people to want to go in the military,” Jahnkow says. “The recruiters have been trained to use basically psychological methods to turn people around if they’re being reluctant to enlist, and if a recruiter knows that a veteran has visited the same class, they have ways to negate that.” 

In addition to the military’s preparedness for counter-recruitment, there’s also the issue of simple math. The Pentagon has a multibillion-dollar budget for recruiting alone. By contrast, We Are Not Your Soldiers has an annual budget of $25,000. Meanwhile, Megaciph, Damiani, and the seven other volunteers are up against a much larger body of veterans who generally support military recruitment. According to a 2019 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 81% of post-9/11 veterans would advise a young person to join the military. 

With these challenges in mind, NNOMY produced a video called “Before You Enlist!” The 16-minute video seeks to lay out a case against military service that preempts the military’s psychological recruitment tactics. With veteran stories and statistics, the video debunks perks, such as “free education” and job training, that the military uses to appeal to potential recruits. The video explains that college benefits are not guaranteed and a “general” discharge can completely disqualify a veteran from receiving benefits. Furthermore, a college education paid by the U.S. military still bears a cost, even if it is not financial. As Matt Stys, a U.S. Army veteran featured in the video, says, “You might not be paying monetarily, but you’re paying with your body, you’re paying with your soul, you’re paying with your mind.” Other veterans share stories of struggling to find meaningful, well-compensated work after their service. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics figure cited in the video, unemployment for young veterans aged 25 to 34 was 42% higher than non-veterans of the same age.

The video also offers a way to bring this message into a greater number of classrooms given the limited number of veterans who are able to make classroom visits. Jahnkow also describes the video as a training tool to develop students’ critical thinking skills so they will be prepared to handle recruitment conversations themselves.

Also central to the video’s message is an explanation of the idea of the “economic draft” or “poverty draft.” The video ends by directing viewers to Peaceful Career Alternatives. Jahnkow and others explain that understanding the economic constraints of young people and offering alternative pathways is essential to counter recruitment efforts.

“I feel like empathizing with them is the first step,” Damiani says. “Acknowledging that right now they don’t have a lot of choices and the military offers a lot of at least money. It seems to them to be a lot. A $10,000 signing bonus sounds like a shitload of money to a teenager.” 

Transforming the pre-K-12 education system is an important component of countering recruitment drives. The ways in which students are filtered and tracked into remedial courses starting from an early age has a limiting effect on their post-secondary options. Students who have been excluded from higher-level courses and the college and career pathways that accompany them become ripe targets for military recruiters. Other resources educators can tap into include texts like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and the Zinn Education Project, which present U.S. history with a more honest context.

Aside from creating more opportunities for poor and working-class students, targeting policy changes at the school and district level to protect students from recruitment is another important tactic. Jahnkow cites victories by the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities’ Education Not Arms campaigns to limit recruitment activity at schools that other communities could replicate. 

At the same time, the curriculum itself has a role to play. Currently, the standard school curricula often valorizes war and soldiers, while leaving out the U.S. military’s historical role in genocide and colonization. “You know, the Department of the Army was started for clearing Natives off their land and eradicating them, and that still goes on today,” Megaciph says, referring to the original Department of War established in 1789. 

Lastly, veterans and organizers like Jahnkow say there is an urgent need to build up the capacity of anti-war, anti-recruitment organizing. Damiani says that includes “finding ways to de-stigmatize sharing the dark side of the military so that more veterans, when they get out, feel safe and comfortable talking about the real shit rather than continuing to glamorize it.” 

But growing the pool of veterans—and starting other counter-recruitment strategies—will take money. Counter-recruitment organizing efforts are severely underfunded, Jahnkow says. At the same time, many counter-recruitment and anti-war organizations are being outmaneuvered by the military in digital and social media spaces. This is partly an issue of funding, but Jahnkow adds that the volunteer base for anti-war organizations also skews older. Fighting recruitment online more effectively will require more younger volunteers with the skill set to use Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms in ways the counter-recruitment movement currently does not.

Meanwhile, Jahnkow believes that in today’s poor recruiting environment, the military will “pull out all the stops” in both digital and personal recruitment. 

“I think it’s super trippy, that there are children who are old enough to be in the military and being deployed to Iraq, who were not born when the war started. That is something that is just devastating and tragic to me,” Damiani says. “It fuels my fire to keep talking to the kids, because they need to know.”

Source: https://www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2023/04/03/military-recruitment-veterans-push-back

 Lolita C. Baldor / Parent Category: NNOMY / Articles 21 March 2023

March 5, 2023 / Lolita C. Baldor / AP News -  Army recruiters struggling to meet enlistment goals say one of their biggest hurdles is getting into high schools, where they can meet students one on one. But they received a recent boost from a recruiting advocate whom school leaders couldn’t turn away: the secretary of the Army.

During three days of back-to-back meetings across Chicago last month, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth spoke with students, school leaders, college heads, recruiters and an array of young people involved in ROTC or junior ROTC programs. Again and again, she asked, what can the Army do to better reach young people and sell itself as a good career choice.

In blunt sessions, recruiting leaders told her they need more and better access to high school students. But they also said the atmosphere can at times be unfriendly — or worse — with school leaders, many of whom are skeptical that the Army offers a good career option for their students. “I’m going to use the word hostile,” one recruiter told her. “There’s no other word to use.”

It’s not unusual for the Army’s top civilian to travel the country, pitching the Army message and checking in on recruiting progress. But the Chicago trip came on the heels of the Army’s worst recruiting year in recent history, when it fell 25% short of its 60,000 enlistment goal. It’s up to Wormuth and other Army leaders to find creative new ways to attract recruits and ensure that the service has the troops it needs to help defend the nation.

All the military services are strugging to compete for young people in a tight job market where private companies are often willing to provide better pay and benefits. Two years of the coronavirus pandemic shut down recruiters’ access to public events and schools where they could find prospects. And, according to estimates, just 23% of young people can meet the military’s fitness, educational and moral requirements, with many disqualified for reasons ranging from medical issues to criminal records and tattoos.

Army leaders say their surveys show that young people don’t see the Army as a prime career choice, often because they don’t want to die or get injured, deal with the stress of military life or put their lives on hold.

What Wormuth heard in her Chicago sessions was a litany of challenges, from the issue of school access and competition with colleges to confusing Army websites, limited social media and a general lack of public knowledge about the jobs and opportunities that military service can provide.

In a meeting with Pedro Martinez, the chief executive for Chicago’s public schools, Wormuth noted the recruiters’ frustrations and she pressed for answers on how to fix things.

Martinez agreed that when recruiters try to work with individual schools, and a new recruiter comes in or a counselor leaves, “there’s not always a warm handoff.” He suggested working with the central district office instead.

Swiveling to Lt. Col. Shane Doolan, the recruiting battalion commander for Chicago, Wormuth asked if the team deals well with the central office.

“No, we really don’t have a relationship. And that’s what we’re working on here,” Doolan replied, adding that two years of COVID-19 restrictions hampered those efforts. He also said recruiters found a lack of understanding about the Army.

Doolan and other recruiters told Wormuth that they face resistance from teachers’ unions and school board members who don’t see the value in offering students the military as a career option. In some cases, school officials view the military through a post-Vietnam era lens.

Martinez and other school officials acknowledged there is a knowledge gap, but added that for security reasons, principals and counselors are cautious about who gets access to their schools and students.

They also warned that a recruiter who is good at speaking to students may not be as prepared to deal with school leaders. Recruiters, they said, must be able to explain the benefits of military service to those who are gatekeepers to the students.

High school access isn’t the only hurdle.

Speaking with college leaders, Wormuth stressed that the Army should not be viewed as their competitor for young people.

“The Army is facing a recruiting challenge. That’s what brought me here,” Wormuth told a large group of college presidents and leaders at the University of Illinois Chicago. But, she added, “it doesn’t have to be a choice for kids between the Army and college. Some kids benefit from a little time doing something else.”

In some cases, she said, soldiers return to college after serving, or while continuing to serve, and are better prepared to be good students.

Students offered their own views.

In small sessions with members of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) and the junior ROTC, students laid bare the gaps the Army must bridge to attract others in their generation. They said young people don’t know the benefits offered by Army service, which include a wide array of career choices or free college tuition. They said students have little exposure to service members and that for every positive mention of the military or the Army online, there are five negative ones.

Gathered around tables and in their uniforms, they spoke glowingly about their ROTC experiences: the camaraderie, the support, the leadership skills they get and the confidence they build.

But all too often, they said, their friends question their choices, and, as one said, “assume I’m going to war.” Some noted that at times their parents are reluctant and had concerns about their safety.

In a crowded auditorium at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, Wormuth came face to face with those perceptions. Young students peppered her with questions about sexual assaults in the Army, homeless veterans, and the use of the military during racial unrest after the police killing of George Floyd.

Flying home after three days jammed with such sessions, Wormuth said the questions from the Whitney Young students, along with similar issues raised in other meetings, reinforce the need for the military to solve some it its more difficult problems.

“They asked about sexual harassment. They asked about, are they going to be safe? They asked about barracks, in addition to wanting to know what the benefits are,” Wormuth said. “That, to me, underscores the importance of us finding ways to solve those problems. Those are real issues and the market research we’ve done speaks to that.”

She said that she and Gen. James McConville, the Army chief of staff, realize it will take time to fix the recruiting shortfall.

“I don’t think we’re going to build back our recruiting numbers to the level that Gen. McConville and I would feel comfortable with in one year,” she said.

Maj. Gen. Johnny Davis, head of Army Recruiting Command, said some new incentive programs are already working and enlistment numbers for recent months are higher than last year.

Army leaders are pinning their hopes on a new advertising campaign that will launch this week and bring back a tried and true Army slogan from the 1980s: “Be all you that can be.”

In the Whitney Young auditorium, Wormuth said the slogan speaks to the variety of careers the Army offers.

“If coding is your thing, we have a place for you in the Army,” she told the students. “If jumping out of planes or helicopters is your thing, or if you’d rather fly them, you can become an aviator or go airborne in the United States Army. If you want to speak different languages and travel the world, you could become a linguist or a foreign country expert in the army. ”

And, she added, if hip hop is their passion, they can become an Army rapper, since two vocalists just joined the Army band of rappers.

“People remember people who take risks and try to do something in service of something bigger than themselves,” she told the classes. “People remember those who choose to be all that they could be.”

Source: https://apnews.com/article/army-recruiting-challenges-christine-wormuth-schools-ad7992e3d744533e76d28eccffa7eb4d

 Alex Ruppenthal / Parent Category: NNOMY / Articles 20 March 2023

Jan 5, 2023 / Alex Ruppenthal / Chicago Sun Times - Freshman enrollment in a controversial military-run training program plummeted this academic year at some Chicago high schools after district leaders cracked down on schools that were effectively forcing first-year students to participate, according to a report from the district’s watchdog released Thursday.

Chicago Public Schools pledged last spring to end automatic enrollment in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, a daily class on military science and leadership taught by retired military officers.

The move followed an investigation by the district’s Office of Inspector General, which found that nearly all freshmen at some South and West Side schools were placed in the program “without any choice in the matter,” often as a substitute for gym. Some principals told the OIG they lacked the money to hire enough physical education teachers to offer PE to all students.

The OIG probe was prompted by a Chalkbeat investigation in 2021 that revealed that hundreds of students at 10 predominantly Black and Latino high schools were being enrolled in JROTC by default. The practice drew backlash from some parents who described it as a way of shepherding teens from under-resourced schools toward military careers and away from other opportunities.

In its annual report, the OIG found freshman enrollment in JROTC had decreased “dramatically” at eight schools where automatic freshman enrollment was most widespread. Enrollment fell from 639 to 211 between the 2020-21 school year and the current school year.

One principal said this is the first year in which freshmen can decide between physical education or JROTC.

“The majority chose gym,” said the principal, whom the OIG did not name.

Another new CPS policy announced last school year requires every high school to offer physical education to all students. Five schools told the OIG their JROTC enrollment declined after they added a physical education teacher or class.

Decreasing enrollment is certain to worry military leaders, especially as the Army fails to hit recruitment goals. Although JROTC participants are not required to serve, the military relies on the program to introduce service careers to roughly 550,000 students nationwide each year. The Army found that students at high schools with Army JROTC programs are more than twice as likely to enlist after graduation.

In Chicago, parental written consent is now required before students can participate in JROTC.

“That has helped,” said Wiley Johnson, former chair of the local school council at King College Prep, which used to enroll all freshmen in JROTC. “It has made a huge difference.”

The OIG’s new report shows the decline in freshman enrollment has been steep at several schools, dropping from between 90% and 100% in 2020-21 to less than 20% this school year.

One school that previously enrolled 95% of freshmen in JROTC enrolled only a slightly lower percentage this year, according to the OIG. CPS told the OIG it would investigate the situation at the school, identified by WBEZ as Michele Clark Academic Prep Magnet High School in Austin.

Messages to Clark’s principal were not immediately returned.

Source: https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2023/1/5/23539882/freshman-jrotc-enrollment-plunges-after-overhaul-by-chicago-public-schools

 OpenAI artificial intelligence engine /  Parent Category: NNOMY  / Articles 05 March 2023 05 March 2023 

JROTC stands for Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, a program that is designed to provide high school students with leadership skills and prepare them for a possible future career in the military. While some people support JROTC, others are opposed to it for various reasons.

One of the primary reasons why people oppose JROTC is because they believe that it glorifies war and violence. They argue that the program encourages young people to view military service as the only viable career option, rather than pursuing other paths such as higher education or vocational training.

Others object to JROTC because they believe that it promotes militarism and nationalism. They argue that the program instills a sense of blind patriotism in young people, rather than fostering critical thinking skills and independent thought.