Anna Attie / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 26 December 2020 

Anna Attie / In These Times - When James Gard­ner got injured play­ing bas­ket­ball as a DePaul Uni­ver­si­ty fresh­man, he lost his finan­cial aid pack­age and was dropped from his class­es. To stay in school, he took out a $10,000 loan.

Soon, Gard­ner (a pseu­do­nym request­ed in fear of reprisal) and his fam­i­ly real­ized they couldn’t afford the uni­ver­si­ty. Instead, he trans­ferred to a pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty out­side Chica­go and enrolled in the Reserve Offi­cer Train­ing Corps (ROTC) of the Air Force. The mil­i­tary paid for his entire col­lege edu­ca­tion — on the con­di­tion he serve at least four years after graduation.

Gard­ner is a mem­ber of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca (DSA) and says the mil­i­tary is geared toward ​“resource extrac­tion and resource allo­ca­tion.” When DSA col­leagues learn about his mil­i­tary back­ground, he says there is a ​“lit­tle bit of a gasp.”

“Would I be in the same predica­ment,” he won­ders, ​“if col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty were tuition-free? Would I have gone through ROTC? I don’t know.”

Gardner’s sit­u­a­tion isn’t unique. Amer­i­cans owe more than $1.67 tril­lion in stu­dent debt (Source: adjusted for 11/2022 now $1.768 trillion) , and the cost of col­lege has increased by more than 25% in the past 10 years. Accord­ing to a 2017 poll by the Depart­ment of Defense, pay­ing for edu­ca­tion is the top rea­son young peo­ple con­sid­er enlist­ing. In 2019, the Army cred­it­ed the stu­dent debt cri­sis with help­ing it sur­pass its recruit­ment goals.

'I’m guessing about 60% of people wouldn’t join the military if they already had their education paid for,' says Matt Drennan, who just began his first year at the Virginia Military Institute.

“One of the nation­al crises right now is stu­dent loans,” Maj. Gen. Frank Muth, head of Army Recruit­ing Com­mand, said in 2019. While wars in the Mid­dle East were ​“not real­ly part of the dis­cus­sion” dur­ing his vis­its to recruit­ing sta­tions, he said edu­ca­tion­al ben­e­fits were a strong sell­ing point.

The pull of the mil­i­tary has even with­stood Covid-19. Though the pan­dem­ic has hin­dered mil­i­tary enroll­ment because of the lack of in-per­son sites, Army recruiters are con­fi­dent they will meet their recruit­ment and reten­tion goals, and are mak­ing stu­dent loan pay­ments cen­tral to their efforts. Mil­i­tary ben­e­fits include ROTC schol­ar­ships, loan repay­ment pro­grams and the GI Bill.

“I’m guess­ing about 60% of peo­ple wouldn’t join the mil­i­tary if they already had their edu­ca­tion paid for,” says Matt Dren­nan, who just began his first year at the Vir­ginia Mil­i­tary Insti­tute. While col­lege mon­ey wasn’t Drennan’s only moti­va­tor, he says join­ing the mil­i­tary will help him ​“not be a bur­den” on his par­ents. His father still has his own stu­dent debt to pay.

The stu­dent debt cri­sis dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly affects peo­ple of col­or, with Black women owing more than any oth­er demo­graph­ic. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, Black women are heav­i­ly over­rep­re­sent­ed in the mil­i­tary. In 2018, Black women account­ed for almost 30% of all active-duty women, despite com­pris­ing only 13.7% of U.S. women.

Gard­ner acknowl­edges that many Black fam­i­lies, like his own, have a mil­i­tary lega­cy. But over­all, he says, the answer to why Black peo­ple are over­rep­re­sent­ed in the mil­i­tary is ​“the same rea­son why any­one else goes: It’s the economics.”

Chil­dren are often pushed toward the mil­i­tary long before they con­sid­er col­lege appli­ca­tions or grad­u­ate high school. In fact, 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act requires pub­lic schools to give mil­i­tary recruiters unfet­tered access to stu­dents. Recruiters then dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly tar­get schools in poor and work­ing-class neighborhoods.

Nika Lofton, now a junior at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, grad­u­at­ed in 2018 from Cen­tral High School in Macon, Ga. She remem­bers mil­i­tary recruiters as ear­ly as mid­dle school. ​“Any time I ever heard any­one talk about [why they were join­ing the mil­i­tary], it was … free col­lege,” Lofton says, not ​“being real­ly pas­sion­ate about going to the military.”

At Lofton’s school, mil­i­tary involve­ment fell along col­or lines with few (if any) white stu­dents join­ing the Army’s Junior ROTC pro­gram for teens. Cen­tral High School is almost 90% Black and 99% of stu­dents are from poor families.

Junior ROTC pro­grams are espe­cial­ly com­mon in poor, major­i­ty-minor­i­ty school dis­tricts. And they have been expand­ing for decades. The Army Junior ROTC web­site boasts that around 40% of all the pro­grams are in ​“inner city schools, serv­ing a stu­dent pop­u­la­tion of 50% minorities.”

“These stu­dents are seen as dis­pos­able and easy to recruit,” says Asha Edwards, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois sopho­more who co-found­ed a chap­ter of the anti-war orga­ni­za­tion Dis­senters. She says anti-mil­i­tary orga­niz­ers must intro­duce alter­na­tives to the mil­i­tary and dis­suade youth involve­ment with ROTC pro­grams, which ​“prey on poor Black students.”

“If we divest from the Pen­ta­gon and the war indus­try,” Edwards says, ​“we could afford free college.”

Source: https://inthesetimes.com/article/student-debt-military-schools-recruitment-college-loans-education-race

 Fabiola Cardozo / Parent Category: NNOMY / Articles 14 December 2020

Fabiola Cardozo / NNOMY / español - Some elements make the popularity, frequency, and increased rate of the military enlistment of many young people possible. One of the most important is the influence they receive from their environment on the part of those people who act as counselors and teachers within the schools they attend, as well as from their parents or relatives at home. The normalization of militarization in American society leads us to think of military enlistment as a great option for young people’s futures. However, little is said about the real difficulties they will face. An adult who advises a teenager on military enlistment has naturalized war in a way that is not conducive to better decision-making on the part of young people, preventing the exploration of less violent alternatives. (See: http://peacefulcareers.org/index.html).

Within the school, some teachers and counselors receive encouragement from the Pentagon to influence and foster an interest in the military sector in young people. As we know, between students and teachers or counselors, there is an inherent power dynamic that gives educators almost unquestionable validity, leading to a dangerous influence. Likewise, the constant visits of military recruiters and the implementation of school programs that encourage entry into military service mean that young people are being permanently influenced by this idea. (See: https://nnomy.org/en/what-is-militarization/school-militarization.html).

Military cadet programs at schools like JROTC and Young Marines are always promoted as leadership programs. But is it a youth leadership program, or is it more of a strategy that is part of a grand plan to keep the war machine running where young people are the most vulnerable? Who is really in charge of these programs? Are young people able to decide autonomously? It is convenient to think about the influence that all these programs exert to promote military enlistment, coupled with a militaristic culture that is fostered within all the spaces in which young people live. Video games, movies, programs, TV series, and even music offer a glorified image of military life that is not exactly a true reflection of reality, making it possible for violent behavior to increase in children and young people.

While there are multiple factors that lead to violent actions, a growing body of literature shows a strong association between the perpetration of violence and the exposure to violence through the media. Studies demonstrating an association between exposure to violence in the media and real-life aggression and violence began appearing in the 1950s. Since then, various government agencies and organizations have examined the relationship. (See: https://www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/violence-media-entertainment.html).

We must also consider the few opportunities that are offered to the poorest and most marginalized communities, these being the target audience of military enlistment, where it is sold as an option or "the best option" to socially advance their lives. At times, counselors and professors advise young men to join the military if they lack the “good” grades necessary to qualify for scholarships that allow them to enter university, without giving them more information about other options.

The term “poverty draft” came about in the early 1980s to describe “the belief that the enlisted ranks of the military were made up of young people with limited economic opportunities,” Sojourners reports. Rocio Cordova, program coordinator for the Project on Youth and Non-military Opportunities, describes this phenomenon as a “draft-like system that pushes non-privileged people into enlisting because they lack access to jobs, income, and educational alternatives in their communities.” (See: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-military-targets-youth-for-recruitment).

With the promise of leaving poverty and all that it entails behind, many young people enter the military service. However, all the difficulties that arise—discrimination, bullying, and different expressions of violence—can trigger serious problems such as depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, among others.

Although adults in the active military service are reported to experience increased mental health risks, including stress, substance abuse, and suicide, there is evidence that military service for the youngest soldiers is consistently associated with health effects far worse than for those who are older. This suggests that military service is associated with disproportionately poor health for those in late adolescence. These negative outcomes for teen soldiers, coupled with significant evidence that the adolescent brain is not equipped to make accurate risk calculations, leads APHA to conclude entry into the military should be delayed until full adulthood. For these reasons, the American Public Health Association opposes military recruiting in public elementary and secondary schools. (See: https://www.apha.org/policies-and-advocacy/public-health-policy-statements/policy-database/2014/07/23/11/19/cessation-of-military-recruiting-in-public-elementary-and-secondary-schools). 

When thinking about military recruitment, it is necessary to reflect on and question the social influence that is exerted on young people. We must also offer more information about other possibilities for their professional and personal development, as well as create a culture that is strongly and actively critical of the militarization of American society.

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 Fabiola Cardozo / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 06 October 2020

Fabiola Cardozo / NNOMY /  español  - It’s widely recognized that the Covid-19 pandemic undoubtedly affects the economy and, as a result, also negatively affects healthcare, education, and culture. However, in the face of hard times like the ones we’ve experienced this year, national priorities are oriented through the policies implemented by political leaders.

A recent article by the Washington Post highlights how The Pentagon diverted taxpayer money originally meant for masks and cotton swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor.

"The Cares Act, which Congress passed earlier this year, gave the Pentagon money to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” But a few weeks later, the Defense Department began reshaping how it would award the money in a way that represented a major departure from Congress’s intent.

The payments were made even though U.S. health officials think major funding gaps in pandemic response still remain. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Senate testimony last week that states desperately need $6 billion to distribute vaccines to Americans early next year. Many U.S. hospitals still face a severe shortage of N95 masks. These are the types of problems that the money was originally intended to address."

What are the real needs of the population during the pandemic? Should the National Defense sector be a priority now? Questions like this lead us to examine some data.

These are the 2019 US Poverty Statistics published by the US Census in September 2020:

• The child Poverty Rate is 14.4%, therefore, about one in six children are in a poverty status.  This is a disturbing poverty statistic to many Americans because children are helpless to influence their living conditions.
  
  

• While the poverty rate for the population as a whole is 10.5% the rate varies greatly by race.  Blacks have the highest poverty rate at 18.8% and Non-Hispanic whites the lowest at 7.3%.  The Poverty rate for Blacks and Hispanics is more than double that of non-Hispanic Whites.
  
  

• Adults that work full time have a low Poverty Rate of 2.0%, which is not surprising.  The 2.3 million full time workers that are in poverty generally have low paying jobs, such as a minimum wage job paying $16,000 per year, and have two or more children thus pushing the family into poverty.   There are 42.9 million adults between the ages of 18 and 64 (working age) that are not working. They total 22% of working-age adults, but account for 61% of working-age adults in poverty.
  
  

• 14.4 million working-age adults have a disability which represents 7% of the workforce.  They have a Poverty Rate of 22.5%.  While this is a high rate of poverty it is less than the nonworking adult rate of 26.4%.
  
  

• The educational level attained by individuals has a dramatic impact on poverty.  23.7% of adults over 25 years old without a high school diploma are in poverty versus 3.9% for those with a college degree.

Covid-19 exacerbates other social crises and lays bare the inequalities that make children, seniors, Black people, immigrants, disabled, and people without access to education more vulnerable to poverty. This also means that they’re more likely to have a more intense experience navigating a humanitarian crisis that is characterized by the difficulty of accessing health care, a proper diet, and shelter as basic human rights. As it stands today, the landscape in the United States is defined by elevated unemployment rates, lower general income, and an increase in medical expenses, which makes paying rent difficult as a consequence, increasing the number of evictions.

"President Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum that provided $300 per week for unemployed workers. However, President Trump’s action was limited. This act required using FEMA funds and states had to opt-in to the program. The total amount of funds are limited to six weeks of benefits and some states have already run out of money under this program. This leaves unemployed workers only able to receive their state unemployment benefits, which range from around $300 - $500 per week. (Ver: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanguina/2020/09/23/next-stimulus-bill-needs-to-address-these-3-issues/#573b455c2769)

There are currently 7,44 million cases of Covid-19 in the United States and 210,000 deaths. Because this is a respiratory disease which propagates from person to person, masks and early detection through tests are an important line of defense. The interest of some in the business of war, in continuing to amass a large stockpile of resources, and to encourage the increase of the military industry, however, continues to grow.

“The $1 billion fund is just a fraction of the $3 trillion in emergency spending that Congress approved earlier this year to deal with the pandemic.

  

But in the months after the stimulus package was passed, the Pentagon changed how the money would be used. It decided to give defense contractors hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund, mostly for projects that have little to do with the coronavirus response. Defense Department lawyers quickly determined that the money could be used for defense production, a conclusion that Congress later disputed”. (Ver: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/09/22/covid-funds-pentagon/)

During the pandemic, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, has adamantly put forth the challenges we all face, as well as the needs we need to fulfill:

The pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of our world. It has laid bare risks we have ignored for decades: inadequate health systems; gaps in social protection; structural inequalities; environmental degradation; the climate crisis. The virus poses the greatest risk to the most vulnerable: those living in poverty, older people, and people with disabilities and pre-existing conditions.

(Ver: https://www.un.org/en/coronavirus/tackling-inequality-new-social-contract-new-era)

“COVID-19 is our common enemy.  We must declare war on this virus.  That means countries have a responsibility to gear up, step up and scale-up.  How?  By implementing effective containment strategies; by activating and enhancing emergency response systems; by dramatically increasing testing capacity and care for patients; by readying hospitals, ensuring they have the space, supplies and needed personnel; and by developing life-saving medical interventions”. (Ver: https://www.un.org/en/coronavirus/covid-19-we-will-come-through-together)

“Health spending must be scaled up right away to meet urgent needs and the surge in demand -- expanding testing, bolstering facilities, supporting health care workers, and ensuring adequate supplies – with full respect for human rights and without stigma”. (Ver: https://www.un.org/en/un-coronavirus-communications-team/above-all-human-crisis-calls-solidarity)
 

In the same way, the Secretary-General has called upon all nations to cease all armed conflicts and put an end to the ravenous desire to perpetuate war:

“It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives. To warring parties, I say: Pull back from hostilities. Put aside mistrust and animosity. Silence the guns; stop the artillery; end the airstrikes. This is crucial…To help create corridors for life-saving aid. To open precious windows for diplomacy. To bring hope to places among the most vulnerable to COVID-19”. (Ver: https://www.un.org/en/un-coronavirus-communications-team/fury-virus-illustrates-folly-war)

The response of the United States’ government leaves a lot to be desired; war shouldn’t be, now nor ever, a nation’s priority. We must uproot militarism present within all of our social structures.

 Eoin Higgins / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 01 August 2020

"It's important that our youth understand that joining the military isn't the only way to pay for college or find stability in life."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday proposed blocking the military from recruiting in schools, describing the practice as a predatory attack on disadvantaged children who already suffer from underfunded resources in their learning environments. 

The proposal follows an amendment to the defense spending bill from Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, last week that would ban military recruiters from using video game streaming platforms to reach impressionable young people. 

.@AOC, though an amendment to the defense spending bill, is seeking to block federal funding for military recruiters in middle & high schools.

“Children in low-income communities are consistently targeted for enlistment,” she says. https://t.co/NyWPDztR9D pic.twitter.com/APta1mOJd3

— Luke Broadwater (@lukebroadwater) July 27, 2020

"Whether through recruitment stations in their lunchrooms, or now through e-sports teams, children in low-income communities are persistently targeted for enlistment," Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times.

According to the Times, the fate of both last week's and this week's amendments remain unclear:

It is not clear whether Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's proposals will receive a vote. The House Rules Committee will consider them on Tuesday, ahead of action on the defense spending measure later this week.

As Common Dreams reported, the progressive Democrat's video game recruiting amendment came after the military's streamers on the platform Twitch found themselves in the midst of controversy after banning activist Jordan Uhl and others from the Army ESports channel for asking them about war crimes. 

YES! Let’s get it! @AOC has introduced a pair of amendments to a defense appropriations bill that would bar the military from using funding to maintain a recruiting presence in US schools or on digital streaming platforms such as Twitch. https://t.co/JleKgzYuze

— About Face: Veterans Against the War (@VetsAboutFace) July 27, 2020

Uhl, who welcomed Ocasio-Cortez's first amendment as "one of many necessary steps required to dismantle the military industrial complex," told Common Dreams that the new proposal was another good sign to end what he described as an abusive practice by military recruiters. 

"Military recruiting is an insidious practice that preys on the vulnerable," said Uhl. "It's important that our youth understand that joining the military isn't the only way to pay for college or find stability in life."

We've spent $6,400,000,000,000 on war since 9/11. One-fourth of that could've canceled all student loan debt in the United States.

But if we canceled low-income students' debt or gave them healthcare, how would the military poach them for the war machine? #PeopleOverPentagon https://t.co/I8prU65jlK

— Savannah Wooten (she/her) (@SavannahEWooten) July 27, 2020

In her comments to the Times, Ocasio-Cortez also emphasized the need to provide students with more resources to understand they have more options than just joining the military. 

"In many public high schools where military recruiters have a daily presence, there is not even a counselor," said Ocasio-Cortez. "As a result, the military stops feeling like a 'choice' and starts feeling like the only option for many young, low-income Americans."

Source: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/27/progressives-applaud-aoc-proposal-ban-insidious-practice-military-recruiting-schools

Jordan Uhl / Parent Category: NNOMY / Articles 24 July 2020

 Gamers with the Army, Navy, and Air Force are spending hours on Twitch with children as young as 13.

Jordan Uhl / The Nation - Have a nice time getting banned, my dude,” Army recruiter and gamer Joshua “Strotnium” David told me right before he booted me from the US Army’s Twitch channel. I had just reminded viewers of the United States’ history of atrocities around the globe, and helpfully provided a link to the Wikipedia page for US war crimes.

Was I undiplomatic? Sure. But if the military is going to use one of the world’s most popular platforms to recruit kids, then it shouldn’t be able to do so without some pushback. Right now, with the support of Twitch, gamers with the US military are spending hours with children as young as 13, trying to convince them to enlist.

The Army, Navy, and Air Force all stream on Twitch using dedicated e-sports teams. These teams are comprised of skilled gamers who compete in tournaments for cash prizes. While members of military e-sports teams offer the regular gaming skill set, they’re also on-screen talent and recruiters. Instead of approaching a recruiter behind a table in a school cafeteria, kids can hang out with one who is playing their favorite video games and replying to their chat messages for hours on end.

Twitch, a livestreaming platform owned by Amazon, boasted more than 5 billion hours watched from April through June. (For comparison, Netflix claims that during quarantine people have been viewing around 6 billion hours of its shows and movies a month.) A typical military stream looks something like this: A recruiter, usually a man in his 30s, sits comfortably in his gamer chair inside a dimly lit room illuminated by a monitor and the colorful LED lights of his computer tower. An American flag hangs on the wall behind his right shoulder, an oversized stuffed animal sits to his left. He’s playing Call of Duty or Valorant. He’s friendly, and talks about how much he loves being in the Army. Despite being older than most of his young viewers, he speaks like them. “It do be like that sometimes. We do have some great comms,” said a recruiter in one recent session.

The practices employed on Twitch by military e-sports teams are part of a system by which recruiters target children in unstable and/or disadvantaged situations. Recruiters take advantage of the poor seeking steady income, the vulnerable longing for stability, and the undocumented living in fear because of their citizenship status. Now, at a time when all those factors are magnified by a pandemic that has left half the country out of work and over 30 percent unable to afford their housing payments, conditions are ripe for recruiters to prey on anxious youth.

“I see you guys are upgrading from recruiting out of low-income schools, nice,” Twitch user xCanyon916 said in a Navy stream on Tuesday while the recruiter was fielding questions about life in the military from chatters expressing desire to join the Navy e-sports team. The recruiter warned xCanyon916 that if they said something again about the Navy’s recruiting practices, they’d be banned.

Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer with a dedicated following of over 430,000 users, recoiled at the thought of recruiters’ building relationships with young, impressionable viewers.

“Twitch is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my career, and it’s because you’re live for hours on end, talking to these people in the chat. You develop a community and know your individual chatters. There is an ecosystem in every Twitch channel,” Piker said. “Recruiting in this predatory way is a violation of [the users’] safety.”

While an 18-year-old might watch a piece of propaganda like American Sniper once in movie theaters and go on with their lives, here military members themselves are streaming hawkish agitprop day after day. In some cases, such as Call of Duty, these are games that the military or ex-military figures have consulted on and helped shape. In these Twitch channels, recruiters are using these games to solicit young viewers to share personal information. Branches that use e-sports and Twitch streams to reach and recruit younger viewers rely on sleight-of-hand tactics, false promises, and deceptive messaging to trick them into filling out recruiting forms.

The Twitter account for the US Army e-sports team links to a sparsely populated page with REGISTER TO WIN! at the top, no details on what one could even win, and a sign-up form that, according to a tiny disclosure at the bottom of the page, welcomes an eventual harangue by an Army recruiter. It allows people as young as 12 to submit the form, but adds a notice on the post-submission page that recruiters are not permitted to contact a child under the age of 16.

Twitch’s advertising pitch boasts that it can reach 80 percent of teen males in the United States. The minimum age requirement for Twitch is 13.

“All parents are concerned about screen time and what it’s doing to their children,” Justin Hendrix, the executive director of the NYC Media Lab, told me. “As a parent, I reckon a lot of us are unaware that our children are encountering marketing messages, influencers, and sales people in a variety of contexts online when we think they’re just playing games.”

Twitch viewers in the Army’s channel are repeatedly presented with an automated chat prompt that says they could win a Xbox Elite Series 2 controller—an enhanced controller with customizable options and extra paddles for advanced play that costs upward of $200—and a link where they can enter the “giveaway.” It, too, directs them to a recruiting form with no additional mention of a contest, odds, total number of winners, or when a drawing will occur.


The Army declined to comment.

There are over 325,000 current active-duty Navy servicemen and women. The inaugural Navy e-sports team commissioned earlier this year consists of 10 people. To qualify for the e-sports team, you must be at least an E-4, petty officer third class, a rank that takes on average two to three years to reach. One cannot join the Navy and immediately be on the e-sports team, but the Navy’s Twitch channel features a bio that reads, “Other people will tell you not to stay up all night staring at a screen. We’ll pay you to do it. Get a look at what life is like inside the uniform on the America’s [sic] Navy.”

Lara Bollinger, a public affairs officer with the Navy Recruiting Command, said in an e-mail that the bio is “a nod to the fact that when standing watch in various capacities on a ship (on the bridge, in the combat information center, etc.) a Sailor will be looking at various screens, (radar, sonar, navigation, etc…).”

Twitch does not consider military e-sports streams mature programming, so it does not require people to enter their age before viewing. One need only click a button acknowledging that the stream is intended for older viewers. With screen time spiking because of the pandemic, this presents a troubling dynamic.

“You can say what you want about people who serve in the military and what that says about them. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be able to play video games or e-sports, but I do think it’s more insidious to have the military using it as a recruiting tool for young, impressionable people,” Rod Breslau, an e-sports industry consultant and insider, said.

Hart Viges, a veteran, peace activist, and counter-recruiter in Austin, sets up information tables in schools and throughout his community to help kids understand that joining the military is not the only way to attain a more stable living situation or money for college. Recruitment rhetoric also ignores many of the risks of military life, especially the psychological complications of returning to the civilian world.

“They don’t talk about military sexual trauma. They don’t talk about the suicide rate. It’s mostly ‘We can pay for your school. You can serve your country,’” Viges said. “When I ask kids why they want to join, it’s either ‘I want to serve my nation’ or ‘I want to pay for college.’ I imagine recruiters feed off those two motivations the most.”

The use of gamified war propaganda to play into that myth isn’t new for the US military. The Army developed its own game franchise, America’s Army, which it launched in 2002 at the height of the War on Terror and includes story lines and missions based on real-life skirmishes. Games like Call of Duty whitewash the horrors of war, sterilize the violence, and mask the trauma inflicted on everyone involved.

The e-sports industry has become overrun with military sponsorships and partnerships with different games, e-sports organizations, teams, and even some individual players. The Call of Duty League is sponsored by both the Army and the Air Force. The National Guard recently partnered with e-sports organization NRG.

Instead of running a Super Bowl ad, the Navy opted to redirect those funds toward boosting its e-sports presence. The Navy sponsors ESLGaming and Fandom, two of the largest e-sports organizations in the world, as well as the e-sports team Evil Geniuses, which on Monday announced a larger collaborative effort with its military funder.

The Air Force, NRG, and Evil Geniuses declined to comment.

The Navy also has a partnership with Twitch that grants it prominent placement in the homepage carousel.

“Through our partnership with Twitch, the most popular e-sports streaming site, the Navy has immediate access to millions of 17-to-24-year-old e-sports enthusiasts on the platform to showcase a side of Navy life that viewers may not expect,” Bollinger said. “Viewers are asking our gamers insightful questions, and our gamers are effectively communicating that there is a place for everyone in the Navy.”

None of the military branches or Twitch would comment on paid promotion or how branches might qualify for prominent placement on Twitch’s homepage, an incredibly valuable position thanks to Twitch’s 15 million daily active users. Users recently expressed dismay last month when the Army’s channel was featured in the “Stream With Pride” category despite the military’s history of discriminating against the LGBT community.

But beyond the recruiting mechanism, these nationalistic e-sports efforts disregard the violence that the US military inflicts around the world.

“When tech and gaming platforms think of safety, they likely aren’t thinking about the very real violence predominately Muslim communities will face around the world as their platforms aid in military recruitment,” said Iram Ali, the interim director of campaigns at Kairos, a fellowship program that supports more diverse and equitable leadership in tech. “It was interesting to see Call of Duty want to express support for Black Lives Matter. But what active steps will the creators take to make sure the way the military preys on poor Black and brown kids in recruitment isn’t also happening with the help of their video game?”

This sentiment is complicated by the evolving nature of war, which makes gamers especially valuable. The military has long employed video-game-based training and was expanding its use even before the pandemic. Military personnel operate unmanned drones thousands of miles away using controllers that would be familiar to a serious gamer. A recent study showed that gamers may make better drone operators than even experienced pilots. With the military’s Twitch recruitment strategies, it’s easy to see the beginnings of an e-sports to drone operator pipeline.

“As we think about how automation and media are changing the way we fight wars, it’s concerning to think that children are being given the impression that the military is like a video game,” Hendrix said. “Whether it’s drones or killer robots, the last thing we need is less humanity in war.”

Source: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/military-recruitment-twitch/

Jordan Uhl / The Nation - Have a nice time getting banned, my dude,” Army recruiter and gamer Joshua “Strotnium” David told me right before he booted me from the US Army’s Twitch channel. I had just reminded viewers of the United States’ history of atrocities around the globe, and helpfully provided a link to the Wikipedia page for US war crimes.

Was I undiplomatic? Sure. But if the military is going to use one of the world’s most popular platforms to recruit kids, then it shouldn’t be able to do so without some pushback. Right now, with the support of Twitch, gamers with the US military are spending hours with children as young as 13, trying to convince them to enlist.

The Army, Navy, and Air Force all stream on Twitch using dedicated e-sports teams. These teams are comprised of skilled gamers who compete in tournaments for cash prizes. While members of military e-sports teams offer the regular gaming skill set, they’re also on-screen talent and recruiters. Instead of approaching a recruiter behind a table in a school cafeteria, kids can hang out with one who is playing their favorite video games and replying to their chat messages for hours on end.

Twitch, a livestreaming platform owned by Amazon, boasted more than 5 billion hours watched from April through June. (For comparison, Netflix claims that during quarantine people have been viewing around 6 billion hours of its shows and movies a month.) A typical military stream looks something like this: A recruiter, usually a man in his 30s, sits comfortably in his gamer chair inside a dimly lit room illuminated by a monitor and the colorful LED lights of his computer tower. An American flag hangs on the wall behind his right shoulder, an oversized stuffed animal sits to his left. He’s playing Call of Duty or Valorant. He’s friendly, and talks about how much he loves being in the Army. Despite being older than most of his young viewers, he speaks like them. “It do be like that sometimes. We do have some great comms,” said a recruiter in one recent session.

The practices employed on Twitch by military e-sports teams are part of a system by which recruiters target children in unstable and/or disadvantaged situations. Recruiters take advantage of the poor seeking steady income, the vulnerable longing for stability, and the undocumented living in fear because of their citizenship status. Now, at a time when all those factors are magnified by a pandemic that has left half the country out of work and over 30 percent unable to afford their housing payments, conditions are ripe for recruiters to prey on anxious youth.

“I see you guys are upgrading from recruiting out of low-income schools, nice,” Twitch user xCanyon916 said in a Navy stream on Tuesday while the recruiter was fielding questions about life in the military from chatters expressing desire to join the Navy e-sports team. The recruiter warned xCanyon916 that if they said something again about the Navy’s recruiting practices, they’d be banned.

Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer with a dedicated following of over 430,000 users, recoiled at the thought of recruiters’ building relationships with young, impressionable viewers.

“Twitch is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my career, and it’s because you’re live for hours on end, talking to these people in the chat. You develop a community and know your individual chatters. There is an ecosystem in every Twitch channel,” Piker said. “Recruiting in this predatory way is a violation of [the users’] safety.”

While an 18-year-old might watch a piece of propaganda like American Sniper once in movie theaters and go on with their lives, here military members themselves are streaming hawkish agitprop day after day. In some cases, such as Call of Duty, these are games that the military or ex-military figures have consulted on and helped shape. In these Twitch channels, recruiters are using these games to solicit young viewers to share personal information. Branches that use e-sports and Twitch streams to reach and recruit younger viewers rely on sleight-of-hand tactics, false promises, and deceptive messaging to trick them into filling out recruiting forms.

The Twitter account for the US Army e-sports team links to a sparsely populated page with REGISTER TO WIN! at the top, no details on what one could even win, and a sign-up form that, according to a tiny disclosure at the bottom of the page, welcomes an eventual harangue by an Army recruiter. It allows people as young as 12 to submit the form, but adds a notice on the post-submission page that recruiters are not permitted to contact a child under the age of 16.

Twitch’s advertising pitch boasts that it can reach 80 percent of teen males in the United States. The minimum age requirement for Twitch is 13.

“All parents are concerned about screen time and what it’s doing to their children,” Justin Hendrix, the executive director of the NYC Media Lab, told me. “As a parent, I reckon a lot of us are unaware that our children are encountering marketing messages, influencers, and sales people in a variety of contexts online when we think they’re just playing games.”

Twitch viewers in the Army’s channel are repeatedly presented with an automated chat prompt that says they could win a Xbox Elite Series 2 controller—an enhanced controller with customizable options and extra paddles for advanced play that costs upward of $200—and a link where they can enter the “giveaway.” It, too, directs them to a recruiting form with no additional mention of a contest, odds, total number of winners, or when a drawing will occur.


The Army declined to comment.

There are over 325,000 current active-duty Navy servicemen and women. The inaugural Navy e-sports team commissioned earlier this year consists of 10 people. To qualify for the e-sports team, you must be at least an E-4, petty officer third class, a rank that takes on average two to three years to reach. One cannot join the Navy and immediately be on the e-sports team, but the Navy’s Twitch channel features a bio that reads, “Other people will tell you not to stay up all night staring at a screen. We’ll pay you to do it. Get a look at what life is like inside the uniform on the America’s [sic] Navy.”

Lara Bollinger, a public affairs officer with the Navy Recruiting Command, said in an e-mail that the bio is “a nod to the fact that when standing watch in various capacities on a ship (on the bridge, in the combat information center, etc.) a Sailor will be looking at various screens, (radar, sonar, navigation, etc…).”

Twitch does not consider military e-sports streams mature programming, so it does not require people to enter their age before viewing. One need only click a button acknowledging that the stream is intended for older viewers. With screen time spiking because of the pandemic, this presents a troubling dynamic.

“You can say what you want about people who serve in the military and what that says about them. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be able to play video games or e-sports, but I do think it’s more insidious to have the military using it as a recruiting tool for young, impressionable people,” Rod Breslau, an e-sports industry consultant and insider, said.

Hart Viges, a veteran, peace activist, and counter-recruiter in Austin, sets up information tables in schools and throughout his community to help kids understand that joining the military is not the only way to attain a more stable living situation or money for college. Recruitment rhetoric also ignores many of the risks of military life, especially the psychological complications of returning to the civilian world.

“They don’t talk about military sexual trauma. They don’t talk about the suicide rate. It’s mostly ‘We can pay for your school. You can serve your country,’” Viges said. “When I ask kids why they want to join, it’s either ‘I want to serve my nation’ or ‘I want to pay for college.’ I imagine recruiters feed off those two motivations the most.”

The use of gamified war propaganda to play into that myth isn’t new for the US military. The Army developed its own game franchise, America’s Army, which it launched in 2002 at the height of the War on Terror and includes story lines and missions based on real-life skirmishes. Games like Call of Duty whitewash the horrors of war, sterilize the violence, and mask the trauma inflicted on everyone involved.

The e-sports industry has become overrun with military sponsorships and partnerships with different games, e-sports organizations, teams, and even some individual players. The Call of Duty League is sponsored by both the Army and the Air Force. The National Guard recently partnered with e-sports organization NRG.

Instead of running a Super Bowl ad, the Navy opted to redirect those funds toward boosting its e-sports presence. The Navy sponsors ESLGaming and Fandom, two of the largest e-sports organizations in the world, as well as the e-sports team Evil Geniuses, which on Monday announced a larger collaborative effort with its military funder.

The Air Force, NRG, and Evil Geniuses declined to comment.

The Navy also has a partnership with Twitch that grants it prominent placement in the homepage carousel.

“Through our partnership with Twitch, the most popular e-sports streaming site, the Navy has immediate access to millions of 17-to-24-year-old e-sports enthusiasts on the platform to showcase a side of Navy life that viewers may not expect,” Bollinger said. “Viewers are asking our gamers insightful questions, and our gamers are effectively communicating that there is a place for everyone in the Navy.”

None of the military branches or Twitch would comment on paid promotion or how branches might qualify for prominent placement on Twitch’s homepage, an incredibly valuable position thanks to Twitch’s 15 million daily active users. Users recently expressed dismay last month when the Army’s channel was featured in the “Stream With Pride” category despite the military’s history of discriminating against the LGBT community.

But beyond the recruiting mechanism, these nationalistic e-sports efforts disregard the violence that the US military inflicts around the world.

“When tech and gaming platforms think of safety, they likely aren’t thinking about the very real violence predominately Muslim communities will face around the world as their platforms aid in military recruitment,” said Iram Ali, the interim director of campaigns at Kairos, a fellowship program that supports more diverse and equitable leadership in tech. “It was interesting to see Call of Duty want to express support for Black Lives Matter. But what active steps will the creators take to make sure the way the military preys on poor Black and brown kids in recruitment isn’t also happening with the help of their video game?”

This sentiment is complicated by the evolving nature of war, which makes gamers especially valuable. The military has long employed video-game-based training and was expanding its use even before the pandemic. Military personnel operate unmanned drones thousands of miles away using controllers that would be familiar to a serious gamer. A recent study showed that gamers may make better drone operators than even experienced pilots. With the military’s Twitch recruitment strategies, it’s easy to see the beginnings of an e-sports to drone operator pipeline.

“As we think about how automation and media are changing the way we fight wars, it’s concerning to think that children are being given the impression that the military is like a video game,” Hendrix said. “Whether it’s drones or killer robots, the last thing we need is less humanity in war.”

Source: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/military-recruitment-twitch/

 Carson Frame / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 10 July 2020

The Army is holding its first nationwide virtual recruiting campaign, after the COVID-19 pandemic forced it to scale back face-to-face interactions and revealed gaps in its digital outreach strategy.

As the coronavirus pandemic bloomed this spring, the Army reduced staff at many brick-and-mortar recruiting stations across the country. Enlistments slowed, fueling concerns that the service would have to extend the contracts of current soldiers in order to meet total force requirements.

Recruiters took their work remote, but lost out on some of the major recruitment opportunities that normally boost their numbers.

"That last moment before a senior leaves their high school-- typically we're there," said Staff Sgt. Kara Wilson, a station commander in West Texas. "We're helping them with support, finding them different avenues."

"However, we didn't have that moment this year, she said."

So Wilson and her team have had to build an online recruiting environment to reach those same young people. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have proven the most effective, and Wilson has designed new campaigns for each.

But not without a little help.

"I have teenagers at home," she said. "So they have kind of schooled me on many of these new platforms, which allows me to get after the Generation Zs."

Wilson's Instagram is overflowing with images related to fitness training, as she is a marathoner. She's also posted photos of herself and others at the start of their Army careers. Several images reference the service's 'What's Your Warrior?' ad campaign. In one image, Wilson reminds interested young people that they can interview for Army positions remotely, given COVID-19.

Wilson said one of her best engagement efforts was a 45-minute Instagram Live Q&A session about what it's like to be a soldier. She promoted it for weeks and posted a count-down to her feed. People viewed the video more than 300 times.

Wilson said the idea was inspired by her 14 year-old daughter, who was raised in the Army.

"She said, 'You know, mom, I'm your kid… But other people just see you as a soldier. So what if you did a meeting with somebody else? Maybe a friend of yours in the Army... and you guys did like a question-answer thing?'" Wilson remembered. "I thought, 'Wow, that's awesome.'"

Fitness challenges, e-sports tournaments, and video testimonials are other ways Army recruiters have tried to grab the attention of young people online.

Even before the pandemic, the Army was working to incorporate more digital outreach into its marketing. But it wasn't doing it especially well, according to Emma Moore, a researcher with the Military, Veterans, and Society program at the Center for a New American Security.

"The digital engagement was showing gains. But I would say from probably most other private company and marketing measures, it's been ad hoc," Moore said. "The Army is not set up to be incredibly flexible and responsive to changing their narrative or their marketing campaign."

That's a disadvantage in the digital space, where apps and communication platforms quickly evolve.

Wilson advocates decentralizing recruitment decision-making and authority, allowing regional recruiters to tailor their approach to specific communities and demographics.

"While I am encouraged by the fact that I'm seeing new types of outreach, via photos, videos, hashtags, it's still a little clunky. It still feels very Army," she said. "So I wonder about how to enable younger recruiters."

Starting in 2018, the Army began to back off from its top-down approach to recruiting, giving local recruiters more flexibility to design social media campaigns and adapt them to new platforms. It trains recruiters how to get more social media followers and encourages them to re-engage with enlistees whose contracts they've inked.

"With technology, there are innovations happening every day," said Maj. Gen. Frank Muth, head of the Army's recruiting command. "We've got to be able to not be so much a hierarchical organization that just validates the systems put into place, but be a network."

Enlistments are about 4,000 under the Army's stated goals for this time of year, Muth said. Following the issuance of stay-at-home orders in March, there was a dip in interest, and that setback is still being felt.

But interest from young people has slowly started to tick back up, according to Muth. He said the pandemic's full impact on recruitment is unclear. But he guesses that if joblessness hasn't gone down by fall, the Army will see a bump in people wanting to join.

Typically, when unemployment exceeds 6%, the military sees a surge of interest, especially from young people leaving high school and college.

Muth added that virtual outreach is here to stay, and that about 90 percent of the recruiting process can be done online.

"I think at the end of the day, what we'll find is that we may be able to reduce some of our recruiting force and reduce some of their brick and mortar."

This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans. Funding comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Source: https://americanhomefront.wunc.org/post/covid-19-has-forced-army-rethink-and-step-its-virtual-recruiting-efforts

 Jacobin / Parent Category: NNOMY / Articles 26 June 2020

AN INTERVIEW WITH
Nancy Cruz, Barbara Harris, Rick Jahnkow, and Seth Kershner | Originally Published in Jacobin Magazine on October 18, 2019

SK
The National Defense Act of 1916 created the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (rotc), which operates at the university level, along with Junior rotc, which operates at the high school level. At first, JROTC was kind of like rotc’s unwanted stepchild. There were only a couple hundred JROTC units across the country until the mid-1960s.

The program really started to expand in earnest once the draft ended in 1973. Between 1971 and 1974, enrollment in Army JROTC increased by 21 percent, Air Force JROTC increased by 50 percent, and Navy JROTC increased by more than 100 percent. High schools became the answer to the Pentagon’s manpower problems.

BH
Anyone under the age of eighteen should not be recruited or be part of the military system. I believe this is a United Nations protocol, and in my view the United States doesn’t follow it.

SK
Resistance to military influence in education goes way back in the United States — even as far back as John Dewey, the philosopher celebrated as the father of progressive education, who was very involved in efforts to resist JROTC in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1917, at their national convention in St Louis, the Socialist Party called for “consistent propaganda against military training and militaristic teaching in the public schools,” and the party’s 1962 platform objected to rotc as “military conditioning inappropriate to education in a democracy.”

The term “counter-recruitment” was first coined in ’72 or ’73. Mostly, it was people from historic peace churches — Quakers and Mennonites — who were involved in those years, as well as people who wanted to continue their involvement in peace work following the end of the draft and the drawdown of hostilities in Vietnam.

RJ
During the Vietnam War, our analysis of militarism’s impact was fairly limited. Later on, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some of us who had been around during the Vietnam War began to realize we needed a much broader analysis. We had to look beyond the impact of militarism on individuals and instead look at its impact on whole communities. This meant we had to look at where military recruiters are most present — schools in working-class neighborhoods.

SK
The Pentagon’s own research shows that, while JROTC doesn’t really improve academic outcomes, it works well as a turnstile for the armed forces. It’s obvious why the program is so strongly supported by the Pentagon: about 40 percent of students who spend at least three years in JROTC go into the military after graduation.

RJ
Instead of the legal draft we fought against during the Vietnam War, we started looking at the “poverty draft”: people being pushed into the military by their economic and social status. We realized pretty quickly that the poverty draft needed to be addressed differently than the legal draft. We couldn’t just go out and moralize about participation in war. We needed to actually offer something as an alternative to young people.

NC
Yes, the issue of school militarism is about access, about enabling youth to attend college or enter good, nonmilitary jobs. At Project YANO, we educate folks about training opportunities in skills such as plumbing — skills that can lead to union jobs. That’s a big part of my work now: to help people understand that trade unions also offer benefits. You don’t have to go join the military for that. You can be a plumber or a steelworker or an electrician.

BH
In the early 2010s, a lot of new recruiting centers were opening up in underserved neighborhoods in New York City. We demonstrated in front of those little recruiting centers with Veterans for Peace. Eventually, the armed forces got the numbers they wanted, so they packed up and closed their doors.

I have given public testimony at New York City Council Department of Education meetings lobbying for the elimination of the $1.5–1.6 million tax levy allocated for JROTC in the New York City education budget. More recently, I’ve met with New York City teachers, now members of the Retired Teachers Chapter of the United Federation of Teachers, who are concerned about the fact that JROTC instructors aren’t certified to teach in New York City public high schools, the cost of the program, the curriculum (which was developed by the Pentagon), and the display of rifles.

NC
I began to do counter-recruiting work in 2007, when I was in high school. I went to Mission Bay High School in San Diego. The military had a big presence at our school, doing regular recruitment. About 73 percent of the folks at Mission Bay were on free or reduced lunch. It was a predominantly working-class school. The school was predominantly people of color: about 63 percent of students identified as Hispanic, while only about 15 or 16 percent were white. Right before my senior year, the incoming principal reduced support for college preparatory and honors courses, and she brought in the JROTC program.

We took it very personally. I saw it as a personal challenge. I felt we were backtracking on a commitment, made in a previous year, that everyone should have the ability to go to college if that’s what they want to do. Here were these authority figures — administrators! — trying to decide what my future was going to be. A lot of students had a defiant attitude about that.

We leafleted during an open house to inform parents, and we were asked to leave the campus. We were kicked out. We also organized walkouts to bring attention to the military presence. Once, the vice principal followed us in a school police car, trying to intimidate people to leave the walkout and go back to school. But we still marched over to a recruitment station and vocalized our message: we didn’t want a military presence or recruiters on our campus.

Ultimately, we organized a boycott of the JROTC class because there was a requirement that JROTC had to maintain enrollment of more than one hundred students or 10 percent of the student body. If they fell below that threshold for two consecutive years, they would lose federal funding, and the program would have to close. At Mission Bay, we made sure their enrollment numbers were low for two consecutive years. Mission Bay no longer has a JROTC program.

RJ
It’s worth pointing out that, in this case, parents and students had to pressure the principal at that school to follow the law. The principal wanted to keep the program in place, despite it not meeting the minimum enrollment levels.

NC
Then there was the conversation about putting in the shooting range. At Mission Bay, there wasn’t enough classroom space to begin with — but they wanted to break down a wall in the school to turn two classrooms into a shooting range. We chose to take on the shooting range issue because it was very tangible. Our goal was to remove all the shooting ranges from the San Diego Unified School District — not just stop the creation of a new one at Mission Bay.

Many parents didn’t even know about the shooting ranges or marksmanship classes. We were able to get a lot of community members to come out in support. We were able to get media attention. Community groups sponsored buses to get students to school board meetings. It was very important that students were part of the decision-making at the school board level.

Ultimately, we were successful in getting rid of the shooting ranges at eleven schools in the San Diego Unified School District, after a two-year battle. They were all removed in 2009.

SK
It’s nearly impossible to dislodge an existing JROTC unit through a public campaign demanding its removal. Student boycotts, like the story Nancy told about Mission Bay High School, are really the most promising approach for forcing JROTC units to close down that we’ve seen in the past twenty or thirty years.

The War on Terror has made organizing against JROTC more difficult. There are units at roughly 3,400 high schools today, where fourteen- to seventeen-year-old students suit up, perform drills, and take classes under military officers. And there’s room to grow: in 2009, Congress approved the potential for increasing the program to 3,700 units. The various branches just haven’t set aside the funds to pull that off yet.

People are starting to realize that JROTC is saturating urban areas. One in every four public high schools in an urban area has a JROTC unit. In rural areas, it’s one in twenty. The rand Corporation, a major think tank, released a report in 2017 recommending that JROTC turn its focus to smaller high schools in rural areas. That could mean they’re headed to states that haven’t had a big JROTC presence before. Today, the majority of JROTC units are in the South — in South Carolina, for example, there are units at about 60 percent of high schools.

BH
Another concern is the “Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery” (ASVAB) test. The Department of Defense administers the test in schools throughout the country. Results of the test provide recruiters with personal and academic data for profiling and potential outreach to students. This information allows them to decide if they want to pursue a particular young person for recruitment. If a student’s profile meets a recruiter’s needs, he or she is often contacted by letter or phone call. Often, parents are completely unprepared to confront that kind of attention directed at their child from a recruiter. It’s very troubling.

The fact that each student’s ASVAB data automatically goes to the Department of Defense for profiling and recruiting is unacceptable. We want to change this procedure throughout New York State. New York City implemented a revised ASVAB directive in 2016 requiring the parent and student to sign and return an opt-in form, giving permission for ASVAB results to be shared with the military. We are working on implementing a similar ASVAB directive in the entire state, to ensure that families are in charge of their ASVAB data.

About eight years ago, I reached out to almost every guidance counselor in the state, asking what they knew about the ASVAB. Mostly, they couldn’t care less, which was quite interesting. They had so much on their plates. Progress was slow with them. And, of course, many of them have principals who are ex-military. I was surprised to find out how many retired military officers become high school principals.

SK
I think activists can be successful at preventing new JROTC units, but, of course, they have to know when and where new units are being proposed. In the 1990s, activists used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get lists of schools that had been targeted for possible new JROTC units. We need to do the same thing today. That will give us a road map.

There are other weaknesses, too, like enrollment. To get federal funding, schools that have JROTC units have to keep enrollment above a certain minimum. Usually, no one notices when they fall below that minimum, so they carry on, in violation of the law. But, again, you can use FOIA to figure out enrollments at various schools, identify which units are under-enrolled, and push to get those eliminated.

RJ
The military’s involvement in public schools is not just for the purpose of recruiting bodies. It’s for recruiting minds as well.

The military’s values are being taught in schools across the country. That should scare anybody in this country who is dedicated to working for progressive social change. Those kinds of activities undermine our ability to mobilize people later on in life. That’s the greater danger than just having recruiters go to schools to fulfill enlistment quotas. It’s something we all have to be afraid of.

More resources on JROTC and school recruitment can be found at the website of the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth: www.nnomy.org.

Source: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/dismantling-the-school-to-soldier-pipeline

 Jonah Walters / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 17 June 2020

Military recruiters understand that widespread joblessness is good for enlistment. They celebrate the arrival of “Sergeant Hard Times,” recognizing that misery is the best motivator.

The corona virus crisis has been a double-edged sword for military recruitment in the United States. On the one hand, the tightening of the labor market contributed to higher rates of retention than the Army brass expected, meaning that many soldiers decided to reenlist this spring rather than pursue civilian employment when their terms of service expired. On the other hand, recruiting stations across the country have had to shut down to comply with social distancing guidelines, limiting recruiters’ access to young people and inhibiting the “kneecap-to-kneecap” conversations recruiters widely acknowledge to be essential to their work.

Less than one percent of the Armed Forces’ target demographic — seventeen- to twenty-four-year-olds — is actively interested in a military career. After a “kneecap-to-kneecap” encounter with a recruiter, whether at a recruiting station or a school event, probability of enlistment climbs to more than 50 percent, according to the Army.

The reasons for this have been well-documented by anti-recruitment activists for decades. Recruiters, who are expected to meet regular enlistment quotas, aggressively pursue young people who express interest, generally attempting to separate them from parents, teachers, counselors, and others who might advocate for civilian careers.

Since the end of the Obama presidency, Army leaders have insisted upon the need for a 500,000 member Army, establishing quarterly recruitment benchmarks in an attempt to reach that goal. (Last year, there were about 470,000 active-duty Army soldiers, down from a recent peak of about 560,000 in 2010, during Obama’s Afghanistan surge.) The recruitment drive is part of an effort to transition the US military away from its focus on “small wars” and counterinsurgency efforts in preparation for a possible “great power” conflict with Russia or China.

The Army missed its recruiting goal by about 6,500 enlistments at the end of 2018, its first missed target since 2005, during the Iraq War. The Army responded by adding 770 new recruiters and forming virtual recruiting teams (VRTs) for each of its recruiting battalions nationwide. VRTs, which one colonel characterizes as “force multipliers,” are tasked with identifying possible recruits using social media.

The Pentagon also launched a national recruiting strategy dubbed “Focus 22,” which aims to shift the geography of recruitment away from Southern and Midwestern areas (many of which are experiencing population decline) and towards a list of twenty-three American cities with high numbers of black and Latino young people. (Presumably they added a city after determining the name of the initiative.) City governments have generally been quite happy to collaborate with military recruiters on this program.

In Baltimore, city officials opened all forty-four of the city’s public recreation centers to the armed forces, allowing the military to install its “March2Success” software on public computers. March2Success is a program that purports to assist students studying for college admissions tests; it also captures personal information and helps recruiters identify students to target for recruitment.

Perhaps most bizarrely, the Army developed a set of sixty-five neighborhood profiles, or “segmentations,” to assist recruiters in cities around the country with their messaging. The Army understands downtown Baltimore, for example, to be a “Modern Urban Mix” segmentation. Recruiters are reminded that, in segmentations such as this one, residents enjoy “urban adult contemporary music” and are interested in boxing.

The first year of Focus 22 was a success. More than 68,000 new recruits joined the ranks of the armed forces in 2019, with military officials acknowledging that student loan debt was likely the biggest factor driving military recruitment that year.

Focus 22 continues this year, although the ongoing coronavirus crisis poses significant barriers to normal recruiting techniques. The military has met the moment by transitioning to a detailed digital recruitment plan, intensifying its focus on social media outreach and taking advantage of school closures to promote March2Success to home learners.

The Marine Corps recently organized a truly bizarre virtual recruiting event, featuring Second Life-style avatars wandering clumsily around a digital job fair. The Pentagon also has big plans for its Army Esports Team, formed just last year as a possible outreach and recruiting engine.

It remains to be seen whether the armed forces will hit their benchmarks this year. It’s no secret that the Pentagon deliberately targets low-income black and Latino youth for recruitment, and that, especially in recent years, recruiters have begun to see poor neighborhoods in liberal cities as prizes ripe for the plucking.

The purpose of Focus 22, according to its Army architects, is to provide a pathway into military careers for young people in poor urban neighborhoods without a lot of employment options. Recruiters aim to accomplish this, in part, by introducing the military to people who have not yet encountered it as an institution in their everyday lives.

By my count, Army National Guardsmen deployed to assist police in repressing this month’s Black Lives Matter protests in fifteen of the Pentagon’s twenty-three target cities. (Cities where the National Guard deployed and that appear on the Pentagon’s list are Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Sacramento, Seattle, and St. Louis.)

After the events of the past month, young black residents of Minneapolis and other cities need no introduction to the military as an institution. Many of those who the Pentagon may have hoped to recruit this summer have by now already encountered the military — not in the form of a smiling recruiter (or his online avatar), but as a menacing interloper in their own neighborhoods.

Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/us-military-recruitment-protests-covid

Gary Ghirardi / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 15 June 2020

Back in May of 2020, I caught an interview on Pacifica's KPFK radio on a morning program where a young woman was explaining the loss of her aunt that was a nurse in a hospital engaging the Coronavirus. She recounted her aunt telling her that she was not provided with masks or gloves and that a patient had sneezed in her face a week prior to her falling ill. All this culminated with a Zoom meeting with the family saying goodbye before she died. Later that day I passed a local hospital that had placed a large banner on the street honoring our heroes that were fighting the current epidemic.

In my work for The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth, I am constantly reminded of a similar refrain from those pushing back against our work of getting youth, with limited opportunities for their futures, to consider all the ramifications of serving in the United State's post 9/11 military. That push-back always invokes the heroic diatribes defending those who serve in our military branches and a forceful reminder of how dare we try to diminish the sacrifice of heroes who have served or are considering serving by revealing the harmful realities of military service. Of course we do not diminish their service but try to put it in context to a fuller and more accurate disclosure of what military recruiters manage to leave out of their enlistment appeals. The relationship between these two scenarios, and the contradictions inherent in both, stayed with me all week and encouraged this short OpEd.

What seemed so prescient to me was that both these health workers and young soldiers are asked to put themselves in harms way for the rest of us yet we seem to not strive, as a country, to provide them with adequate protections, compensation fitting the hazards they face, or sound governmental policies to avoid virulent pandemic or violent conflict and then we resort to platitudes of recognition rather than prioritize human concerns that could had made these situations less lethal. I think that our “essential workers,” our warriors included, are our expendables, that can be sacrificed to flawed planning and a lack of just and humanistic social principles without our society coming to terms with what has caused these deplorable conditions in the first place.

Our nation, as a culture, has consistently normalized and created cover for our injustices and have reduced terrible suffering to cliched and tired justifications for empty honors. Likely, for many of us individually, we are not comfortable with such representations but we have become collectively distant from the fallout of disasters that we don't own and perceive are outside our individual control including our endless and opaque wars.

Now, as we enter a perfect storm of a global pandemic and an economic disaster rivaling our pre-WWII depression, coupled with a shattering of our national political leadership heading into a circus of a presidential election, we seem to be approaching a difficult choice that needs to be enacted that the citizenry may lack the political will and organization to see through.

Are we prepared  to look in the mirror at our true national face, and make the changes so necessary to heal a very broken and dysfunctional country? To redirect the massive waste of resources expended for mounting militarism into human requirements like national healthcare, housing, and food security for nearly half of our population that are on the brink of insolvency with this crisis? Or will we use perpetual and escalated warfare to pull our economy up again as did happen seventy-five years ago? Based on the absence of a leader with the ability to make the kind of reforms needed to overcome the power of entrenched global economic interests that seem insurmountable at this point, the future looks uncertain.

If we choose the latter course and proceed with the expansion of the war economy, now launching into space, the price it will pay upon the poor and fledgling middle-class, in multiple nations, will make many more expendables in the process and may even bring our entire species and the others we share this planet with to an end. The stakes are that profound.

 Pat Elder / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles 07 / June 2020

COVID-19 has profoundly impacted the way the military finds new soldiers. The recruiting command was caught unprepared to face the pandemic and is facing a challenging new reality.

Military recruiting is an intense, psychological pursuit that has traditionally relied on the ability of recruiters to develop close relationships with teenage prospects. These relationships were cultivated in the nation’s high schools where recruiters enjoyed access to children. Recruiters served as coaches and tutors. They brought donuts to the faculty. They ate lunch with prospects, sometimes a hundred times in a single school year. Military recruiters played one-on-one basketball after school with potential recruits and became best of friends with some kids. So friendly, hundreds of male recruiters have been implicated in inappropriate sexual relationships with underaged girls.

High schools were the center of the recruiting universe, but that ended abruptly in March when the enlistment pipeline was ruptured. Recruiters enlisted seniors and placed them into the Delayed Entry Program (DEP) in which a student’s entry into active duty is postponed for up to 365 days. (The Army now calls it the Future Soldier Program.) The thrust of the DEP program is to maintain future soldier motivation while minimizing attrition. When DEP members report to basic training, they are accessed (enlisted) into active duty.

 There are actually two enlistment-processing actions: contracting into the DEP and accessing into active duty. It’s the second one that matters.

Youth take the Oath of Enlistment to enter the DEP. "I, _____, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States..”

The DEP is the core component of the military’s recruiting process. If DEP members change their minds and decide not to enter the military, they are allowed to leave with no adverse consequences. Once they stop responding to their recruiter and they are out. When recruits fail to report to boot camp they are discharged. “It’s like waking up from a nightmare,” one enlistee explained. There is a long history of abuse by recruiters and the command toward DEP members who quit, while many youths and their families are unaware of the non-binding nature of the DEP.

Before the pandemic, seniors in the DEP were encouraged to spend a significant amount of time with other DEP members and their recruiter who indoctrinated them into a military culture with drill and ceremony, lessons on the chain of command, and rank structure.

The recruiter’s close, personal involvement kept unpredictable youth from walking away. Impetuous teens who turn 18 often sign up without clearly thinking it through. While recruiting behavior in the nation’s high schools has become increasingly predatory, the American Public Health Association says there is significant evidence that the adolescent brain is not equipped to make accurate risk calculations. The kids often express ‘buyer’s remorse” so the job of the recruiter is not just to get seniors to sign up, but to keep them in the DEP until its time to ship to boot camp. This is precisely where the military is most vulnerable to the upheaval caused by the pandemic.

A study that analyzed data on over 1.3 million DEP participants from FY05 to FY12 found that attrition increases the longer a member is in the DEP, so it’s necessary for the branches to quickly move recruits who signed up earlier in the academic year to boot camp. Historically, almost half of those in the Army’s Future Soldier program are in the DEP for two or fewer months. Many sign up in April and May and they’re shipped to boot camp in June and July. Only 15% stay in the DEP 7 or more months.

The Army had the lowest DEP attrition rate among the services at 11.0%. In contrast, over 40% of Marine Corps and Navy DEP members stay 7 or more months and have average DEP attrition rates of 17.8% and 20.8% respectively. The Air Force, with over 60% of its DEP lengths between 3 and 6 months, averaged a 12.7% attrition rate.

The DOD does not provide the current strengths of the DEPs in each branch, although we know many seniors don’t make up their minds until the 4th academic quarter - and this year, the quarter was cancelled due to COVID-19, leaving the DEP in peril.

The absence of the command’s human touch and the uncertainties of reporting to boot camp amidst stories of outbreaks at the Army’s Fort Jackson, Fort Benning, Fort Leonard Wood, or Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, and Recruit Depot Perris Island have caused many to think twice about reporting to boot camp. Naval recruiting is facing public concern over COVID-19 outbreaks on 40 ships, most notably, stories of a thousand infected sailors on the USS Teddy Roosevelt.

Mothers of youth in the DEP have reached out, expressing deep concerns, while many teenage recruits may be oblivious to the dangers or have not developed adult reasoning capabilities, as the American Public Health Association suggests. The moms have every reason to be worried.

More than 140 Army soldiers and trainees at Fort Benning, Ga., and more than 70 at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., tested positive for the coronavirus, the Army reported in early June.

At the Marine Corps’ Parris Island Recruit Depot in South Carolina, where an outbreak has been reported, the recruits wore masks in the larger formations, but during some physical tests — even those where teamwork was required and social distancing impossible — the masks came off. Most of the drill instructors wore theirs at all times, as did visiting Defense Secretary Mark Esper and his entourage when he visited at the end of May, according to Stars and Stripes.

The Marine Corps is not reporting on the number of COVID-19 infections at Parris Island, which is located within the area of zip code 29902. Data from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control on June 6th shows that 99 confirmed cases and 608 suspected cases have been reported in zip code 29902 since the pandemic began June 6, 2020.

Stars and Stripes, a critical source of information pertaining to the military, reports that all of the services have recently experienced drastic declines in the number of recruits they added to their DEPs. Maj. Gen. Frank Muth, Commanding General, U.S. Army Recruiting Command said he expects to face a shortfall at the end of May of about 3,100 recruits with signed contracts.

On March 18, the Army shut down public access to its 1,400 recruiting stations. Within a week, more than 20,000 military recruiters were left to their cell phones, computer screens, microphones, cameras., and detailed personal information on tens of millions of American youth. The DOD must sign up 150,000 annually to stay even with those leaving the service. Muth said his decision to shutter stations from the general public was about protecting his own people.

The Navy saw a 45% dip in qualified individuals expressing interest in March, 2020, compared to March, 2019. The Air Force also saw drops in recruiting in March and April. The Marine Corps saw a drop of about 25% in contacts with qualified individuals in March over the same month last year.

Gunnery Sgt. Justin Kronenberg, a spokesman for Marine Recruiting Command, told Stars and Stripes, “Our systematic recruiting process has always placed a premium on ‘kneecap to kneecap’ interaction between a recruiter and applicant, so it may be challenging to replicate this physical assessment of those wanting to become Marines solely through tech mediums.”

Almost half of Marine Corps accessions are 18-years old. Those who are age 20 and younger made up 83% of Marine Corps recruits, 65% in the Air Force and the Army; and 64% in the Navy.

For at least a decade the Army has been aware that the way it recruits lagged behind technological advances employed by more sophisticated corporate recruiters. But the military enjoyed a captive high school audience so recruiters were occupied by “hanging out” with potential recruits in high school parking lots or setting up booths during career days or giving out free tchotchkes in high school cafeterias. They weren’t lurking in game rooms and on social media to the degree they are now.

Recruits completed various physical activities such as running, push-ups etc. Recruiters nurtured students and provided guidance. They encouraged future soldiers to invite parents, family, and referrals to DEP events. They played video games and they had pizza together.

The recruiting command understands the “recruiter-applicant-influencer relationship” is a significant cause of DEP attrition. Put another way, Johnny’s girlfriend or his mom may not want him to enlist. In the pandemic world, these “influencers” may have more of an upper hand over the virtual recruiter.

The command says contact between the recruiter and the DEP member and his or her influencers must be “frequent, genuine, honest, and forthright.” Surely, social media affords the frequency, but may be lacking in its ability to project recruiters as being genuine, honest, and forthright.

Human interactions cannot automatically be replicated through machines.

Military recruiting has shifted from an intensely personal pursuit to a comparatively sterile online experience. Recruiters spend most of their digital days on social media. 18-year-olds often don’t “do” email, and rarely talk on the phone, while text messages are frequently ignored. The trick for recruiters is to engage the teens on video platforms like Instagram, Facetime, and Zoom where recruiters can hope to humanize the interaction and build trust.

Recruiters host huge gaming tournaments promoting “Call of Duty” which is built around the combat portion of belonging to the military. Recruiters hope its visceral appeal and ability to attract large, nationwide audiences will allow them to collect leads.

The Army’s Joint Base Lewis-McChord Morale Welfare and Recreation Program (JBLM MWR) hosts these tournaments. They are sponsored by the United Services Automobile Association (USAA) and used by the recruiting command to keep DEP members in the loop and to reach new prospects. Chat rooms discuss things like the necessary number of kills to initiate killstreaks, or how important organization and teamwork are. Recruiters lurk in chat rooms.

The Army recently announced it is loosening restrictions on how recruiters may use Facebook. The Army instructs its recruiters:

“You can use your personal Facebook page to become an admin of a fan page. Anybody who has admin rights to the fan page can grant you admin rights to the fan page; your information will not be shared on the fan page and no one outside of the page admins will know that you are an admin of the fan page. Determine your own privacy settings; these will not be violated if you are a fan page admin. Direct traffic to your fan page and keep your personal life separate from work. In addition, it is strongly suggested that you use “friends only” privacy settings on personal pages to protect your personal information.”

The U.S. government is surreptitiously spying on our children.

The laptops of recruiters are loaded with personal information on youth taken from social media sites. The information is merged with data from the DOD’s Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies Recruiting Database (JAMRS) and the result is staggering. The recruiter knows Johnny reads wrestling magazines, weighs 160, can bench press 180, drives a twelve-year-old Ford F150, and likes BTS and Kpop. And although they’ve never spoken, the local recruiter assigned to Johnny’s high school knows that Sam, his girlfriend, would love to see him enlist and that she loves Zendaya and they both enjoy kayaking. They even know Johnny’s mom doesn’t care much for Sam It sounds superfluous, but these kinds of details matter more today than ever. They provide a human connection before reaching out digitally.

Recruiters track DEP members and potential recruits on social media sites for signs of disqualification, like weight, tattoos, problems with education, drugs, or law enforcement. Army recruiters use FBI Live Scan capability to conduct quick-turn-around fingerprint checks. Important documentation like diplomas, birth certificates, and Social Security cards are all relayed electronically now. With the exception of the physical examination, everything is done virtually. Recruiters have become something like associates at credit card, health care, and insurance company call centers.

When direct, personal contact is necessary with the recruiting command the health of DEP members is jeopardized. The Army Combat Fitness Test, a critical component of the recruitment process, can’t be accomplished through a computer screen. During the 2-mile run, the Army says, a limited number of lanes will be made available to runners. The pushups test requires another individual to properly count repetitions, but the tracking person can count at a 6-foot distance. Soldiers will be required to wipe down each piece of exercise equipment with sanitizer after completing the corresponding test. The Army may eventually figure it out, but it is likely to be at the expense of the health of thousands of 18-year-olds along the way. The virus will exploit the weakest link in the Army’s chain of viral defenses.

Once the candidates ship to boot camp, they are quarantined for two weeks. After that, the Pentagon seems to be making it up as they go along. In early May the DOD said a recovered COVID-19 patient would be ineligible to join the military. The DOD reversed course shortly thereafter and said only recruits who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 would be banned. By the middle of May the DOD announced that recruits who have recovered will be examined by a physician to determine if there are long term effects.

The recruiting command is in serious trouble because large numbers of potential recruits and their families realize this is a terrible time to enlist.

Youth who sign up with the DEP are putting their health in jeopardy. The DOD’s decisions regarding Covid 19 will continue to be guided by its ability to fill the ranks.

Sources used for this article

 Bonnie J Caracciolo / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 02 June 2020

Bonnie J Caracciolo / Chelsea Uniting Against the War (CUAW) - For fourteen years a dedicated group of anti-war citizens in a working-class suburb of Boston, MA, has worked to inform high school students in their community, including their own children, about the perils of military recruitment. Chelsea Uniting Against the War (CUAW) convenes within the first week of the school year to distribute counter-recruitment flyers informing students of the risks of military service. They then follow up this activity by speaking with students one-on-one during school lunch breaks while distributing forms to opt out of school releases of student information to military recruiters. These lunchtime events occurred twice each year and were always preceded by a phone call to the principal’s office to determine an appropriate date. At no time did CUAW enter the school without prior notice.

This annual routine changed in the Spring of 2019 when CUAW showed up on the appointed date and was confronted by the newly-hired principal who told the members they were not going to be allowed to continue. CUAW members left the school without incident.

In September of last year (2019) a group of nine CUAW members assembled outside of Chelsea High School during the first week of school as it had done for the previous thirteen years, for the purpose of distributing a counter-recruitment flyer and to discuss the opt out form which is included in the school’s student handbook.

Shortly thereafter, a request was made for a meeting with the school superintendent for the purpose of revisiting the ban on access to the school.  Three times school officials set up a meeting, only to postpone it to a later date. Finally, a meeting was scheduled that included both the principal, the former AND new superintendents AND the city attorney for Chelsea. The meeting was confusing as none of the parties on the side of the city appeared to be in agreement and simply informed CUAW that regardless of the precedent that had been set in the past, CUAW was no longer welcome inside the school cafeteria. The former superintendent claimed that although she was aware of CUAW being inside the school she did not know why.  No one else spoke except the city’s attorney, who essentially said if CUAW can find a reason why it should be allowed inside the school for the purpose of counter-recruitment, we should let her know.

Well, that was the opening CUAW needed! With the help and guidance of Rick Jahnkow, researcher and consultant with the San Diego-based Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO*), a hastily organized conference call took place between San Diego and Chelsea. During this meeting, it was decided to craft a letter from CUAW to the city attorney. It would include copies of letters from the ACLU that had helped several other counter-recruitment groups achieve equal school access. The cover letter requested that the city attorney and school superintendent review and reconsider CUAW’s request to be allowed entry into the high school.

Once the letter’s delivery had been confirmed, a CUAW member visited the city attorney’s office and was told that she was unavailable, but that a response would be forthcoming.  This went on three more times when finally, on March 11, a letter from the Assistant City Attorney arrived via email, saying:

“We have reviewed your request for access to Chelsea High School and have come to the following conclusion. The Chelsea Public School District will allow Chelsea Uniting Against the War (CUAW) access to students on the same basis as that granted to military recruiters.”

The letter went on to describe the parameters to which CUAW must adhere, including activities limited to the school cafeteria during all four lunches and a restriction on posting material on walls. Otherwise, this was a victory that gave new vigor to counter-recruitment efforts at Chelsea High School.

*Project YANO has been doing youth education and school outreach since 1984.

#projectyano #counterrecruitment #cuaw #nnomypeace #militaryfreeschools

Source: http://www.comdsd.org/index.php/articles-archive/234-a-counter-recruitment-victory

 Elizabeth King / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 27 May 2020

Elizabeth King /Article Originally appeared in In These Times web edition in June 2019 -

A scrappy counter-recruitment movement is trying to starve the military of labor.

Out of the spotlight, dedicated counter-recruiters around the country are steadfast in their organizing to cut off the human supply chain to the U.S. military.

­Eighteen is the youngest age at which someone can join the U.S. military without their parents’ permission, yet the military markets itself to—which is to say recruits—children at much younger ages. This is in part accomplished by military recruiters who visit high schools around the country, recruiting children during career fairs and often setting up recruitment tables in cafeteri­as and hallways. As a result, most students in the U.S. will meet a military recruiter for the first time at just 17 years old, and children are getting exposed to military propaganda younger and younger.

The recruitment of young people to the military is as old as the military itself, and has become more and more normalized along with the general militarization of schools. According to the Urban Institute, more than two-thirds of public high school students attend schools where there are “school resource officers,” a name for school-based police. This police presences comes on top of the role of military recruiters on campuses, or at college and career fairs. 

Counter-recruitment surged in popularity during George W. Bush’s Iraq War, when the U.S. military ratcheted up recruitment for the war. But these days you don’t hear much about this movement, despite the fact that the U.S. is still engaged in brutal wars, from Yemen to Afghanistan, and the Trump administration has been threatening war with Iran. Out of the spotlight, dedicated counter-recruiters around the country are steadfast in their organizing to cut off the human supply chain to the U.S. military. U.S. wars have caused innumerable deaths, created long-term hardships in occupied nations, and cost trillions of dollars. Counter-recruitment, then, is about starving the military of the labor it needs to accomplish these destructive missions. When working with students, parents and school leadership, counter-recruiters focus on a variety of issues, including the negative personal consequences that come with being a soldier and broader problems like racism and U.S. imperialism.

Kate Connell, the director of the California counter-recruitment organization Truth in Recruitment, a parent, and a Quaker, tells In These Times that one reason counter-recruitment efforts are so overlooked these days is that U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan have fallen out of the news. “I think that's kind of what got people concerned and out in the streets” in the past, she says. Though this movement doesn’t get as much attention these days, organizers and activists say that counter-recruitment efforts remain critically important.

For the most part, activists who do counter-recruitment work in schools focus on matching or exceeding military recruiters in face-time with kids. Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, military recruiters are required to have the same level of access to students as college and career professionals who recruit in schools.

Hart Viges, a U.S. Army veteran who has been volunteering in counter-recruitment for around a decade and works with Sustainable Options for Youth-Austin (SOY-Austin), says his role is to educate children using interactive tabling in schools. The group brings t-shirts and a “peace wheel” the students can spin to learn more facts about the military. Children also get to discuss how they’d like taxpayer dollars spent. For example, they might discuss whether they want to spend billions on war, or allocate that money elsewhere. Viges is blunt with them about what life will be like after time spent in the military.

“I ask them, ‘Do you like fireworks?’” Viges says. When they respond yes, he explains, “you won’t like them anymore” after coming back from a war. He tells them the realities of living with post-traumatic stress disorder brought about by combat, and how it does lasting damage to veterans. Being real with children about the military has proven effective for Viges. “There's so many wins in counter recruitment I feel,” he adds. “I talk to kids who are thinking about joining and I tell them the realities of it, and you can see their minds start to change… With politicians it's like a stalemate, but counter-recruitment is like a punch in the gut that will topple the military industrial complex.” Hart also talks to children about other issues connected to the military industrial complex that concerns them, such as war in general, racism, sexism and climate change.

Youth are active in this work, too. Jenny, a 16-year-old incoming junior at Santa Maria High School in California, interns with Truth in Recruitment. She tells In These Times that she got involved with the organization after a friend told her it would be a good way to stand up for herself and her peers who are frequently visited by military recruiters at school.

When she started high school, Jenny says she noticed that the military recruiters frequented her school, but other opportunities for students post-high school were not well represented. “I thought this was a problem, especially since the majority of us are students of color and I thought that we were being disproportionately targeted because we are people of color,” she says.

Angel further notes that many students at her school are undocumented, and she noticed that military recruiters were telling her peers distorted information about the benefits of military service based on their undocumented status. She says that after speaking to military recruiters, a number of her peers have said that they were promised they would get U.S. citizenship if they served in the military. While there is some pathway for non-citizens who serve in the military to become naturalized, this is not a guaranteed benefit. In fact, the U.S. government has a history of deporting foreign nationals who were employed by the military. “I always have to correct them because I don't want them to join and not know the full truth about it,” Angel says. “We wouldn't be seeing these things at schools rich, white students attend.”

The military does, in fact, tend to recruit in poor and working class communities, especially among Black and Latinx youth. The strategy of targeting poor, working-class, and Black and Latinx people for military conscription is known as the “poverty draft.” The tactics of this strategy can be seen in military recruitment efforts at schools like Santa Maria High School where Angel attends, and is evident in studies on the socioeconomic status of people who fought in recent US wars. According to a 2016 study out of Boston University and the University of Minnesota Law School, “Today, unlike in World War II, the Americans who die or are wounded in war are disproportionately coming from poorer parts of the country.”

Connell, the Truth in Recruitment director, says that the tactics used by military recruiters on children are “very much a grooming process.” She notes that branches of the military operate social media accounts, where they will follow and communicate with students who are potentially interested in joining up. In this way, recruiters have direct, unsupervised access to young teens, who may or not be discussing recruitment efforts with trusted adults in their lives. This type of behavior, Connell says, is “inappropriate.”

Still, the presence of the military in schools has become normalized. “I feel that the idea that the military is an untouchable subject as far as criticism or cutting the budget, [makes counter-recruitment] a really tricky conversation to have, so people avoid it.” The institutional power and not to mention funding and broad support that the military has makes counter-recruitment a challenge.

But the group has seen concrete results from their organizing and advocacy. Working with students, parents, and school and district leadership in Santa Barbara in 2014, Truth in Recruitment was able to convince the district to create better resources for parents to more easily opt their students out of having their information shared with military recruiters.

Though counter-recruitment is perhaps not as prominent as it was more than a decade ago, organizers in this field are unequivocal about the need to support students by offering alternatives to the military, such as college or the workforce. As the military continues to target children, especially in low-income and Black and Latinx communities, counter-recruiters will continue to work with children and their care-takers to offer safer, more dignified options for life after high school.

Source: https://inthesetimes.com/article/21937/war-military-counter-recruitment-education-schools-youth

Edward Hasbrouck / Parent Category: NNOMY / Articles 04 April 2020

On March 25, the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS), after a three-year charade of stage-managed and largely one-sided public events accompanied by closed-door meetings and negotiations among the members of the Commission, released its final report. It recommends that Congress amend the Military Selective Service Act to require that young women, as well as young men, register for the draft when they reach age 18, and inform the Selective Service System each time they change their address until their 26th birthday.

The Commission's recommendations with respect to Selective Service registration are such a naïve fantasy, completely unfeasible and with no foundation in research or reality. The Commission kept its head firmly in the sand, carefully avoiding any inquiry into whether or how the current (unenforced and widely violated) registration requirement for men, much less an expanded registration requirement applicable also to women, could be enforced.

In the report’s 255 pages, there's no mention at all of compliance or noncompliance with draft registration. There's been no audit of the registration database since 1982, and the Commission didn't conduct or ask for one.

The Department of Justice is, and would remain, responsible for enforcement of the registration requirement; but nobody has been prosecuted for non registration since 1986, and in the years that have followed, the DoJ has made neither any estimate of the numbers of violators nor any plan or budget for how to identify, investigate, find, arrest, prosecute, or incarcerate them.

A preliminary report the NCMNPS received from the Department of Justice didn't mention enforcement, and the Commission didn't bother to follow up with the DoJ about the omission. The Commissioners went to extreme lengths to avoid asking any questions about compliance, noncompliance, enforcement, or feasibility, because they knew that even cursory research into these questions would make clear that draft registration of men has failed, and that trying to register women would be even more of a failure.

According to a statement from peace and antidraft organizations and activists, including antiwar feminists:

The issue is not whether women should have to register for the draft, but whether the government should be planning or preparing to draft, anyone.

Congress should end draft registration for all, not try to expand it to young women as well as young men.

H.R. 5492 [introduced by representatives Peter DeFazio and Rodney Davis] would end the current contingency planning for a future draft as well as draft registration, and would end all sanctions against those who didn't register. That's the appropriate choice for Congress and the American public.

The NCMNPS was directed by Congress to consider the "feasibility" of any draft. But registering or drafting women would not be feasible in the face of the likely widespread noncompliance. Women and men will join in resistance to any attempt to expand draft registration, or plans for a draft, to women.

Draft registration for men failed: criminal enforcement had to be abandoned decades ago in the face of pervasive noncompliance. Even the former Director of the Selective Service System testified to the NCMNPS that the current Selective Service System database is "less than useless" as the basis for a draft. Trying to draft women or get them to register to be drafted would be even more of a fiasco.

Congress is under no legal obligation and has no deadline to consider the recommendations made today by the NCMNPS. But if Congress does nothing, draft registration is likely to be ended before long by court order. So Congress is likely to consider both the Commission's recommendations and the alternative of H.R. 5492 either later this year or at the latest in 2021.

The issue isn't likely to come to head in Congress for months, but it's important to start mobilizing opposition and raising awareness now that this debate is going to happen. The government doesn't readily admit failure or acknowledge that the willingness of the people to comply with its orders places limits on what it can do. The decisive factor is likely to be whether, when the time comes for Congress to vote on whether to end draft registration or extend it to women, members of Congress see sufficient visible evidence that young women -- as young men have done, but probably in even larger numbers -- will resist if the government tries to draft them or get them to register to be drafted, and that many older people will support them in that resistance.

Source: http://comdsd.org/index.php/articles-archive/232-national-commission-report

 Rolando Zenteno / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 14 February 2020

by Rolando Zenteno / Facing South - Since the U.S. ended the draft in 1973, young adults from Southern states* have been overrepresented among new military recruits. In fact, the region has been in a league of its own in terms of military recruitment since the late 20th century, with no other region experiencing as wide a disparity in military representation.

The disproportionate presence of new military recruits from the South can be understood by looking at the region's "representation ratio": its share of new recruits divided by its share of the U.S. young adult population. A ratio of 1 means a state's share of new recruits is equal to its share of the U.S. young adult population between the ages of 18 and 24, the typical age range for new enlistees. A ratio of less than 1 means a state is providing fewer recruits than might be expected given its young adult population, while a ratio of more than 1 means it's providing more than its fair share.

The South's ratio has barely budged since the 1990s.

According to fiscal year 2017 data, the most recent available, the South's share of the U.S. young adult population was 33 percent, but it provided 41 percent of new military enlistees nationwide. As a result, the region's representation ratio is 1.2, which means it provided 20 percent more military recruits than might be expected given its young adult population.

It's a very different story for South Carolina, whose contribution of new military recruits outweighs its share of the U.S. young adult population by more than 50 percent. Only four Southern states have a representation ratio of less than 1: Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky and West Virginia. Florida's and Georgia's contribution of military recruits exceeds their share of the young adult population by 30 percent, putting them among the five states most overrepresented among new recruits.

Explaining the disparities

There have been efforts to understand why the South is so disproportionately represented among U.S. military recruits.

A 2018 study by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), which provides the U.S. government with research, looked at variables that could help predict how much of a state's young adult population would enlist in the military. Among the variables it analyzed was how a census region's young adult unemployment rate would affect its military enlistments. But for the South, the unemployment rate had the least impact on military recruitment numbers among all of the regions.

The IDA found a factor with a strong impact on military recruitment: the concentration of veterans in a given area. Per the study, veteran presence can translate to a parent, mentor, or coach who served influencing a young adult's choice to enlist.

Adjusting for several variables, the study found that about an 8 percentage point increase in an area's veteran population in the 35 to 54 age range could boost enlistments from about five recruits per 1,000 young adults to about six.

And then there is the influence of active duty military members. More than a third of them live in an area of the South stretching from Florida through Georgia and the Carolinas to Virginia.

The military itself acknowledges that proximity and personal ties to service members can influence enlistment decisions.

"We know that the larger presence of military bases in the South and having a family member who's served are both factors contributing to a person's decision to serve," Lisa Ferguson, media relations chief at the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, told Facing South in an email. "We also know that 79 percent of recruits have a relative who's served, which points back to a familiarity with the lifestyle and a higher propensity to consider the military for a career."

Such was the case for Eric Padró of Clarksville,Tennessee, who joined the Air Force after college. Facing South interviewed him via Facebook.

"My influence to join was my family's history of military service," wrote Padró, whose brother, father, and both grandfathers served in the military. "I knew I wanted to join the Air Force around sophomore year of high school."

A family affair

The military's concentrated presence in the South is driving recruitment — often from the same families.

Data from the Joint Advertising Marketing Research and Studies, which is responsible for Department of Defense recruitment research, shows the military is consistently looking inward for recruitment. The percent of new recruits who say they have a family member who served in the military has hovered above 75 percent since 2012.

In the Army, the military's largest branch, more and more new recruits are coming "from the same small number of counties and are the children of old recruits," as the New York Times recently reported. Many of the counties rich in Army recruits are in the South, stretching across large swaths of Florida, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas.

"A strong predictor of whether you will join the military is whether your friends and family are joining the military," Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University, who served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, told Facing South in an email. "The large military communities in the South thus contribute to and reinforce this pattern of over-representation."

* Facing South counts the following states as part of the region: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia

Rolando Zenteno is the inaugural recipient of the Julian Bond Fellowship with Facing South.

Source: https://www.facingsouth.org/2020/01/understanding-souths-unequal-contribution-military-recruits

 Taylor Allen (Colorado Public Radio) / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 06 December 2019

Taylor Allen / Colorado Public Radio -  The main source of light in this dim, warehouse-sized room in suburban Denver comes from rows of screens. Each panel shows fast-paced military action — camouflaged soldiers swarming a city or special operations forces securing a target.

One of the figures hunched over a computer in the darkness huffs in disappointment.

"I've died like four times in three missions," said 17-year-old Gavin Gains.

Even though he wasn't dominating the brand new "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" game, Gains attracted the attention of the event's sponsors - the U.S. Army. The office held this release party for the new game at an esports venue called Localhost Arena. Anyone who came to the party was able to play the new game as long as he or she also spoke to Army recruiters.

"This is the targeted demographic - these young men and women that came out here to play the esports," said Sgt. Vincent Cruz, an Army recruiter.

The Army has turned to esports, along with other new marketing strategies, in an attempt to make military service more appealing to young people. Cruz says video games are a way for the Army to connect with more people. It has even created its own professional esports team, which has become part of Cruz's pitch.

Cruz said the military wants to, "Reach out to these men and women and show them that 'Hey, you can actually do this in the Army and get paid by the way.'" The Army calls its esports efforts "some of the highest lead-generating events in the history of the all-volunteer force."

For the past three years, the Army regional recruiting office that serves Denver has hit only about 80 percent of its recruiting goals. Nationally, the Army fell 6000 troops short of its goal last year. This year, the Army set a lower goal and met it. But military leaders say the old ways to attract potential recruits aren't working the way they used to. More modern tactics are called for, like hosting an event at the Localhost Arena in Lakewood or starting a professional esports team.

"Phone calls and text messages are not the way to go," Cruz said.

Localhost Arena General Manager James Love said the staff was surprised when the Army showed up and said they wanted to collaborate on an event.

"I got some sideways glances." Love said. "Most people said 'Yes, we would love that.'"

The partnership is mutually beneficial. The Army wants to recruit, and Love wants the business to grow and attract players.

"There are gamers and nerds in the Army," he said. "There are gamers and nerds down the street. We want them all in here playing as a community because we want to show people just how diverse we are."

That's part of the Army's goal too - to show that it's not all boot camp and buzz cuts. It wants to persuade recruits that there's a fun side to the military, too.

Gains isn't ready for college yet, but he's fairly certain he wants to join the military. The biggest reason is a sense of community.

"It's always just been a big motivator for me is just having somewhere I belong," he said. "I like the military because you may not necessarily like everyone, but you know they have your back."

Michelle Alcantar, 17, is a new recruit. She expects to graduate from high school at the end of this semester and be off to boot camp in Oklahoma by summer. She got into video games through her brother-in-law, who is also in the Army.

Both gaming and the military are stereotypically seen as male. She's proud to be a woman involved in both.

"To me, it's really special because not a lot of women, I feel like, are represented in the Army," Alcantar said. "I feel like it's such a power move for women just because we can do the same thing men can, and we're finally allowed to do that after years that we couldn't."

Alcantar also won a raffle at the recruitment game night. She went home with a brand new copy of the game.

The recruiters won too. Out of about 110 people who attended the party, the military gained 35 leads.

This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans. Funding comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Source: https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/40083/20191206/army-recruitment-today-is-less-quot-be-all-you-can-be-quot-and-more-quot-call-of-duty-quot

 Gary Ghirardi / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 23 November 2019

The 750 retired admirals, generals, and other top military leaders who are members of Mission: Readiness recognize that the strength of our country depends on a strong military. Since 2009, Mission: Readiness has championed evidence-based, bipartisan state and federal public policy solutions that are proven to prepare our youth for life and to be able to serve their nation in any way they choose. 

OpEd: Gary David Ghirardi, National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth -

Mission: Readiness, a project ostensibly of the Pentagon, has just celebrated its tenth year of entering our nations preschools to promote the health and qualification of “children at risk” to be eligible to enter military service in fourteen years to fifteen years when they reach the age of legal military enlistment.  This program, which is one of five components of The Council For a Strong America, is a bipartisan effort by supporting Democratic and Republican policy makers and retired military elites to shepherd these youth into productive outcomes in opposition to what is being represented as an epidemic of bad health, crime, drug addiction and sub-literacy.

Mission: Readiness, in its initial incarnation, posited that the state of American youth was a “national security issue,” meaning that enlistment aged youth, due to inadequate health, educational deficits,  criminal records, and drug addiction, deprived the military of qualified candidates for military service. In subsequent years, the message was toned down to pose the issue as one of being “citizen ready” and now has morphed into five individually emphasized programs encompassing crime interdiction, military readiness, prepared workforce, physical preparedness and religious grounding, now being spearheaded by evangelicals to strengthen family and community ties.

Much of what is being expressed are ideas supportable aside from political or philosophical differences: We should want the best for our children and youth and want them to be healthy of mind and body and yet, coming from the perspective of peace communities, we need to ask and ultimately challenge, why should laudable goals be usurped by the Pentagon with its egregious history of national and international human rights violations and exposing its own soldiers to physical, social, and mental health threats?

We have seen in the current administration the elimination of school food programs for our poorest school students and yet have the military, through the Council for a Strong America, promoting concern for student health in their developmental diet. There seems to be a systematic shifting of resources from the civilian sector to the military one, as we see increasing budgets for military programs and  diminishing civilian investments for those most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of our market based economy.

In 2014, The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth initiated a  A National Call: Save Civilian Education, warning of the convergence of “the Pentagon, conservative forces, and corporations systematically working to expand their presence in the K-12 learning environment and public institutions of higher education.

Alarms were sounded on this increasing trend and little attention garnered outside of a few progressive media channels. With these trends continuing, are we experiencing a final shift away from civilian based assistance for those most vulnerable, and a cycling and re-education of marginalized communities into a permanent and dedicated military class?

With the counter military recruitment movement, also ten years beyond its peak of activism and now settling into an uncertain and challenged practice of groups facing the rapidly advancing onslaught of a well funded and youth focused military recruitment outreach from the Pentagon, there needs to come a recognition to encounter our youth at the same ages as does the Pentagon.  The counter-recruitment community needs to also struggle to make our case that the types of programs that encourage healthy youth, intellectually and physically, need to come from those institutions that are tasked, in the civilian mold, with developing healthy children, not as a national security issue, but rather on a humanitarian basis.

We cannot allow the military to have unlimited and unregulated access to the development of our children. We need to form our youth for a peaceful world and break away from a permanent war culture that invokes the national interest being that of those corporations that currently drive and profit from our militarized and securitized economy. Demilitarization activists must also challenge a militarized form of Evangelical Christianity, and its allied cohorts, that seek to hide their true justifications beneath a moralizing cover of religious righteousness.

There needs to rise a new generation of activists that will challenge this Military and Educational Complex, drawing on the progressive roots and tendencies that exist within our teachers unions and in our historical peace churches and communities of consciousness to not let this issue slip away in the plethora of issues facing our survival from a rapacious corporatist national order that has supplanted the commons.

The military does not belong in our schools forming our children, citizenry, and least of all re-configuring our fledgling democracy.

Leila Ettachfini / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 31 October 2019

“Debt is a form of social control. You can force people to do all kinds of things if you put them in debt first."

Leila Ettachfini / VICE - The U.S. Army has already achieved its recruiting goal this year, after falling short about 6,500 recruits in 2018. At the Pentagon this week, the head of Army Recruiting Command Maj. Gen. Frank Muth attributed the success to America’s crippling student debt crisis.

While the Department of Defense’s 2019 budget is $686 billion, that number is less than half of the collective student debt in America, which surpassed $1.5 trillion this year. “One of the national crises right now is student loans, so $31,000 is [about] the average,” Muth told reporters. “You can get out [of the Army] after four years, 100 percent paid for state college anywhere in the United States."

Though people have long used the Army as a means out of poverty and to earn an education, the Department of Defense has historically used patriotism or a sense of duty to urge people to enlist, but after a revamp in the recruiting process this year, Muth said that wars abroad were “not really part of the discussion” when speaking to potential soldiers. The Army’s new recruiting strategy relies, in part, on social media messaging, like this tweet from Army recruiters in Chicago:

“#PleaseAWomanIn5Words (or man). I'll pay your student loans! #ArmyTeamChicago”

Many have condemned the new strategy, including Georgia Parke, a communications director for Bernie Sanders. “But if we cancel student debt who will fight the endless wars?” she tweeted in response to the news. America’s longest-running war is in Afghanistan, which has been underway since 2001, with about 14,000 service members currently deployed there, according to the Department of Defense.

Thomas Gokey, an organizer with the Debt Collective, an organization of activists working toward debt cancellation, also believes that the Army’s use of offering help with student debt in exchange for enlisting is harmful. “Debt is a form of social control,” he said. “You can force people to do all kinds of things if you put them in debt first, including waging unjust wars, killing and hurting other people, and risking [their] own life and limbs.” Gokey also points out that colleges often benefit immensely from the GI Bill financially, giving them incentive to support recruitment on campus.

In addition to help with tuition and loans, Army recruits cite job stability, pay, health benefits, family history, and other factors as common reasons for enlisting.

Asked if he thinks the military’s recruitment strategy is ethical, Gokey said, “Since when has the U.S. Army cared about ethics?”

Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne833d/the-army-beat-its-recruitment-goals-this-year-by-targeting-students-in-debt

Kate Connell / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 24 October 2019

Dear Friends of Truth in Recruitment,

Thank you everyone who attended Truth in Recruitment's (TIR) Summit on Youth and the Military on October 12! It was a big success, and your participation means a lot to us. We hope that you gained more understanding of the Selective Service System, military recruitment in local schools, as well as the issues of deported veterans, and that you found the discussion helpful and informative.

At a Santa Maria High School career fair this October, students reported that all branches of the military were represented but only community college Allan Hancock had a table. No four-year universities or colleges were present. With this in mind, please save the date to give public comment at the next Santa Maria Joint Union High School District school board meeting on Tuesday, November 12, 6:30-8pm. Through our organizing, we will advocate for a balance of information on students’ post-secondary options, and for the SMJUHSD to be more receptive to the community needs.

A special thanks to our volunteers, sponsors, speakers, and resource tablers! Included in this group are the TIR Steering Committee, Future Leaders of America, House of Pride and Equality, Importa, California Rural Legal Assistance, Lideres Campesinas, Fund for Santa Barbara, McCune Foundation, Central Coast Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, Santa Barbara County Action Network, Veterans for Peace Santa Barbara, Santa Maria High School students and teachers, Just Communities, Santa Maria Public Library, Robert Vivar and other members of the Unified U.S. Deported Veterans Support House, Edward Hasbrouck of www.resisters.info, Monisha Rios, U.S. army veteran and TIR activist, Pat Alviso of Military Families Speak Yours in peace,

Kate Connell

P.S. Your support helps Truth in Recruitment provide balanced information on the military to students, families and entire communities in Santa Maria. On behalf of our organization and all those who benefit, thank you so much for your support!

Truth in Recruitment (TIR) is a project of the Santa Barbara Friends (Quaker) Meeting, a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Our goal is to educate students, families, and school districts about alternatives to military careers, inform families of their children's privacy rights, and advocate for policies regulating recruiter presence on campuses.

Click DONATE to make a donation today!

Zander, Pioneer Valley High School alumnus, and TIR student interns; Alicia, emcee, and Jenny, panelist.

https://truthinrecruitment.org/

Bonnie J. Caracciolo / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 12 October 2019 

Bonnie J. Caracciolo, Chelsea Uniting Against the War (CUAW) - On September 9, 2019 members and supporters of Chelsea Uniting Against the War (CUAW) greeted students on their way to school. CUAW was there to inform students about their right to opt out from having their personal information given to military recruiters.

Since 2001 and the No Child Left Behind Act along with the 2002 National Defense Authorization Act- both which provided for the presence of military recruiters in middle- and high-schools - young people have become vulnerable targets.

The group distributed over 1000 leaflets describing the facts about military enlistment including information on homelessness among veterans along with other serious issues. One in ten homeless people in the US is a military veteran. (2019) Additionally, 150 opt out forms were handed out.

Chelsea High School is in a mostly immigrant, working-class neighborhood near Boston, MA. Current enrollment is 1,335 students in 9th through 12th grade.

Each of the activists spoke to several students who knew about the opt out forms and had already signed them.

CUAW funds their activities in a number of ways including a yearly Bowl-A-Thon for Peace and other events which bring the tight knit community together and introduce their younger neighbors to these actions. Due to the profile of the community, all materials are in both English and Spanish. 

CUAW funds its activities in a number of ways including an upcoming Bowl for Peace/Boliche Por La Paz. This effort brings the community together. Plans are already underway to bring this message to other high schools which are actively targeted by recruiters. 

Young Vanguard / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 15 September 2019 

Young Vanguard, The Militant, Vol. III No. 10, 8 March 1930 - A new feature in the militarization of the American youth is taking place in New York. This act, in face of the recent London Conference, and all other peace and disarmament negotiations, belies the attempts of this government to appear as a promoter of peace. A bill has been introduced into the New York State Legislature calling for the conscription of all students between, the ages of 10 and 18 to compulsory military training.

To avoid resentment to this open attempt at making soldiers of the American youth the bill states in its title that it is “Instruction in boy scout training and kindred subjects”. But even such a covering fails to hide the fact that the aim and purpose of this bill is the preparation of cannon fodder for the coming war. As in all forms of military service, the weak and sick are eliminated, and the best physically are allowed the “privilege” of participation, which in this instant would mean compulsion to service.

The bill if passed would mean that all students, regardless of attendance at private or public schools would be forced to wear the uniform, take 30 minutes drill daily, and special training during the holidays, and summer vacation periods.

Need of Mass Movement

The passing of such a bill would necessarily set a precedent that would undoubtedly be pursued in other states. At the present moment only the Teachers Union of the State has protested against “this attempt to exploit the children of the state and thus keep alive the institution of militarism”. That however, is far from sufficient.

This particular attempt of the state of New York must be linked with the whole attempt at militarization of the youth In preparation of war. The struggle against war and militarization must be made a mass movement of protest and struggle. To effectively carry out such a struggle, only the Communist and class conscious workers leading the mass of workers can be relied upon. It demands effective organization and propaganda – a feature that is entirely lacking in the revolutionary movement in this country.

The present move on the part of the militarist strata must be viewed as part of the general war manoeuvers, and which will be more and more aimed at a war by the capitalist powers against the Workers Republic of the Soviet Union. Pictured in that light, the fight of the workers must be linked together with the general struggle against war and the brutal exploitation of the capitalist system. The present act is a warning to the working class of what to expect in the near future. It is a forerunner to the further preparation for war thru the attempt at complete militarization, not only of the working class and student youth, but of the whole industrial system of the country.

Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/glotzer/1930/03/milyouth.htm 

 Alex N. Press / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 15 September 2019

How Rory Fanning went from Army Ranger to war resister (and counter-recruiter).

Alex N. Press / Jacobin - In a high school classroom on the South Side of Chicago, Rory Fanning is telling students about the time he and his fellow Army Rangers occupied a school in Afghanistan. “We walked in and said, ‘School’s canceled, we’re going to use this as a military base for the next six weeks.’ There was nothing they could do about it.”

Sometimes, after abducting locals for reasons as thin as not showing enough deference to soldiers, his superiors would place their detainees in separate classrooms and fire a gun somewhere out of sight so that each detainee would think the other had been shot. At that point, says Fanning, “We’d walk into the rooms where each person was and say, ‘Your friend didn’t tell us what we wanted to hear. Do you have anything we want to hear?’ This is how we got information. These are things I watched.”

It’s June 2019; the so-called War on Terror has been going on since before any of the students in the room were born. Fanning is presenting his story — how he went from volunteer enlistee to conscientious objector — to three classes this morning. He’s doing what’s known as “counter-recruitment.” The US military spends more than a billion dollars a year to draw enlistees to what has been, since 1973, an all-volunteer force. The gigantic institution employs around ten thousand recruiters, and thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, they receive the same access to students as college recruiters. The odds are certainly not in Fanning’s favor.

Rather than finger-wagging to teenagers, telling them they cannot enlist, Fanning insists he simply wants them to know what they’re signing up for. After all, as he tells the class, the military is no regular job — if you try to quit, you can be sent to jail, or, at least historically, killed (“Your manager at Pizza Hut certainly doesn’t have that kind of power,” he says). His aim is to fill in the parts of the military experience that go unmentioned by recruiters — such as the fact that most of those killed in war are civilians, and that unlike Call of Duty, you can never turn off your memories of war.

The school we’re in has a particularly active Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program, and men in uniform pass by in the hall between class periods as Fanning hangs back, talking with the teacher who invited him to speak today. The military emphasizes JROTC’s role in “character development” rather than as a recruiting vehicle, but almost half of JROTC cadets go on to enlist.

Fanning enlisted in the Army Rangers shortly after 9/11 — the Rangers were having a particularly good year thanks to Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, a film depicting the regiment bloodletting in the Battle of Mogadishu. He had recently finished college and felt it wasn’t right that eighteen-year-olds, barely adults, were going to be the ones signing up to fight. Plus, he tells the class, he wanted to “prevent another 9/11.”

Despite Fanning’s desire to do good in the world — and maybe have his student debt paid off, too — it didn’t take long for him to come to a different view of the military. “I was expecting bullets to be whizzing by my head when I landed in Afghanistan,” he tells the students, “but when the sun came up the next day, all I saw was unbelievable amounts of poverty. I felt like a bully.”

Later, while cooking dinner for his family at his home in a Chicago suburb, Fanning will recount a common excursion for his unit: they would land a helicopter in someone’s front yard, enter a home to the sound of screaming children, and kidnap someone on what (Fanning only later realized) was usually worthless “intelligence.” “I never put a bag over someone’s head, but I watched a Navy seal do it, and [I] helped handcuff and carry the guy. You have no idea who the guy is. He’s breathing heavily, and you’re watching the green bag — it’s like a sandbag, abrasive — going in and out and wondering what’s going on in his brain. You just stare at this guy as we fly off into the night. And he’s — [pants, as if suffocating] — he has no idea if he’s going to be interrogated or killed or what, and then we go back to bed.”

“What I was doing in Afghanistan was making the world more dangerous,” he says. So he decided to become a war resister, seeking — and eventually obtaining — conscientious objector status, a rarity in Special Operations, especially at this early stage of the post-9/11 wars.

But Fanning’s act of protest rendered him persona non grata among the Rangers, banished for “abandoning” his fellow soldier. “For six months, I was on lockdown while they figured out what to do with me,” he says. “All my friends and the chain of command put me on punishment detail, and they just ridiculed me.”

No one would speak to him — unbreakable bonds of war be damned — save for two brothers: Pat and Kevin Tillman. Pat was famous, having left a $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to serve after 9/11. In doing so, he had become the all-American poster boy for military propaganda. Yet despite this image, “Tillman was growing frustrated with what he saw, too,” says Fanning.

Fanning got to know the brothers one Friday evening while on leave in Fort Benning, Georgia, after returning from his first tour in Afghanistan. He was on his way to meet his fellow Rangers at a bar — at this point, he was thinking about leaving the military, but he didn’t know how — when he saw the Tillmans in a coffee shop. While “everyone else was getting wasted,” Fanning tells me, the Tillmans were exchanging research papers on Israel-Palestine. “They were just trying to understand what was happening. That was something they did all the time.”

A friendship was struck, and when Fanning turned war resister, the Tillmans were “real sources of comfort.” Though Fanning wouldn’t realize it until returning to civilian life, Pat would also play a central role in his being discharged. In April 2004, he was called down to formation. He expected to be sent to Leavenworth, military prison, but instead was informed that Pat Tillman had been killed the previous night. Fanning was told Tillman “was killed in enemy ambush and died a hero.” Only later would the truth come out — that Tillman was killed by friendly fire, with the military apparatus all the way up to President George W. Bush having a hand in covering his death up. Fanning was discharged days later — the Rangers were under scrutiny and didn’t need a conscientious objector around.

The cover-up fed Fanning’s sense of betrayal. But being from a conservative, pro-military family, he didn’t know how to talk about his experiences and was scared to do so, so he spent “the next four years hiding what’d happened” to him, grateful at least to have escaped further punishment. Yet the need to speak about what he now knew of the military gnawed at him — the wars weren’t stopping, and people were barely talking about them anymore. He decided to at least show his gratitude to the Tillmans by raising money for the Pat Tillman Foundation. He did so by walking across the country, and then he wrote a book about it. In the process, he discovered radical histories, learning about Nat Turner’s slave uprising, and Dolores Huerta’s labor organizing, and parallels to his own war resistance, such as the San Patricio Battalion: Irish soldiers who deserted the US side to join the Mexicans in the Mexican-American war — and were hanged for this rebellion. Gradually, he became a socialist.

“It’s only in the past ten years that I’ve been talking about this,” Fanning, now forty-two, tells me. As he began reading, books like Howard Zinn’s and Stephen Kinzer’s histories of US intervention, and, later, journalist Anand Gopal’s writing on Afghanistan, the feeling of having been deceived only grew. “I realized: this isn’t only my experience, it’s the experience of all these other people who claim to defend freedom and democracy but are doing the complete opposite, and have been for decades.”

I was expecting bullets to be whizzing by my head when I landed in Afghanistan, but when the sun came up the next day, all I saw was unbelievable amounts of poverty. I felt like a bully.

Now, Fanning feels he has no option but to speak out about war and imperialism. “If a veteran goes into a high school and opposes war, the message might have a better chance of being heard,” he says. He admits that family and old friends don’t invite him to dinner as much as they might’ve had he kept his mouth shut, but the trade-off is a no-brainer: “I feel like I can breathe.” He supports dissenters abroad, such as corresponding with draft resisters in Israel, and at home: both active-duty soldiers and veterans regularly reach out to him. He encourages them to resist in groups, rather than alone — “It’s way harder for the military to push back on a bunch of people instead of one person.”

When Colin Kaepernick began taking a knee in protest against police violence, Fanning supported him, forming Veterans for Kaepernick. And when Kaepernick’s detractors invoked Pat Tillman, he countered this with the Tillman he knew, who, he insists, would’ve been on Kaepernick’s side. “It’s next to impossible for me to imagine otherwise,” he says, refusing to let his friend be conscripted by the forces of militarism, even in death.

Yet the US military is a behemoth so hulking as to feel unstoppable, impenetrable, undefeatable. When I ask Fanning if he ever feels hopeless about the possibility of closing the country’s eight-hundred-some bases abroad and ultimately dismantling the military, as he hopes to do, he laughs, shaking his head. “You chip away,” he says. Sure, there is a “sense of fatigue” and deflation after mass marches and organizing failed to stop the Iraq War. But, he adds, “every change in history has happened at such a small level at first, and my hope comes from the gains we’ve seen just in the past few years.” Plus, despite the billions spent, the military hasn’t been meeting its recruiting goals lately.

The past few years have seen the start of a revival of socialist politics, and while the US left is still small, Fanning sees its priorities as inextricably entangled with, and relevant to, the military and veterans. A broader social safety net would remove critical lures in recruiters’ tool kits at schools like the one we visited earlier in the day. “Poverty draft” is the phrase for describing the targeting of poor, working-class, and, particularly, black and Latino kids for recruitment. According to a 2014 investigation by the Chicago Reporter, 93 percent of Chicago’s JROTC cadets are black or Latino — the city has the country’s largest JROTC program, and more than 70 percent of its JROTC schools are in “high schools located in majority-black or majority-Latino” zip codes. Dangling the (not always fulfilled) promise of multi-thousand-dollar signing bonuses, free or reduced-cost college, citizenship, loans, health care, and a career, the military is appealing to young people who are otherwise denied livable wages and benefits.

But free higher education, universal health care, and genuinely affordable housing wouldn’t only remove reasons for joining — they’d also help veterans, who, despite their surface-level veneration (being trotted out at sports events or given the occasional discount), continue to suffer profoundly, with twenty committing suicide each day and roughly forty thousand homeless. Veterans could offer a lot to the Left, too, says Fanning. After all, there are millions of people connected to the US military, people veterans are well positioned to reach.

Despite what he feels is a natural kinship between veterans and the Left, there remains ambivalence in certain quarters of the latter as to how, or whether, to relate to the former. Although veterans and active-duty soldiers were a key part of the movement against the Vietnam War, that was at the time of a draft. Even acknowledging the significant size of the poverty draft, many soldiers are not poor and sign up voluntarily, for ideological reasons, even if those reasons often boil down to a generic patriotism. Though many in the military are glorified bureaucrats — pencil pushers who never see combat — some soldiers do, in fact, kill people.

But if the Left is to build a mass movement, veterans and active-duty soldiers have a role to play. “People sign up because they think they’re doing the right thing, because that’s what society teaches you. And then when they realize they’re not, they feel betrayed,” says Fanning. “If people are unapologetic” about their time in the US military, “that’s one thing,” he says. “But it’s another thing to say, ‘I did the best with the information I had access to, with what society taught me, and after I learned there was a better way, I went that better way.’”

“There are lot of disgruntled veterans out there,” he says. “A lot of people are looking for community in the military, and that’s what keeps them there. They stay in for all the wrong reasons, doing things no one agrees with. But what if people said, collectively, we’re going to get out of this together, we don’t have to abandon one another? If you can build those same kinds of bonds in struggle and protest, and offer antiwar veterans a platform in a society that shuts them out otherwise, while removing the economic reasons for joining, you can draw a lot of people away from the military.” While there are currently a few organizations for antiwar veterans — Veterans for Peace, along with About Face — as the Left grows, Fanning expects the presence of socialist veterans will, too.

As for the far right’s inroads among military members, Fanning sees this is an unnatural pairing. While racism and xenophobia are central to the US military’s perpetration of violence, for disaffected soldiers to direct their anger toward immigrants or people of color more generally “makes no sense.” “We’re going to blame the people with no political power, no financial power, no military power for all of our problems?” he practically shouts as we sit in his backyard, his family inside, getting ready for dinner. “To the extent it works, it’s only because soldiers haven’t encountered the opposite argument” from the Left. “We have way more in common with the people we’re ‘fighting’ in these wars than with the people telling us to go fight, the generals who are supposedly on our same team.”

“The JROTC kids in Chicago that I’ve spoken to aspire to do other things. They come from backgrounds without a lot of resources, and they’re looking to give themselves a chance,” says Fanning. “But they’re also interested in standing up for something, a higher ideal.” At his house, Fanning is recounting the students’ reactions to his talk today — the boy who the teacher told us usually never sits still, riveted, yelling from the back row in anger at what Fanning said; the girl who was considering enlisting, but now wasn’t so sure. You can’t will an upsurge, much less a revolution, into existence, but in the meantime, you chip away.

Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/the-defector

Jonah Walters / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 17 August 2019

Jonah Walters, Jacobin - A smattering of information has been revealed about Connor Betts, the misogynist twenty-four-year-old who killed nine people and injured twenty-seven in Dayton earlier this month.

One of them was that he was in the Bellbrook High School Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program, according to a classmate. We know little about Betts’s time in the program, the training he received, or what impact it had on him. But it’s worth mentioning that we have thousands of kids in America getting military training at school.

An estimated 500,000 high schoolers at 3,400 schools are enrolled in the JROTC, administered jointly by the military and each local school district. Students enrolled in JROTC classes are assigned ranks, taught military comportment and demeanor, and required to wear military uniforms. In most cases, students also receive training in military skills like marksmanship using school shooting ranges.

The Pentagon insists that JROTC is not a recruitment program, but a practical curriculum that teaches integrity and discipline — as innocuous as sports or physical education. But between 40 and 50 percent of students who complete three years of JROTC enlist in the military upon graduation, in part because JROTC graduates can receive enhanced pay and preferential benefits.

JROTC units are supervised by retired military officers who are exempt from civilian teaching certification requirements. To retain federal funding, each JROTC unit must maintain enrollment of 100 students or 10 percent of the student body — leaving the program vulnerable to organized student and parent boycotts.

Shooting Ranges Have No Place in Schools (Obviously)

About 2,200 schools offer hands-on marksmanship training, according to data from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, a government-chartered entity that collaborates with JROTC units to create and maintain school shooting ranges. Until about 2000, students were usually trained on .22-caliber rifles, but nowadays instructors use pellet guns.

There have been efforts to end this practice. After the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley disbanded the thirty-three “rifle teams” that had previously operated in that city’s public schools. In 2009, the San Diego Unified School District banned marksmanship training after years of sustained protest from students and parents, removing the eleven shooting ranges that had previously operated at public schools in that city.

ASVAB Is Not Healthy for Children or Other Living Things

Under the guise of the innocuous-sounding “ASVAB Career Exploration Program,” the Department of Defense administers the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to some 655,000 students in twelve thousand schools each year. The explicit purpose of the ASVAB test is to identify high school juniors and seniors as candidates for targeted recruitment — but often the test is marketed to school guidance counselors (and students) as a generic career aptitude test.

In more than a thousand high schools around the country, students are actually required by school policy to take the test, often without parental knowledge. While schools may choose to administer the test without sharing the results, it remains very difficult for students and parents themselves to opt out of the ASVAB data-sharing process. In about 92 percent of cases, ASVAB results are shared immediately with the military.

They’re Keeping Tabs on Your Kids

The Department of Defense database known as “JAMRS” (for “Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies”) contains the names of some 30 million people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, for the purpose of targeted military recruitment.

Top secret until 2005, a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union forced JAMRS to stop storing social security numbers, but the database still contains information like students’ full names, addresses, grade-point averages, and ASVAB test scores. The lawsuit also failed to prevent JAMRS from storing race and ethnicity information, likely due to the military’s long-standing interest in recruiting black and Latino students.

Creating JAMRS required compiling data from sources like the Department of Motor Vehicles and the College Board, as well as purchasing data from consumer marketing corporations — all at an estimated cost of about a billion dollars. Thanks to the ACLU lawsuit, students can now have their name and data placed in a “suppression file” by filling out an opt-out form. But there is no way for students to completely delete their names from JAMRS.

It’s Not Just High School

In recent years, the Department of Defense has turned more of its outreach focus toward children much younger than high schoolers.

“DoD STARBASE,” a program founded in 1993 and funded through the military’s recruitment budget, brings fifth graders to tour military facilities and introduce them to military careers.

“Mission: Readiness,” a nonprofit controlled by retired generals, pairs military personnel with classrooms of pre-kindergarten children (four-year-olds) to promote physical fitness and exercise. The organization, which received its start-up cash through President Obama’s 2014 budget, was founded in response to concerns about the battle-readiness of young enlistees.

The military sucks up billions of dollars every year that could go to funding education. The least it could do is stop indoctrinating our kids in the joys of warfare.

Jonah Walters is a researcher at Jacobin and a graduate student in geography at Rutgers University.

Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/jrotc-army-recruitment-high-schools-connor-betts-dayton-shooting

Emilio, Educarueca.org / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 28 July 2019

This article posting dedicated to Libby Frank of the Northwest Suburban Peace & Education Project

Emilio, Educarueca.org - In the summer of 1963, the League of War Resisters created a peace action committee that fundamentally fought against the anti-terrorism terrorism exercised by the US-backed Ngo Dinh Diem government of South Vietnam. On July 25 there were pickets in the house of the permanent observer from South Vietnam to the UN, and in October, a demonstration to “welcome” Mrs. Ngo Dinh Nhu during her visit to New York.

THE FIRST NATIONAL SCALE PROTEST.

The first important demonstration against the war took place in New York on December 19, 1964, and was supported by the WRL, CNVA, FOR, the socialist party and SPU. One thousand five hundred people took to the streets despite a temperature below zero to hear the war denounced to Muste, Norman Thomas and. Philip Randolph. In San Francisco, one hundred people heard Joan Baez sing. Other demonstrations took place in Minneapolis, Miami, Austin, Sacramento, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston and Cleveland. A feature of the mobilization was the disclosure of "a Call to American Consciousness," which prompted an immediate ceasefire and the earliest possible withdrawal of US troops.

THE YEAR OF VIETNAM.

1965 was "the year of Vietnam." The statement of the first US bombing in North Vietnam on February 7 generated pickets and seated throughout the country. These were perpetuated throughout the month, and many efforts were invested in collecting signatures for a new appeal that prompted civil disobedience. The Cincinnati Pacifists group organized a “Committee against taxes for the Vietnam War” to claim fiscal resistance. In December 1969, an independent War Resistance to War group was created that had about 200 tax resistance centers throughout the country. On March 16, 1965 Alice Herz, an 82-year-old widow who had fled from Nazism, set herself on fire at a busy intersection in Detroit; She died ten days later. On November 2 Norman Morrison, secretary of a Friends Encounter, burned himself to death in front of the Pentagon. A week later, Roger La Porte, a young volunteer from the New York Catholic Labor movement, set himself on fire in front of the UN. The first national anti-war demonstration was organized on April 17 by Students for a Democratic Society, as a march through Washington to end the Vietnam War. The Assembly of Unrepresented Persons, from August 6 to 9, brought together the pacifist and civil rights movements in what resulted in the largest demonstration in Washington for civil disobedience to date. A march from the Washington Monument to the Capitol ended with a sitting in which 350 people were arrested. At the same time, students from Berkeley and other Bay Area schools tried to stop trains arriving in Oakland with soldiers destined for Vietnam. The Assembly of Unrepresented Persons also generated the National Coordinating Committee to End the Vietnam War, which made preparations for the demonstrations of October 15 and 16, 1965, Days of International Protest. This led to the formation in New York of the Fifth Avenue Pacifist Parade Committee, a unique coalition of all groups opposed to the Vietnam War, including liberals, pacifists, communists, and the new and old left. Under the direction of AJ Muste, a march on Fifth Avenue reached more than 50,000 participants, and an organizational model was created for future mobilizations nationwide.

THE BURNING OF MILITARY CARTILLES.

On October 15, David Miller, a Catholic Worker, decided to burn his military draft card instead of delivering a speech. The act received tremendous publicity, as it was the first draft card burned after the promulgation that summer of a law of Congress that equated the destruction of a military draft card to the serious crime of not going to the ranks. Burning the cards had been a traditional form of pacifist protest against the call to the ranks. In May 1964, twelve men burned their cards in New York City as a protest against mandatory military service. A few weeks before the Assembly of Unrepresented Persons, there was another burning of cards in New York, which was denounced in the national media, and caused the Washington patriots to rush to pass a bill in Congress to ban this practice. On November 6, in New York City, AJ Muste presided over a very well organized draft card burn.

THE PRINCIPLE OF A COUNTER CULTURE

The pacifists had long encouraged people to stop working in war industries and to separate themselves from the bellicose government. Many young people came to consider the whole society as part of a warlike culture, and they self-asserted; they would no longer collaborate with the American way of life that had generated Vietnam. This movement was intended to be apolitical, but in reality it was a decisive political rejection of militarism and the State. Because they were opposed to violence and appealed to lifestyle rather than covert rhetoric, radical pacifists saw that they could relate to this counter cultural lifestyle very easily. The New York WIN group, Jim Hayes and some friends from New England, the people around the WRL-West of San Francisco and a new anarchist orientation chapter of the WRL in Los Angeles began to address the self-organized community in an attempt to fill the new lifestyle with political content. The opportune moment for this type of transformation had arrived and, consequently, the pacifist movement was more than a movement against the Vietnam War, and the changes that it produced reached the deepest of the basic way in which the Americans looked and structured their lives.

A VISIBLE PROTEST

This change occurred gradually: it began in 1966, reached its highest point with the euphoria of the summer of love of 1967 and ran into the reality of the Chicago demonstrations in 1968. Street demonstrations were frequent in 1966. The minimum provocation it was enough to gather people picketing a dinner whose host was Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to block traffic as a protest against a new bombing of North Vietnam, to block the way for recruitment officers at universities, to occupy the offices of Dow Chemical against the production of napalm; to distribute pamphlets against the call to the ranks in fifth centers late at night, induce young people to refuse military service and advise them on how not to return - there was a demonstration for everything.

THE RESISTANCE

Radical pacifists had always insisted that "wars would cease when men refused to fight." Therefore, much of its energy was poured into organizing activities of resistance to military service. During the early years of the Vietnam conflict, there were numerous examples of men who refused to go out and even get ready. The Pacifists published a list of non-collaborators that lasted every month, and many CNVA-related activists burned military draft cards or refused to form fifths, but none of these efforts were organized collectively. The first collective action against military service took place on April 15, 1967 in what became the largest pacifist demonstration in US history. until the time: a group in Sheep's Meadow, in the New York Central Park, followed by a march to the UN of hundreds of thousands of participants. That morning, 175 men burned their draft cards. Non-quintable Friends also met, who organized support groups that eventually met as Resistid: Support-in-Action. The first restitution of the draft cards to the government was carried out by more than 1500 men on October 3, 1967. The second, on December 4, brought with it 475 more resistant; and on April 3, 1968, another 630 began their noncooperation with military service.

THE CONFRONTATION WITH WARMONGERS.

The crucial, and probably the most memorable, action was announced as a "confrontation with the warmongers" and took place at the Pentagon on October 21 and 22, 1967. Thousands of people marched on the building and, when the soldiers blocked the step, they sat at their feet in an improvised collective educational group that lasted all night from Saturday to Sunday night. Hundreds of people were arrested, and many received a beating at the hands of US justice officials, who tried to discourage protesters with unbridled brutality. People took different memories: some remembered the community that was created among strangers on the Pentagon stairway, the sharing of food, the resolution not to counterattack or break ranks in the face of government aggressions; others remembered more the feeling of unity with the soldiers, and left with the idea that these were not the enemies, despite the uniforms, which shared many values ​​and beliefs of the movement and should be treated as brothers. And others, irritated because they failed to pass the military barrier or invade the Pentagon, considered it a failure and blamed the nonviolent tactics. A second crucial action occurred in the Bay Area during the week of the confrontation at the Pentagon. In order to close the Oakland fifth center, Week to End Military Service was organized. On Monday, a pacifist sitting closed the center for three hours and generated 123 arrests. On November 15, 1969, more than half a million people went to Washington to the largest anti-war demonstration in the history of the United States. Peace centers were also set up throughout the country, which organized the people in the struggle for an immediate end to the war.

RECRUITMENT RESISTANCE.

Throughout the war, some pacifist and anti-war groups advised recruitment-resistant people, and occasionally helped them find refuge in Canada and elsewhere. Thus, people regularly sheltered absent soldiers without permission, and provided them with security in the same way that abolitionists created an underground railroad for runaway slaves during the United States Civil War. It is estimated that there were between 80,000 and 100,000 deserters and fugitives, especially in Canada, but also in Sweden, in France and in most countries of Western Europe, in many of which they had been granted legal asylum.

THE OPPOSITION IS GENERALIZED.

In the 70s, the whole of the anti-war movement was fragmented into violent and nonviolent factions. None could channel the enthusiasm of a large number of activists as the SDS had done in 1969. Later we learned that part of this was due to the destructive tactics of the FBI. In May 1970, one hundred thousand people moved to the capital, with a week's notice, to protest against the invasion of Cambodia and the murder of four students at Kent State University, Ohio. For the pacifists, the beginning of the 1970s was marked by small nonviolent assaults on recruitment selection offices and, on one occasion, at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Approximately one million files of fifths were destroyed in several widespread actions; Participants destroyed reports in public seeking their detention or fled later. Although many ended up in jail, these assaults sharpened and fostered anti-war sentiments.

THE RETURN TO NOVIOLENCE.

In May 1971, the SOS Tribe, a group formed by pacifist and non-pacifist activists, organized a one-week demonstration with the aim of paralyzing the city of Washington through a nonviolent traffic obstruction tactic. More than 13,500 people were arrested in three days of nonviolent action.

THE END OF THE WAR.

On January 20, 1973, thousands of protesters went to Washington to protest against the inauguration of the office of President Richard Nixon and against the Christmas attempt to frighten and subdue North Vietnam with 36,000 tons of bombs. When the Paris Peace Accords concluded, most Americans were relieved that the Vietnam War was finally over. They did not know that the war would actually continue for more than two years, with more and more Vietnamese victims. Peace finally arrived in April 1975, but not as a result of the Paris Accords. Despite the enormous support of the US, the war effort in South Vietnam and Cambodia was demoralized and failed. On May 11 at Sheep's Meadow, in New York's Central Park, some 80,000 people came out to celebrate the end of the war.

Source: http://www.educarueca.org/spip.php?article867

 Will Carless / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 05 January 2019

Students in the Young Marines program in Hanover, Pa., attend a ball at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in October 2017. They wear their finest dresses and suits. Their eyes fix on a large American flag as the national anthem falls from their lips.Credit: Sarah Blesener for Reveal

In rural central Florida, a group of children sit on a jetty, their reflections dappled in water the color of iced tea. It is quiet. Stifling, peaceful. The children pray over the breakfast they’re about to eat and ask for blessings for those whose hands prepared it. And they ask for safety during their upcoming weapons training, during which they will learn how to disarm a knife-wielding attacker, load a rifle and properly handle a handgun.

In Harlingen, Texas, young boys loll on the grass in the sunshine, swapping their families’ war stories.

“My uncle killed Taliban in Afghanistan,” one boy says nonchalantly.

Another shares a tale about a relative who tried to sneak an AK-47 back to the U.S. The boys will spend a few more weeks at this private quasi-military camp, where they will engage in physical, mental and weapons training. Some of them dream of a career in the armed forces.

In the small town of Herriman, Utah, children as young as 6 learn the Declaration of Independence by putting it to song. Over a few hot summer days, they will learn about “Americanism,” a blend of patriotism and history that casually mixes in some of the basic tenets of radical libertarianism. During one lesson, they’ll pretend to overturn a boat full of tea into Boston Harbor. In another class, these elementary school children will be taught that it is wrong for the government to force them to pay for social programs in the form of taxes.

New York-based photographer Sarah Blesener spent the past year traveling the United States visiting youth summer camps and events. She has photographed and interviewed dozens of children, from 8-year-old Utahns to teenagers in the Bronx borough of New York. She has camped in sweltering, bug-infested central Florida with religious survivalists and hiked the dusty frontier of the U.S.-Mexico border with 12-year-olds – most of them Latino – who want to “take down illegals.” Along the way, Blesener gained insight into not only how America’s youth think, but also the ways adults guide these children onto philosophical, religious and political paths.

The camps Blesener visited – a slice of hundreds, if not thousands, of similar camps – fall into three general categories: patriotic camps, which aim to instill a love for America and a deep knowledge of the religious roots of the country’s founding; military camps, where children undergo rigorous physical training and are taught the discipline and skills crucial to a career in the armed forces; and survivalist camps, where kids learn skills such as building shelters and identifying edible plants in preparation for an apocalypse, natural disaster or the Second Coming.

It would be tempting to assume that interest in the camps is directly related to recent shifts in U.S. society, the 2016 presidential election and a renewed spirit of American nationalism and patriotism.

But there are myriad reasons why these children attend camps. Some are keen to get a taste of military life, eager to see whether they can survive “boot camp light.” At the Utah patriot camps, most kids have been brought by parents who want them to experience unfiltered American pride they are unlikely to find anywhere else. And then there are the reluctant campers: the teenagers who lament losing half of their summers to patriotism, pushups and prayer, but attend because their parents make them and they don’t really have a say.

Many of these camps, especially the military ones, enforce strict dress codes. Taking care of your uniform is one of the primary rules at several camps Blesener visited. Even the patriot camps have their own uniform – bright red T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “I Love America.”

The less formal camps are run and staffed primarily by volunteers, with paid professionals sometimes brought in to lead firearms safety or self-defense training. But the organized military camps, most of which form part of sprawling national organizations, have legions of paid staff, many of them veterans. Increasingly, these bigger camps look more like offshoots of the military than private enterprises, with their uniforms, ex-military staff and weapons – much of which are paid for indirectly by U.S. taxpayers.

“Overall, I wanted to look at how, as a culture, we pass down patriotic and military traditions to children,” said Blesener, who spent the year as a fellow at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting with support from CatchLight and the Alexia Foundation. “And I think this is an extraordinarily interesting time to do this. America is so divided, and I wanted to speak to youth and see if they are as divided and what their worldview is and how they are being shaped as young adults.”

Forging a new ‘Americanism’

President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to “make America great again” is a message Julie Knudsen has been propagating for years: Not only should America reclaim a proud past, but it also desperately needs to regain pride in the greatness of the American experiment itself.

Back in 2011, Knudsen co-founded the Utah Patriot Camp. Aimed at children ages 5 to 12, the camp was a reaction to Obama-era American apologizing, she said. It was designed to be a safe place where children could learn the glories of the American republic – the beatific nature of this country’s birth.

“We teach the miracle that happened during the Revolution, that God’s hand was involved in the creation of America,” Knudsen said. “A lot of people come for that sort of stuff.”

Without knowing it, Knudsen had tapped into a sentiment that would, five years later, help propel Trump to the presidency. The ethos of the Utah Patriot Camps (she said there are now 15 across three states catering to more than 850 children) represents a new era of patriotism that closely aligns with messages and policies being crafted in Washington, D.C.

The messages of “America first” and “Americanism” can be found at the forefront of far-right political movements such as the one driven by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, as well as in the pages of literature handed out at camps such as Knudsen’s.

“After the war, everybody wanted George Washington to be the king, because he was such a great leader,” a teacher told the class at the Utah camp Blesener attended in June. “And Satan tried to tempt him. Did you know that?”

A small boy interrupted: “What does ‘tempt’ mean?”

“ ‘Tempt’ means a kind of trick,” the teacher said. “Do you think he could have done a lot of good? He could have. But that’s not what God wanted, was it? He wanted this country to be free, right?”

The class took place in the shade of trees in a public park in Herriman. The park had been adorned with dozens of American flags, and they fluttered in the light morning breeze as the children moved from session to session.

Knudsen’s camp is inspired by the 9/12 Project, a now largely defunct organization launched in 2009 by conservative radio host Glenn Beck. Its motto was “Restoring America.”

Everything Knudsen heard and read about the project appealed to her. So she sent away for a copy of a Patriot Camp Handbook, written in 2010 by a group of Pennsylvania moms as “our attempt to generate enthusiasm in our communities about teaching children what makes America unlike any other nation.”The manual became Knudsen’s blueprint for her camp. She expected a few applicants. She got more than 100.

“I think it filled a void,” she said.

The camps feature sessions during which kids sing the Declaration of Independence and include visits from actors dressed as the Founding Fathers. But there are also sessions such as a “redistribution of wealth” activity, during which half of the children do jumping jacks to earn Tootsie Rolls. The candy is then distributed evenly among all the kids – including those who did no “work.”

The manual gives guidance on what should happen next: “Emphasize that it is our own individual responsibility to be charitable,” it reads, “not the government’s job to redistribute our wealth, or take our money to give to others.”

While there are hints like this of right-wing politics in the manual and the lessons, Blesener was most struck by the camp’s overall ethos of unabashed American glorification and a focus on the U.S. as being founded directly by a higher power.

“There was a lot of fun educational stuff – making popsicles, that kind of thing – but there was also this really kind of intense theory they were teaching,” Blesener said. “At one point, they were talking about the Declaration of Independence, and they said it was the first time in history that anybody had ever stood up to their king or queen, which obviously is just not true.”

Public money for private boot camps

At a South Dakota camp run by the Civil Air Patrol – a quasi-military organization primarily funded by Congress – students discussed how best to display their American pride with a teacher brought in to instruct them on flag etiquette.

“In our generation, we obviously see that people don’t treat the flag with the respect it deserves,” one student said. “What should we do when we see a group of people disrespecting that?”

The instructor responded, Blesener recalled, by saying the children should intervene and share their knowledge of how to properly handle and respect the flag with their peers.

At a camp run by another quasi-military organization, the Young Marines, Blesener watched children as young as 8 go through an initiation ritual that included dressing and undressing as quickly as possible. Most of the kids broke down in tears, Blesener said, only to be built back up again by their instructors.

As the drills ended, the children were comforted and told that they had succeeded where others had failed. They were now part of a family, an elite unit.

“Afterward, I was talking to the camp leaders and they were saying, ‘Nowadays, everyone is so politically correct. … Not everyone can take this kind of initiation, everyone is apologizing for their behavior,’ ” Blesener said. “We just want to be one of those groups that is proud of who we are and won’t apologize for it.”

Many of the quasi-military youth camps are privately run and funded, with some camps costing thousands of dollars to attend. Other camps are staffed by volunteers and are free to all. Young Marines camps lie somewhere in the middle, with some charging a nominal registration fee while the bulk of the costs are borne by the organization.

According to Young Marines’ tax filings, the nonprofit received more than $4 million of its about $7 million in funding from “government grants” in 2014. The tax records offer no additional detail about which grants the organization received. Bill Davis, Young Marines’ executive director, wrote in an email that the funds are from a federal grant in part for drug demand reduction efforts, administered by the Department of Defense.

“It’s a quasi-military recruitment program,” said Rick Jahnkow, an anti-militarist activist who founded two organizations aimed at preventing children from becoming “militarized” in schools. “It’s intended to plant seeds in kids as young as elementary school, so that eventually they either become recruitable or, at a minimum, their minds have been recruited.”

Jahnkow and other activists keep a close eye on the military’s attempts to recruit in schools. Traditionally, their campaigns have focused on programs such as the junior ROTC and military-funded shooting ranges in schools, with some success. They’re extremely concerned about programs – some funded by the National Rifle Association – that bring guns into schools.

These programs made national news recently after it was revealed that Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old charged with killing 17 people in a mass shooting at a Florida high school, had participated on a JROTC air rifle team supported by the NRA. Cruz was wearing a T-shirt with the shooting program’s
logo when he was arrested.

But the uptick in recent years of private military youth camps funded with public money has opened a new front in the activists’ work, and it has them concerned.

“It’s a creeping plague,” said Libby Frank, a member of the steering committee for the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth. “It’s all geared toward getting people used to the idea that the military is a major part of their life.”

Blesener, too, said she was concerned by how these camps exploit children’s vulnerabilities by instilling them with notions of America’s military might and moral exceptionalism.

“There is absolutely zero criticism of what the American military does overseas at these camps,” Blesener said. “Every single leader you talk to will deny that these are recruitment camps, but of course, they are. Introducing a child to an activity or a worldview at such a young age is clearly a way to steer them in that direction.”

One of the children Blesener met over the summer, 17-year-old Elizabeth Nelson, went on to enlist in the Army. Nelson said she learned at the camp that, on enlistment, she would get credit for her time spent there if she reached a certain rank at camp.

“I was like, ‘Wowzer!’ ” Nelson said. “I had always wanted to enlist, but when I heard about Civil Air Patrol, I was like, ‘This could really help me in my career.’ ”

Prepping for the ‘zombie apocalypse’

Children attending the North Florida Survival School talked a lot about the zombie apocalypse. They were joking, but for the older kids, the term was a sort of code – an analogy for a coming catastrophe that could be around the next corner.

“The zombie apocalypse is just the fun, easy way to look at it, but the reality is that at any point, an apocalypse could start, whether it is the economy or a nuclear attack,” said 17-year-old Jasmine Burke.

Many street-smart teenagers in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago probably would sneer at their devout, well-behaved counterparts in rural Florida, who spend their weekends learning how to build shelters, start fires and find edible plants, as well as holding prayer sessions and singing hymns by the lake.

Kids such as 17-year-old Joseph Chubb acknowledge this. He is well aware that city kids find it odd that teenagers might want to learn how to collect clean water or hygienically dig a latrine. But to teenagers attending the North Florida Survival School in late August, the ones who should be mocked are the teens sitting in their apartments in the big cities, assuming that their lights will always turn on, the Wi-Fi will never go out and the pizza guy will always deliver.

“Most people in America don’t even know how to light a fire,” Chubb said. “The shelter of the indoors, the increase in modern technology – it’s obvious we’ve become more dependent on that. When you don’t need to go outside and make a fire, you forget how to do it.”

The three-day midsummer camp outside Ocala culminated in an afternoon session firing rifles at a target by the lake. One by one, the kids donned ear protection and shooting goggles and learned how to properly load, aim and fire two different rifles.

For several of the children, who had been shooting for years, the training session was merely a refresher of the rules they had long committed to memory. But for 9-year-old Austin Gerthe, the afternoon offered some valuable lessons.

“One time, I shot my dad’s shotgun secretly,” Austin confided before the session. By the end of the training, however, the skinny, freckled boy had yet to master the rules of handling weapons. The instructors decided he was better off just watching.

There are no reliable statistics showing whether demand for survivalist training camps is growing or waning. Steven Claytor, owner of the North Florida Survival School, said he has seen demand increase over the last few years, but suggested it had more to do with a flood of survival-themed TV shows than with Trump’s election or increased global geopolitical tension.

Other survivalist camps reported a more recent boost directly related to the 2016 presidential election.

“The phone hasn’t stopped ringing since Dumpy Trumpy took office,” said Shane Hobel, owner of the Mountain Scout Survival School in New York’s Hudson Valley. He said potential customers are “freaking out” about the possibility of Trump pulling the U.S. into a nuclear war. And they’re worried his leadership could cause the economy to collapse.

But Eric Giles, who owns the Texas Survival School in North Texas, had a different experience.

“It’s kinda slowed down,” he said. “It slowed down after the election. A certain group of people were worried about (Hillary) Clinton getting in, but they’re not worried anymore.”

About this project:

• Visit: An exhibition of this work in New York City, through April 1, 2018 or in San Francisco, May 3-30 with other Catchlight fellows at SF Camerawork.

• Read: What Sarah Blesener learned during her fellowship year.

• Learn: More about Blesener and the funding behind this project.

Source: https://www.revealnews.org/article/youth-camps-shape-new-generations-with-patriotism-pushups-and-prayer/

 Truth in Recruitment (TIR) / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles 15 October 2018

The military has an enormous budget for recruiting and pressuring school districts that limit recruiter visits….Vigilance is necessary. During the school year 2017-18 Truth in Recruitment (TIR) leadership and staff met with Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD) school board members Ismael Ulloa, Wendi Sims-Mooten and Jackie Reid as well as Assistant Superintendent Shawn Carey on four separate occasions. We discussed implementation of the Exhibit 5125.1 Recruiting Activities in the Santa Barbara Unified School District and the continued problem of policy violations.

Two issues took a lot of back and forth with the district to work out — the Opt Out form for release of directory information, and recruiters’ efforts to solicit contact information directly from students:

• We believe that a recruiter told the SBUSD that they could not give parents a choice on the Opt Out form to check a separate box to opt out only from the military getting a child’s information. Last year the district combined the two as a single opt-out – Colleges/Military. After much research by John Douglas, a retired lawyer and Dos Pueblos HS alumni parent, the district agreed to ‘uncouple’ the choices. We showed them over 20 examples of school districts who gave families an either or choice, including the state of Hawaii, and such cities as Chicago, San Diego, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. The Military Law Task Force and the Project on Youth and Nonmilitary Opportunities also aided this effort.

• The second issue–some SBUSD high schools allowed recruiters to use ‘surveys’ and contact cards to collect student contact information directly from students. Under the federal Every Child Succeeds Act, school districts are only required to give recruiters a student’s name, address and telephone number. These surveys, prominent on the recruiter’s tables, asked for student’s email, GPA, U.S. citizenship status and more, under the guise of finding out their job interests for the military. Such surveys ignore parents’ opt out right to privacy. Recruiters also have handed their phones to students for them to follow each other on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. The military uses social media platforms extensively. After we showed examples of these “surveys” to the administration, they agreed that these violated students’ privacy and the SBUSD policy. If a family “opts-out” they “opt-out.” This will remain an area to monitor. 

With the district’s support, TIR parent, students and staff will have annual meetings with all of the SBUSD principals to engage them in implementing the policy and making their staff aware of the recruiter guidelines. We also plan to continue meeting with the school board members and district administration. For our goal of building leadership, we will be working with Parent, Teacher and Student Associations, Engl  ish Learner Advisory Committees (ELACs), and student clubs.    

Source: https://truthinrecruitment.org/2018/07/01/difficulties-limiting-recruiters-in-santa-barbara-schools-even-with-a-policy/

 Laura Jordan Jaffee / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 13 October 2018

In June 2016, Congressional Democrats held a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives in an alleged effort to curb gun violence. While the move was largely commended by corporate media—even celebrated as a "civics lesson" for American schoolchildren in The Atlantic—,the legislation being fought for would have expanded the use of a notoriously inaccurate, racist and anti-Muslim "anti-terror" watchlist and done little to reduce violence (Richmond, 2016). This continues a long history of "gun control" policy in the U.S. that disproportionately incarcerates Black, Brown, and mentally disabled Americans by writing them as threats to safety and national security (Crenshaw, Ocen, & Nanda, 2015; Jilani, 2016; Coaston, 2016). 1 Responses to school shootings that uphold "gun control" as the panacea for reducing gun-related deaths subscribe to a liberal, non-violence framework that elides state violence and the structural conditions that engender individual acts of violence. 2

Calls for stricter gun control and mental health screening often come on the heels of school shootings, or they are justified by invoking national memories of these events. Such legislation is put forth as a necessary means of protecting the nation's (white) children through policies that criminalize people of color and psychiatrically disabled people, neglect state-sanctioned racist, gendered, and imperialist violence in schools, and reinforce ableist myths about who is "dangerous" (Crenshaw, Ocen, & Nanda, 2015). This paper asks how myopic conceptions of school safety circumscribe the imagined/imaginable solutions for fostering safe schools. I argue that a narrow notion of school safety derives from a narrow, ableist conception of school violence that pathologizes individuals who act violently and conceals state violence—particularly as it pertains to the production of empire—that manifests in schools. The very development and production of guns capable of such mass destruction—which liberal legislation seeks to restrict from the hands of Black, Brown, and disabled peoples—is a product of the endless war economy created by imperialist wars requisite for capital. 3

Numerous widely publicized school shootings in the U.S. have fueled national concerns around school safety. In 2013, President Obama and Vice President Biden launched "Now Is the Time," which, according to the U.S. Department of Education's website, is "a comprehensive plan to make our schools safer, reduce gun violence by keeping guns out of dangerous hands, and increase mental-health services" (White House, 2013, para. 1). The supposition that improving mental health services and restricting people labelled mentally ill from gun ownership should be the foremost priority for reducing gun violence in schools has become platitudinous. This paper aims to trouble this oversimplified response by positioning dominant discourses around school safety and mental health alongside the increasing militarization of U.S. schools—evidenced in US Department of Defense funded charter schools, increased police presence in schools, the tying of federal funding to military recruitment access, the proliferation of ROTC programs on college campuses, and pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist curriculum—to highlight the inadequacy of conceptions of school violence that fail to account for state violence. Narrow conceptions of school safety that elide state violence and pathologize individual students drive scant policies largely ineffectual in reducing the violence of schooling.

Given the narrowly medical and individualized approaches to mental health in the U.S. broadly, mental health services implemented in schools rarely challenge systems of white supremacist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and colonial violence that undeniably affect students' mental health. The preoccupation with protecting schools from individual "crazed" shooters— framed as the gravest threat to school safety— belies the fact that, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mass shootings make up less than 2 percent of all firearm-related deaths (Ellison, 2016). School safety initiatives that advocate reducing violence in schools by identifying individuals with psychiatric disabilities—presumed to render them dangerous within the public imaginary— neglect the profound structural violence schools perpetuate in the service of empire. The Department of Defense's 1033 Excess Property Program, for instance, has transferred surplus military equipment from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to twenty-six school districts nationwide and enhanced the militarization of school cops and college campuses (Peak, 2015; Davis, 2017). Racist and imperialist violence is also evidenced in practices like sending military recruits into schools with predominantly poor, Black and Brown students, who are in turn deployed in wars that have profoundly disabling mental health effects. 4 In the age of empire and endless war, we need to challenge prevailing conceptions of school safety that abet psychiatric ableism while doing little to curb school violence. To catalyze more radical and liberatory demands for fostering safe schools, conceptions of school safety ought to encompass state violence that manifests in schools and shapes the individuals therein.

The dominant discourse around school safety is premised on the notion that mental illness exists in a vacuum. Mental illness becomes the explanation for violence waged in schools, masking the fact that the state is a primary instigator of school violence. Consequently, policy proposals centered on better gun control, more cops in schools, and the provision of mental health services prioritize identifying mentally disabled people and restricting them from accessing weapons. This narrative results in the pathologization of individual students and circumscribes conceptions of school safety, obscuring the colossal violence that U.S. empire—which needs continuous military fodder and invariably deploys military practices against oppressed peoples within U.S. borders—poses to both students' safety and mental health. 5 This paper specifically examines how the U.S.'s imperial endeavors and quest for global hegemony manifest in U.S. schools through a Critical Disability Studies lens. 6

While writing this article, I received an email from a publishing company with the subject line: "How is depression linked to school gun carrying?" (Juan & Hemenway, 2017). The article title attests to a broader discourse around school safety that suggests violence can be reduced in schools by identifying and controlling people with psychiatric disabilities. This discourse sanctions the expansion of repressive and violent state forces in schools. According to the Department of Education's 2016 Indicators of School Crime and Safety report, between 1999 and 2015, "the percentage of students who reported locked entrance or exit doors during the day increased […] from 38 to 78 percent," while students reporting "the presence of security guards or assigned police officers [increased] from 54 to 70 percent. From 2001 to 2015, the percentage of students who reported the use of security cameras at their schools increased from 39 to 83 percent (Indicator 21)" (p. ix). This past spring, at Colgate University in New York, a campus lockdown and police response were triggered by reports of an "active shooter," who turned out to be a Black student carrying a glue gun for a school project (Svrluga, 2017). This example speaks to how prevailing responses to school safety can actually heighten racist state violence in schools. I was again struck by the inadequacy of alleged school safety initiatives while sitting in a teacher training session during which we were advised on how to "spot" distressed students—framed as potential instigators of violence—at a university deeply complicit in U.S. empire. 7 These moments exemplify how narrow framings of school safety—which read 'school violence' as 'school shootings' and presuppose mental health counselors and cops as the solution—ignore (and thereby enable to persist) a racist and ableist empire that instigates profound state violence within and beyond school walls. In the context of U.S. empire, schools function as a tool of the state through which predominantly (disabled) poor, Black and Brown students are targeted and recruited to serve a racist, imperialist system of global capital that produces mass disablement both nationally and globally (Russell, 2001; Althusser, 1970). 8

In what follows, I first briefly discuss Althusser's (1970) theorization of the role of schools in reproducing dominant ideologies to uphold the status quo. The subsequent section recounts the narrow conception of school safety and/as mental health projects propagated through educational policies and initiatives. From there, I discuss the militarization of schools, a central example of how technologies and practices developed to sustain U.S. empire externally are in turn used to police (disabled) people of color within the U.S. (e.g. Chowdhury, 2009). I ultimately argue that school safety ought to be reconceptualized to account for the disabling effects of state violence precipitated by schools in the service of empire.

Schools as Ideological State Apparatuses

As scholars and activists have long argued, institutionalized education plays a central role in reproducing an inherently unequal social and economic structure. Emphasizing the importance of ideological hegemony for reproducing the capitalist mode of production, Althusser (1970) identified schools as the primary Ideological State Apparatus—or a central means through which the ruling class disseminates dominant ideologies—of late capitalist social formations. As capitalism increasingly relies on endless imperialist expansion and war to sustain itself, the U.S. state increasingly turns to schools to fuel imperialist projects through programs 9 and policies 10 —discussed further below—that normalize military presence in schools. The militarization of schools goes hand-in-hand with schools' role in reproducing and sustaining empire. Writing on the relationship between education and imperialism, Tikly (2004) notes that "modern forms of education with their roots in western cultures and civilizations have been deeply implicated in and provide a common thread between European imperialism and colonialism and the new imperialism" and that "formal educational institutions have provided a key disciplinary institution within the context of classical and settler colonialism" (p. 188). Within this context, and understanding that "education provides a key site for discursive struggle over versions of social reality," deconstructing dominant ideologies around safety and psychiatric disability in the contemporary landscape of education can help more accurately reframe the conversation to focus on the violence of U.S. imperialism and the threat it poses to students' safety and psychiatric health (Tikly, 2004, p. 178).

U.S. Investments in School Safety and/as Mental Health Projects

The title of a 2014 press release on the U.S. Department of Education's website triumphantly proclaims Department of Education invests more than $70 million to improve school climate and keep students safe (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). The expanding surveillance and militarization of schools runs counter to this alleged concern for students' safety and mental health. So-called safety initiatives often take the form of heightened police presence in schools and the criminalization of students at increasingly younger ages. As reported in Color Lines, "per 1,000 students, New York City has 5.28 security personnel, but just 2.9 counselors […]. Chicago has 4.21 officers to 2.18 counselors […]. And Miami has 6.32 officers to 2.28 counselors" (Rankin, 2016). These numbers attest to state violence manifest in schools that is concealed by a school safety discourse which frames violence as a problem of individual "broken" psyches and ignores state violence.

The notion of mental health commonly invoked as a primary concern around school safety itself warrants scrutiny. While expanding mental health supports in schools is undoubtedly necessary, these invocations typically frame mental disability as an individual disorder that exists in a vacuum from social, economic, and historical forces, which has implications for the types of mental health support provided. 11 Within this myopic framing, "crazy" individuals are positioned as threats to safety. Historicizing this narrative, Russell (2002) reminds us that "U.S. eugenics policy focused on the incarcerated population" such that "physical characteristics were linked to criminal behavior and disabled people were said to be predisposed to commit crimes" (p. 21). This narrative elides how social, historical, and economic contexts shape people, produce psychiatric disablement, and render psychiatric difference disabling. In other words, the dominant discourse around mental health fails to account for how systemic violence materializes corporeally. This, in turn, circumscribes the conceivable solutions, proposing "fixing" individuals instead of dismantling the oppressive systems that shape them. Describing how the construct of disability has shaped the history and experiences of teachers in the U.S. and the narration of teachers as incompetent, dysfunctional, and psychiatrically unstable, Rousmaniere (2013) comments that "there is a notable bias to the reporting of these dangers, with more emphasis on individual incidents of school violence and teachers' mental state than on the chronic institutional perils of cancer-causing asbestos and other safety hazards in in school buildings" (p. 101). Further, and given that many mass shooters are motivated by racist, xenophobic, and misogynist ideology, attributing these occurrences to the actions of "crazy" individuals simultaneously re-entrenches ableism while leaving unchecked the structural basis of oppressive ideologies driving such violence (Norton, 2017; Valenti, 2014). Racist and misogynist white male shooters are often humanized in media through ableist rhetoric that further buttresses conceptions of psychiatrically disabled people as inherently violent and dangerous and trivializes racism and patriarchy as issues only for fringe "crazy" people. For instance, positioning as crazy people like Elliot Rodger—who shot and killed six people on UC Santa Barbara's campus in 2014—perpetuates a lie that psychiatrically disabled people are uniquely dangerous and fails to see these actors as products and agents of a violent and exploitative state. Rodger, for his part, was a racist and a misogynist. Proposals to ban him accessing guns do nothing to address the conditions that made him this way, and leave white supremacy and patriarchy unchecked by deflecting attention from the root issues. Upholding gun control as a cure-all for school violence also ignores the targeting of disabled and people of color by cops and judges who enforce such legislation, which should be predictable given this state's founding and history.

In their analysis of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Mental Health Improvements for National Development (MIND) Project, Titchkosky and Albrecht (2015) outline how dominant global institutions like the WHO perpetuate colonial logics by linking mental health to economic productivity. As they explain, the WHO explicitly professes to speak on behalf of corporations, which have identified mental illness as a major concern because the "epidemic" is an economic burden that yields major losses in productivity. The authors argue that the proposed solution, the WHO's MIND project, "is one way empire now invades consciousness making for a version of people as fit, productive citizens able to actualize a nation's development trajectory as imagined by Western powers" (p. 72). Their analysis suggests that public health initiatives launched by the U.S. stem from the needs of capital and U.S. global hegemony as opposed to any ostensible humanitarian concern. International mental health programs become a means by which the U.S. state can uphold its paternalistic professed moral beneficence to expand the global system of capital, while eliding its central role in historical and contemporary imperialist and settler colonial projects. Their observation that "how people are encouraged to identify who is disordered and who is not is directly related to powerful ways in which the world and its people are already known" offers insight into the perfunctory mental health agenda proposed to resolve narrowly framed threats to school safety (p. 81).

While Trump was understandably lambasted for proposing to end "gun-free school zones," this shouldn't be reason to romanticize past state-led efforts to address school safety. Written in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, President Obama's 2013 "Now is the Time" plan offers insight into the dominant discourse around school safety. 12 The plan proposes to reduce gun violence and enhance safety by providing greater access to mental health services and increasing police presence in schools, and by "[keeping] guns out of dangerous hands" (White House, 2013, p. 2). The report recommends providing incentives for schools to hire more police officers—euphemistically referred to as resource officers. 13 A national policy proposal to expand the police state in the wake of a deadly school shooting exemplifies what Klein (2007) has named disaster capitalism, in which the capitalist state exploits a context of national grief to implement policies that would likely otherwise be resisted or rejected. 14 The assumption that increasing the number of police in schools actually enhances students' safety is belied by frequent reports of police physically and sexually violating students in schools. For example, in 2017 Georgia high school students filed a lawsuit against police in Sylvester, Georgia for groping roughly 900 students during a four-hour lockdown drug search which was conducted without a warrant and yielded nothing (Grenoble, 2017). Contrary to the public safety rhetoric, police—as an institution—serve and protect the U.S. state by surveilling and containing oppressed peoples.

Beyond calling for more cops in the streets and in schools, the plan argues that doctors and mental health workers play a pivotal role in reducing violence, specifically by identifying and reporting potentially violent people to law enforcement authorities. The role of mental health workers is framed not as supporting students coping with the psychological effects of state violence, but as surveilling for potentially violent psychiatrically disabled people and reporting them to police. The end goal, again, is the strengthening of the police—a leading repressive state apparatus (Althusser, 1970). Under the heading "Put up to 1,000 more school resource officers and counselors in schools and help schools invest in safety," the proposal suggests that "putting school resource officers and mental health professionals in schools can help prevent school crime and student-on-student violence" (White House, 2013, p. 11). The plan repeatedly emphasizes keeping guns out of the "wrong hands," stating that "we should never ask doctors and other health care providers to turn a blind eye [sic] to the risks posed by guns in the wrong hands" (p. 9) and, further, that we ought to "help law enforcement avoid returning guns to the wrong hands" (p. 6). Throughout the report, the "wrong hands" functions as code for people with psychiatric disabilities, the implication being that they compromise school safety and that these students, specifically, need to be prohibited from handling weapons. Notably, the concern is not that psychiatrically disabled students are more inclined to harm themselves—a statistically far more probable danger—but that students with psychiatric disabilities threaten the safety of others and need to be identified and controlled. This fits Margaret Price's (2011) observation, regarding rhetorics of disability in academic life, that "recently, this destructive force [of insanity] is often represented as a violent student or faculty member who is assumed to have gone mentally haywire, like a bad cog in an otherwise smoothly operating machine" (p. 7). As Price notes, "an attempt is made to construct academe as a "safe zone" that must be protected from the violent incursions of madness" (p. 22). Psychiatrically disabled students are positioned as the instigators of violence through a narrative that frames "student-on-student violence" as the primary threat to safe schools, reinforcing the myth that psychiatrically disabled people are likely instigators, as opposed to victims, of violence, and legitimizing the heightened policing and surveillance of schools in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods. The language of "student-on-student violence" functions similarly to the language of "Black-on-Black crime" insofar as both divert attention away from state violence—in the form of white supremacy, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, transphobia, settler colonialism, and ableism—that structurally undermines health and safety and produces uneven material conditions that render some more likely to be subjected to violence.

The Obama administration's proposal upholds the myth that police enhance safety, ignoring the fact that hundreds of people—disproportionately disabled people of color and oftentimes unarmed—are murdered by police every year in the U.S. 15 Much like the WHO has identified mental illness as a global epidemic that threatens capitalist accumulation and hampers the spread of empire, a parallel narrative frames mental illness as a major threat to school safety that can be treated with more mental health professionals and cops. This narrative obscures schools' function as sites for reproducing dominant ideologies—which pose colossal systemic threats to students' safety and mental health. Commenting on normalized police violence against poor, disabled women of color, Erevelles and Minear (2010) describe how "socially sanctioned fears of the mentally ill and our social devaluation of disabled […] bodies of color justify the volley of shots fired almost instinctively to protect the public from the deviant, the dangerous, and the disposable" (p. 128). In the context of schooling, it is disabled students of color who are disproportionately subjected to disciplinary measures (Rankin, 2016). Black and Latinx students made up 99% of students handcuffed by NYPD "school safety agents" in public schools in 2016 in so-called "child in crisis" incidents, in which a student in emotional distress is removed from their school and taken to a hospital for psychological evaluation (Burke & Chapman, 2017). 16

Ableism within school safety discourses is not new and plays into a pervasive perception of people with psychiatric disabilities as dangerous threats to public safety. A 1998 report issued by the Department of Education entitled Early Warning, Timely Response: A Guide to Safe Schools, with the keywords crime prevention, problem children, school safety, and risk management, intimates that individual "troubled children" are an acute threat to school safety. The report specifically names social withdrawal, depression, and a lack of confidence as potential warning signs of troubled children who compromise school safety.

Reports such as these—which pathologize individual students who allegedly threaten school safety in an ahistorical, depoliticized vacuum—uphold a dominant narrative that effaces state violence and its corporeal manifestations. It also adheres to a racialized discourse of pathology that Taylor (2015) notes reinforces "deeply ingrained assumptions and beliefs about the undesirable, even tragic experience of mental disability" (Taylor, 2015, p. 194). This narrative fails to ask what material conditions shape individuals who act violently, or to distinguish between state violence and individual violence. In their analysis, Titchkosky and Albrecht (2015) note that the WHO narrative represents an effacement whereby the "complex economic terms and conditions of a country are erased by a simplified history, an individualized history represented through the number of people who count as disabled" (p. 76). The prevailing narrative that school safety is threatened by an alleged mental health epidemic, used to justify the increased militarization and policing of schools that disproportionately impacts poor and disabled students of color, represents a similar erasure. This individualized narrative neglects to address the state violence and threats to safety—through their complicity in imperialist projects—that schools propagate (Erevelles, 2000).

A narrow notion of school safety also fails to acknowledge that students with particular psychiatric disabilities are themselves disproportionately targets of state violence through high rates of enlistment in a violent military apparatus and through the increasing militarization and policing of schools that aims to discipline and contain "unruly" bodies (Zarembo, 2014). 17 Contrary to the dominant narrative, students with disabilities are far more likely to be the targets of violence in schools than the perpetrators (Price, 2011). According to a joint Human Rights Watch and American Civil Liberties (ACLU) report, students with disabilities account for 14% of the student population, but 19% of those subjected to corporal punishment in schools (Human Rights Watch/ACLU, 2009). The report documents the extensive use of physical discipline—often in the form of paddling—against disabled students in schools. 18 A failure to incorporate intersecting forms of state violence into dominant conceptions of school safety conceals this material reality. As Erevelles (2000) writes, "American public education has used the category of disability to support separate regular education and segregated education programs that assign students oppressively marked by race, class, and gender to lower tracks within the educational matrix that correspond to similar tracks within the social and economic order" (p. 43).

Empire at Home: U.S. School Militarization

School militarization is rightly understood as part and parcel of U.S. imperialism. As delineated by Furumoto (2005) in her analysis of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and school militarism, "the U.S. imperial project refers to global hegemonic imperialism that is characterized by the U.S. global use of military power and political domination in order to enforce the best possible conditions and outcomes for U.S. economic and political interests" (p. 201). The inextricability of school militarization and U.S. imperialism is underscored by the fact that many of the same companies profit from these concomitant projects. The international security corporation G4S, which maintains prisons, checkpoints, and the apartheid wall in Occupied Palestine and colludes with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport undocumented peoples in the U.S., has provided guns and target practice to teachers in school districts that cannot afford private security companies (Davis, 2017). Considering the profound violence intrinsic to imperialism and attendant educational militarization, the militarization of schooling ought to be factored into conceptions of school safety and challenged and resisted through practices, policies, and pedagogies aimed at assuaging violence in schools. 19

As Furumoto explains, NCLB greatly expanded the U.S. military's access to schools and students. Under NCLB, schools receiving federal funds are required to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters and employers. Section 9528 of the legislation states that "each local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act shall provide military recruiters the same access to secondary school students as is provided generally to post-secondary educational institutions or to prospective employers of those students" (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). Denying recruiters access to students' contact information can result in schools losing their funding. Explaining the direct link between school militarization and U.S. imperialism, Furumoto argues that the

"inclusion of Section 9528 in NCLB to increase military recruiters' access to students and school campuses is a part of the general strategy of the military to increase their ranks. The U.S. military needs soldiers to maintain and enforce imperialism. Targeting African American and Latinos to fight this country's wars is a well-calculated strategy to continue to grow their forces without creating the mass dissension that a draft may provoke" (p. 208).

Race and disability converge through schooling practices that position racialized bodies as deficient and deviant (Erevelles, 2000). Consequently, the targeting of students of color broadly is inextricable from an ableist logic that yields a commonsense wherein the military is a 'logical' path for disciplining students who are always already scripted as 'unruly.' Labeling students of color unruly is often achieved explicitly through disability labels—like Oppositional Defiant Disorder and emotional disturbance (ED)—that are disproportionately ascribed to Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2016).

Galaviz, Palafox, Meiners, and Quinn (2011) provide a case study of the militarization of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to highlight how the militarization of schooling particularly impacts poor students of color and fuels racist stereotypes to justify practices meant to render students compliant and obedient. Their analysis is based on data obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests made to CPS, personal experiences as teachers in CPS, and personal communications with students and parents. Referring to poor youth of color, the authors suggest that "for youth who are regularly presented in media as social problems rather than assets, the military schools' promise to develop youth's leadership and other worthy personal qualities may be just as valuable as promises of college funding to vulnerable young people" (p. 29). Their analysis speaks to how poor students of color are rendered "able"—or productive—through service to U.S. imperialism. Racist ideologies sanction the explicit targeting and recruitment of racially oppressed peoples. The RAND Corporation—a conservative think tank that initially served the U.S. Armed Forces and has since expanded its scope—released a 200-page report titled "Military Enlistment of Hispanic Youth: Obstacles and Opportunities" recommending recruitment of the "most qualified" tier of Hispanic youth in schools, suggesting college money and "leadership opportunities" as means of targeting and enticing these students (Asch et al., 2009, p. 28). This underscores how U.S. imperialism beyond U.S. borders rests on and reinforces white supremacy within the U.S.

The authors' discussion of the funding and placement of military-themed charter schools and Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs, which receive funding from both Chicago taxpayers and the Department of Defense, demonstrates the illusiveness of the rhetoric of choice. In Chicago, military academies receive more resources than traditional public schools, making them a more appealing option than under-resourced public schools for many parents and students, particularly those who lack the resources for private schools or the wealthy public schools that exist in predominantly white districts with high property values. The presentation of military schools as a desirable option for youth in need of discipline also elides "the reality that inequitable structures and state abandonment produce and shape this artificial crisis of scarcity—of resources, safety, and rich curriculum—within the public schools" (p. 34). The authors rightly emphasize that social imaginaries around who needs to be disciplined and 'put to work' through these types of programs are deeply classed, gendered, racialized, and sexualized. They go on to argue that the normalization of a militarized culture is "aimed at cultivating a militarized mind" and that measures like the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) are employed to assess eligibility for enlistment and used in schools for recruitment purposes (p. 36). Such measures produce a dominant logic of disability wherein an "able-mind" is one capable of carrying out the exploitative, murderous, and debilitating military incursions that sustain U.S. empire.

In addition to overt policies and practices like recruiting and enlisting students through school, Furumoto (2005) argues that U.S. empire manifests in schools through more subtle means, as in the production and dissemination of knowledge, values, and ideas that reinforce U.S. global hegemony and hinder students' capacity to critique militarism and challenge oppression. In one particularly vile example of this, the 2006 New York Regents exam asked students to describe how imperialism benefitted Africans (Einhorn, 2006). Forms of knowledge advanced by contemporary educational policies and practices largely fail to equip students with the tools to question dominant ideologies and histories and, accordingly, to challenge U.S. imperialism. As Furumoto (2005) explains:

"The relentless pace of recent U.S. military incursions into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti, as well as saber rattling directed at Iran, leave many of us incredulous at the barbarity of pre-emptive military attacks and at the complete disregard for the lives and well-being of both U.S. soldiers and of the people in the countries we attack. One of the striking aspects of the imperial project is how the same processes of conquest and containment are echoed in urban schools, such as the domination and disciplining of the student mind and body, the dehumanization of students and teachers, and the use of violence and oppression to enforce and reproduce particular values and ideas" (p. 206).

Violent tactics of containment central to empire-building are in turn deployed within U.S. schools, and disproportionately used against the 'unruly' bodies of disabled students of color (Stolberg, 2015; Erevelles, 2000). The deep entanglement of U.S. empire and schooling is also evidenced by the American Federation of Teachers' international program in the Middle East, which aligns with U.S. foreign policy and helps extend and maintain U.S. power in the region, functioning as a form of "labor imperialism" (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2010).

Conclusion

Exceptionalizing rhetoric around Trump gets used to justify reversion to mainstream Democratic politics, like gun control and mental health screening in response to shootings. This discourse also tacitly assumes that the state should have a monopoly on violence, insofar as demands for police and prison abolition are not part of the gun control conversation, which instead promotes fear of people with mental disabilities and in practice further criminalizes people of color. The use of ableist language—which writes Trump as "crazy," "stupid," "insane," an "idiot," and so on—is similarly destructive. This mystification both normalizes the exploitation of intellectually and psychiatrically disabled people by leaving unchecked the systemic privileging of able-mindedness and fails to contextualize the broader historical conditions that made Trump's rise possible, impeding effective resistance.

At a historical moment when U.S. empire persists by waging endless wars, we need to radically rethink conceptions of—and approaches to addressing—mental health and school safety. This starts with shifting dominant understandings of violence to foreground state violence and the manifold ways U.S. empire shapes individuals who act violently, often driven by white supremacist and misogynist ideologies that undergird and legitimize the class structure of capitalism. 20 Reconceptualizing school safety in anti-ableist ways—e.g. not scapegoating by reducing school violence to an issue of uncontrolled/uncontained "mental illness"—that account for the state violence engendered by U.S. empire is a necessary aspect of this project.

Using a feminist disability studies lens, Simplican (2015) argues for an expanded conception of dependency that allows us to mobilize against violence without stigmatizing disabled people who act violently. In so doing, she notes that all too often we fail to indict the "structural forces of violence" that create conditions under which individuals act violently. She asks "whose actions and bodies […] we label as violent? And at what cost?" (p. 14). Her question challenges the parochial response of labelling individual students mentally ill, and thus potentially dangerous, in a broader context in which schools serve the ideological interests of U.S empire, and in which disabled, Black, Brown, and Native students are disproportionately funneled into segregated special education classrooms—and subsequently prisons—for being "unruly." It is the conditions of schooling in the age of empire, not individual students, that should be identified as unhealthy and unsafe. Under these conditions, students who challenge or resists schools' perpetuation of racist and imperial interests are often themselves labeled with psychiatric disabilities and punished for being "unruly" or "disruptive," attesting to the improvidence of regurgitating ableist assumptions that enable the pathologizing of resistance, particularly when waged by students of color. Providing greater mental health support in schools is imperative. But making these initiatives meaningful means challenging an approach to mental health in the U.S. that views psychiatric disability as an individual, medical problem and instead understands it as indivisible from racist and other state violence. Understanding how state violence materializes in bodies and shapes mental health implies a very different set of political and policy responses than gun control with mental health screening. Mental health projects that neglect the state violence of racist imperialism and its mental health implications are wholly insufficient.

A myopic discourse around school safety—which attributes school violence to individual "crazy" actors—advances ableist assumptions by reinforcing the association of psychiatric disability and violence that pervades the public imaginary. Not until we dismantle the structural conditions of schooling within the U.S.—particularly the deployment of schooling as a tool of imperialist expansion—will we begin to properly address either school violence or the very real mental health needs of students that derive from schooling in the age of empire.

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Endnotes

1. California's 1967 Mulford Act, which restricted the right to publicly carry arms, was a direct response to the Black Panther Party's armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods to prevent police violence in Black communities (Wing, 2016). While white Americans are more likely to own guns, Black Americans are far more likely to be jailed for gun ownership. This alone should give anti-racist educators pause in uncritically accepting the prevailing discourse around gun control.
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2. Histories of revolutionary struggle, like the Black Panthers' tactics of armed resistance, offer a counter to this framework. Attesting to the legitimacy of resistance by whatever means necessary under violent conditions of oppression and exploitation, Ida B. Wells proclaimed that "a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home" (Carby, 1985, p. 229).
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3. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers, whose substantive feedback pushed me to clarify my arguments and provide more concrete examples of claims made throughout the paper.
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4. I am not making a normative argument that war is bad because it produces disability. Disability studies and disability justice movements rightly reject the taken-for-granted devaluation of bodily variations and assumptions that disability is inherently undesirable. At the same time, as many critiques of canonical disability studies works have rightly brought to the fore, the widespread use of disablement as a practice of domination cannot be ignored in a field devoted to studying the social meaning of disability and the particular ways bodies are both constructed and produced. Disability studies scholars are more recently grappling with the necessary tension between simultaneously valuing disability (e.g. as a meaningful epistemic location) while rejecting structures of power (e.g. Empire) that produce disablement.
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5. Significantly, the precarious position of disabled people within the capitalist structure—evidenced, among numerous examples, by extremely limited employment options and legal sub-minimum in the U.S.—likely impels involvement in U.S. imperial projects that both produce disablement and destroy infrastructure that supports disabled people globally. The Seattle Lighthouse for the Blind, for example, employs disabled people to produce equipment for Boeing and the U.S. military, and many states' Business Enterprise Programs facilitate Blind people's employment in dining halls on military bases through large food service contracts.
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6. Following Grech (2015), I view "disability as a useful optic through which to examine the dynamics of imperialism," with a particular interest in how this plays out in educational contexts in the U.S. (p. 1).
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7. Among numerous other examples, the chancellor sits on the Academic Advisory Council for the Department of Homeland Security, and the university runs a highly profitable entrepreneurship program for military veterans that grew out of an initiative specifically for disabled veterans.
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8. I understand imperialism as both racist and as endemic to capitalism, given its necessity for the expanded circulation and accumulation of capital as it seeks new markets, resources, and cheap labor (e.g. Harvey, 2003). In Lenin's (2015/1917) words, "imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system, as long as private property in the means of production exists" (p. 88)
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9. The Department of Defense's Troops to Teachers program, for example, transitions military personnel into positions in public schools.
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10. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandated that military recruiters have the same access to students and their contact information as college recruiters (Furumoto, 2007).
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11. A radical mental health movement—which accounts for structural forces of oppression and exploitation and their psychiatric manifestations—has gained momentum in recent years and offers a more worthwhile paradigm for mental health supports in schools (DuBrul, 2012). The Icarus Project is an example of a more liberatory paradigm for understanding and addressing mental health.
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12. The plan has been removed from the White House web page under the Trump administration and is now available from the Obama White House archives.
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13. "School resource officers are specially trained police officers that work in schools" (White House, 2013, p. 11).
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14. Thank you to the anonymous reviewer who offered helpful feedback on this point.
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15. A reviewer asked that I change the word 'murder' on the basis that all readers might not agree with this language. I left it, struck by the words of Valerie Castile after the cop who killed her son was found not guilty: "I will continue to say murder because where in this planet do you tell the truth […]?" (Acquittal of Officer, 2017).
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16. The NYPD was required to publish these statistics following amendments to New York City's Student Safety Act in 2015.
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17. Recent reports suggest that roughly 1 in 5 soldiers has a mental disability prior to enlistment, and that army recruits have significantly higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder than the general population (Zarembo, 2014).
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18. 15 states permit corporal punishment and another 7 do not prohibit it, and disabled (and) students of color are far more likely to be subjected to physical punishment (Turner, 2016).
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19. Here I am thinking of critical pedagogies that point to the structural roots of violence and point to examples of collective resistance, as opposed to narrow educational campaigns that seek to alter individual actions while leaving unquestioned the structural conditions that occasion them.
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20. Changing understandings of what constitutes violence also means emphasizing that state violence and other acts of violence that fuel oppression should not be confounded with or treated as if equivalent to justified violence—also stoked by material conditions of U.S. empire—in resistance to state violence and exploitation.
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Source: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/5230/4878

Elizabeth McAlister / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 13 October 2018

Elizabeth McAlister - Journal of Religious and Political Practice

This essay extends the literature on the militarization of everyday life to argue that contemporary military metaphors and practices have become a generative force animating the sphere of Christian prayer. The wars of the twentieth century and the corresponding process of militarization have affected almost every aspect of social life all around the globe, and prayer is no exception. In the United States, “the capillaries of militarization have fed and molded social institutions seemingly little connected to battle” (Lutz 2002 Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist, 104(3): 723–35.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]: 724). Of course the Bible is full of violent battles and scenes of war, and religious actors have drawn on these images in countless periods throughout history (Niditch 1995 Niditch, Susan. 1995. War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]: 4). Today’s Christian militarization is simply the latest iteration in a long partnership between Christian missions and military expeditions, tropes, values, and logics. Yet in the twentieth century the militarization of daily life in the United States reached new heights and has expanded into new sectors, including research, technology, border patrol, immigration, humanitarianism, education, leisure, aesthetics, and fashion. It is time to examine how militarism has come to be part of the prayer practices of millions of Christians, especially in the charismatic networks that are on the rise across the globe.

This means examining side by side two spheres that are rarely considered together. In popular opinion, prayer is considered personal, holy, moral, beneficent, submissive, and even sacrificial. Militarism, on the other hand, is about dominating through force, and it is collective, violent, and combative, a top-down affair of highly disciplined and aggressive troops and their weaponry, funded and controlled by nation-states. Yet my research shows that prayer has become increasingly militarized during the last several decades.

To understand this process, I focus here on the articulation (Hall 1986) between militarism and aggressive forms of prayer in the case of evangelical warfare prayer developed by white and Native North Americans.11. I use the term articulation in a particular fashion, after Stuart Hall 1986 who theorized that elements of culture, while usually tied to class, can recombine in various ways into new patterns with novel meanings or connotations. This is useful in understanding how cultural spheres as seemingly far apart as militarism and prayer can be linked together both in theory, theology, and practice, and come to create new meanings, rituals, and identities, which in turn influence politics and diplomacy, missionary projects, and even humanitarianism.View all notes I use the term aggressive forms of prayer here as a conceptual, second-order category that encompasses both spoken addresses to the Christian God (or other deities and spirits), and ritual action, conceived to be part of the work of prayer, that aim to harm, debilitate, remove, or weaken another party or to impose the speaker’s will onto another party, an institution, or series of events. It is not the case that aggressive forms of prayer are merely a “reflection” of politics or of the broader culture. One of my assumptions is that through prayer, in both written/formal and oral/improvised forms, people actively produce meanings that in turn shape the world – individual identities, congregations, networks, political actors – in a dialectical way (see also McAlister 2001: 5). This lets us see clearly that secular and religious spheres are entangled and produce one another.

In what follows, I discuss an evangelical network that practices a militarized form of prayer its members call “spiritual warfare”.22. This network is known variously as the Spiritual Mapping Movement, the Transformation or Revival Movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, and the Third Wave Evangelical Movement.View all notes Spiritual warfare is a precise term in evangelical and charismatic networks, and it is a theological orientation that runs through churches as well as para-church organizations. People who subscribe to this idea understand the whole of human history as a consequence of the cosmic battle of Satan against God. They offer a legalistic account beginning with the idea that God gave earthly dominion to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28. When Satan’s temptation of Eve in Genesis 3 leads to the Fall of Man, “legal” spiritual authority extends to Satan and explains why life on Earth is fraught with suffering. According to God’s law, Satan gains the legal right to be “prince of this world” (John 12:31), and he commands an army of demons who maintain “strongholds” – geographic and spiritual bases of demonic power. After Christ was crucified in payment for the sins of all of humankind, Satan was dispossessed of his dominion on Earth. However, Satan’s strongholds did not melt away. Instead, Satan and his demonic army hold on to what power they have cultivated through social vice and sin: violence, idol worship, sexual iniquity, poverty, addiction, abortion, and more. People’s sin functions as an “invitation” for Satan’s demons to enter and begin legal operations.

Most scholarship on this movement focuses on the personal forms of spiritual warfare that individuals wage against personal demons – such as lust, envy, alcoholism, and even mental illness. But less attention has been given to the ways spiritual warriors understand national and global politics. The battle against demonic strongholds is waged against specific evil entities in both local and national spaces. Wrote theologian C. Peter Wagner, “I have come to believe that Satan does indeed assign a demon or corps of demons to every geopolitical unit in the world, and they are among the principalities and powers with whom we wrestle” (Wagner 1989 Wagner, C. Peter. 1989. “Territorial Spirits: Identifying Demonic Spirits Over Geographical Domains.” Ministry Digest, 1(5): 42–45. [Google Scholar]: 47). Spiritual warfare evangelicals have elaborated a complex theology and prayer practice with a highly militarized discourse and set of rituals for doing “spiritual battle” and conducting “prayer strikes” on the “prayer battlefield”. Warfare prayer can take place in church, at large revivals, at semi-public conferences in hotels, or in private spaces such as homes. Spiritual warriors are aggressive prayer intercessors who can pray openly in “prayer walks” through public spaces, often in urban neighborhoods where poverty and crime are rife. Advanced warriors can also do “covert actions” in public spaces when they are “on assignment” from the Holy Spirit, in which case they might pray in small groups at key “demonic strongholds”, such as massacre sites, masonic temples, or abortion clinics. The goal is generally not to cause harm but to impose change onto another party or group (such as Muslim mosques, or abortion clinics) by causing them to go bankrupt, leave a territory, or, ideally, convert to Christianity. The aggressive intent of the prayer, its imagery of violence and war, and its premise of a cosmically violent stage on which Christians must act, supports the case for “a special affinity between Pentecostal prayer and violence” (Obadare 2015). The movement is political in that its intercessors imagine they are part of an elite group of God’s agents, participating in a massive social transformation of the world into the Kingdom of God.33. As focused as they are on bringing revival and transformation in a kind of “end times” sensibility, spiritual warfare theologians avoid delving into doctrinal debates about premillennialism, the rapture, and other features of apocalyptic thought that might cause disagreement and factions. The focus of their energies is on the present moment, when their prayers can bring humanity to the verge of a “breakthrough” of Christian revival led by the Holy Spirit.View all notes

A researcher in religious studies, I have attended numerous conferences, seminars, and prayer groups on spiritual warfare and revival, and have followed the movement as it extended from the US into the Caribbean (McAlister 2012 McAlister, Elizabeth. 2012. “From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 41(2): 187–215.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 2013 McAlister, Elizabeth. 2013. “Humanitarian Adhocracy, Transnational New Apostolic Missions, and Evangelical Anti-Dependency in a Haitian Refugee Camp.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16(4), pp 11-34.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 2013 McAlister, Elizabeth. 2014. “Possessing the Land for Jesus” In Paul C. Johnson (ed), Spirited Things: the Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pages 177–205. [Google Scholar]). I wondered how it was that evangelicals came to understand themselves as prayer warriors, and in particular, how they trained for the most grueling, “territorial-level” assignments. At one prayer conference I met a Native American apostle who led a spiritual warfare boot camp in Oklahoma dedicated to training Native American recruits in the theology and practical protocols of spiritual warfare. The leaders of this boot camp were Native Vietnam veterans, who brought their experience of military training and discipline to bear on prayer. The Christians who engage in this high-level warfare are on a mission to transform territories, institutions, nations, and the land itself. Native Christians involved in the movement focus also the vexed issues involving massacres, land theft, broken treaties, and ongoing social injustices that include poverty and addiction on reservations. The apostle accepted my application to participate in this training, geared for tribal members but open to other ethnic groups, with the understanding that I am a social scientist researching and writing about the movement. This article would serve as a case study on the Native American strand of spiritual warfare. They had received the message that it was part of God’s plan that I attend, and write, in an effort to understand their mission better. Excited and nervous, the same day I was accepted I bought a plane ticket to Oklahoma.

Spiritual warfare boot camp

It was before sunrise and we fifteen recruits were assembled in five rows in an open field in the Oklahoma countryside. The dew was wet under our feet on this dark and chilly October morning in 2013. We had moved quickly from our bunk beds to predawn prayer and into our assigned formation before the drill sergeant could blow his whistle, because we already knew that any lateness, any infraction, any deviation from the proper pose “at attention” – head up, chest back, eyes forward, hands at the sides – would attract the embarrassing attention of one of the three caustic drill sergeants. All Vietnam veterans, they were giving us a crash course in military discipline. We wore matching uniforms of a boot camp T-shirt, black cadet’s beret, and ID lanyard. One by one we were inspected, looked up and down, and given either a correction – “eyes forward” – or a barked question – “What is General Order number four?” The correct answers were all from the Bible: “I will report accurately, by the spirit of truth, all enemy formations. John 16:13, SIR”. Eleven General Orders had been assigned for exact memorization, and we were being tested. Again a drill sergeant barked the loud question: “What is General Order number five?” “I will stand at my post until we all come into the unity of the faith. Ephesians 4:13, SIR”. Soon we were joined by the three prayer warriors who had been chosen to walk the perimeter of the camp, looking for signs of enemy activity.

After we were tested on our General Orders, it was time for marching drills. “AttenTION. Forward MARCH!” Around and around the large field we marched, halted, about faced, and marched again, until the sun was rising and it was time to go to the dining hall for a home-cooked and nutritious breakfast. We lined up single file there, this time first by rank and then by age. We recruits were last, after platoon sergeants, staff sergeants, first sergeant, and then, at the highest rank on base, the generals, who are also apostles of the Lord. Virtually all of the higher-ranking officers were Native, and more than half the recruits were Native as well, including some from reservations in the West and Canada. Among our group were Cheyenne, Chickasaw, Apache, Cherokee, Navaho, Oneida, Tlingit, and two descendants of famous Lakota warriors who had fought at the Battle of Little Big Horn, and whose families had converted to Christianity.

After prayer and breakfast, it was time to take our seats in the church sanctuary, which doubled as a schoolroom for the week-long training. We sat at tables in rows and listened to a well-organized series of talks from about eight speakers in the area who were recognized as “carrying the anointing” for conducting and teaching spiritual warfare. Throughout the week a corps of staff sergeants supervised us within a set of strict disciplinary guidelines. When a ranking officer entered the room we were instantly to stand at attention and wait for his or her “at ease” command. We were to take careful notes, pray together, perform work jobs, and obey the rules of the base. We also attended morning and evening flag-raising ceremonies. I was honored to be chosen to be one of four recruits to perform this solemn ritual, which was carried out to a strikingly poignant recording of a Sioux battle chant. And somehow, between rising at 5 a.m. and going to bed at midnight and doing all of this, we were expected to find the time to memorize our General Orders.

All of this military discipline, taken straight from the leaders’ experiences as soldiers in Vietnam, was to teach us the principles of honor and authority, which would become the foundation for our lives as victorious prayer warriors. As the week went by, I realized that the tough military discipline the officers were subjecting us to was a veneer covering a deep sense of Christian love and affectionate caring. Formal commands gave way to moments of emotional bonding in prayer on several occasions. The leaders explained that they were disciplining us as a loving gift, so that we would be strong enough to follow the protocols, focus, and lines of command that spiritual warfare required. Submission to spiritual authority was central to both the political project of the training, and to its methods of enactment.

For the next week we were taught – with the aid of a pre-prepared workbook and PowerPoint presentations – the principles and protocols of effective prayer warfare. The speakers related the underlying narrative of Satan’s war against God in its particular relevance to both the United States and to Native tribal groups in fascinating ways, which will be elaborated below.

“Everyone who comes into the Kingdom of God comes into spiritual warfare, whether they like it or not”, said the leading apostle on the first night of the boot camp. It turned out that for our apostles, “Warrior means ‘one who keeps peace’”. Our battles would largely be staged in what they called the “spiritual” or “supernatural” realm. Many of them would be self-sacrificial and involve fasting and prayer, and there would be no training in arms handling or physical combat. “We are here to crucify the flesh”, they said. As for me, I was working to understand the relationship between the Christian mission these spiritual warriors felt they have been assigned to carry out and the military practices they were deploying to enact their mission. As we circled the field over and over, learning military marching, proper salute forms, and other commands, I found myself wondering how it had come to pass that this ethnically mixed group of charismatic evangelicals had taken literally the idea of being an “army of God”, and performed this long-standing biblical metaphor in uniform, with actual drills and practices of the US military.

The militarization of prayer in America

The history of any nation can be told as a military history, and crucial for the case at hand, the United States was first colonized through warfare against Native peoples. War consolidated the nation through a revolution against Britain. With its Protestant majority, the nation’s military activity during each conflict was expressed using biblical scripture and rhetoric that became increasingly inflected with evangelical tropes and cues. The twentieth century saw the rise of both US military power and evangelicalism, both of which reached an apex in the speeches of George W. Bush. (In his 2003 State of the Union Address preparing the country for war, Bush said the nation must “confound the designs of evil men” because “our calling, as a blessed country, is to make the world better”.) Major moments of increased militarization included the world wars against fascism in Europe and the establishment of the national security act in 1947. After the Cold War, the United States emerged as the first global superpower, and American military spending, even before the massive increases after the September 11 attacks, was as much as that of the next twelve largest national militaries combined (Lutz 2002 Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist, 104(3): 723–35.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]: 729).

Concurrently, militaristic imagery grew more pronounced in evangelical communities. In 1951, Bill Bright found an institutional means through which to harness military values to evangelical outreach when he founded Campus Crusades for Christ, which remains today a strong presence in many universities and high schools. The organization’s mandate was to instruct young evangelical “warriors” on codes of moral discipline that were articulated in military imagery: members were encouraged to enlist, rally, advance, campaign, and blitz (Martin 1996 Martin, William. 1996. With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America. New York: Broadway Books. [Google Scholar], cited in Johnson 2010 Johnson, Jessica. 2010. “The Citizen-Soldier: Masculinity, War, and Sacrifice at an Emerging Church in Seattle, Washington.” PoLAR. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 33(2): 326–51.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]: 344). In the 1970s, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, evangelicals began to export a militarized vision into a project of aggressive missionary expansion abroad. The US draft ended in 1973, and the armed forces became all-volunteer at the same time that the Reagan administration set in motion a program of neoliberal economic reform and market deregulation, together with an increase in support for the military through spending, and a campaign for volunteer enlisters to “answer the call” of duty. Evangelical discourse in books, conferences, and sermons articulated a new paradigm of free choice, strategy, efficiency, technology, statistics, and goal setting that came to flow across the fields of business, sports, and the military.

In this neoliberal evangelical vision, biblical, organizational, and military language formed an energetic new view of how American Christians could best convert others across the world (Rynkiewich 2007 Rynkiewich, M.A. 2007. “Corporate Metaphors and Strategic Thinking: The 10/40 Window in the American Evangelical Worldview.” Missiology, 25(2): 217–41. [Google Scholar]: 232). Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, already a powerful evangelical institution, in the 1970s grew into an influential center of academic mission study where professors drew on sociological research to bolster a militarized sensibility. Missiology courses identified “target populations” that could be better reached with the assistance of sociological information during “strategic missions”. The resulting Church Growth Movement which began at Fuller would gain momentum among global evangelicals at the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. There, missionaries consolidated statistics concerning population, GDP, and degree of “reachedness” in what some derided as an exercise in “statistical Christianity” (Han 2010 Han, Ju Hui Judy. 2010. “Reaching the Unreached in the 10/40 Window: the Missionary Geoscience of Race, Difference and Distance”, in T. Sturm (ed), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Burlington, VT. Ashgate Publishing. 183–207. [Google Scholar]: 188). The appropriation of technology, social science, and military thought was a powerful mix for these evangelicals, and the advent of affordable air travel had made it possible to meet face to face with fellow missionaries from many different countries. Fuller professor Ralph Winter went on to found the US Center for World Missions in 1976, referring to it as the headquarters for missionary research and “a Pentagon for mission agencies around the world” (Han 2010 Han, Ju Hui Judy. 2010. “Reaching the Unreached in the 10/40 Window: the Missionary Geoscience of Race, Difference and Distance”, in T. Sturm (ed), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Burlington, VT. Ashgate Publishing. 183–207. [Google Scholar]: 190).

This overarching ethos of purposeful mission, volunteerism, and strategic goal setting was part and parcel of the militarization of everyday life of American civil society, Protestant churches, and missionary thought, and moral education became articulated with warfare in explicit ways. In the 1980s, the military began to support evangelical proselytizing and worship among troops. Conservative evangelical leaders like Paul Weyrich (who co-founded both the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation) “advocated for an increased military presence in inner city school districts to provide discipline and moral instruction so as to ‘save’ the poor and, ostensibly, the nation” (Cowen 2006 Cowen, Deborah E. 2006. “Fighting for ‘Freedom’: The End of Conscription in the United States and the Neoliberal Project of Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 10(2): 167–83.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar], cited in Johnson 2010 Johnson, Jessica. 2010. “The Citizen-Soldier: Masculinity, War, and Sacrifice at an Emerging Church in Seattle, Washington.” PoLAR. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 33(2): 326–51.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]: 345).

Evangelicals met again in 1989 at the Lausanne II conference, where they explicitly connected militarism to the sphere of prayer. They ratified spiritual warfare as a legitimate activity in world evangelizing: aggressive prayer was needed to fight evil directly in the invisible realm. They took up the view that there are levels of evil and corresponding tactics of warfare necessary to combat evil, since Satan is essentially a commander-in-chief from whom legions of lower-ranking demons take orders. “Ground-level” spiritual warfare prayer can take the form of casting out evil through deliverance prayer, in which the Christian exorcizes demons from another person under the authority of Jesus (as depicted in Matthew 10:1). These can include the demons of addiction, depression, perversion, and the like. “Occult-level” warfare operates against “mid-level formations” such as shamanism, astrology, or Freemasonry. More ambitiously, Christian prayer warriors can engage in “strategic-level” or “territorial-level” warfare. Territorial-level warfare means to “pray down” powerful demons with broader military jurisdiction – those who have taken over entire areas of geographical territory such as a city or a whole nation. Victory over these “strongholds” will result in the revival and flourishing of Christianity in a given area or place (Wagner 1991 Wagner, C. Peter. 1991. Engaging the Enemy: How to Fight and Defeat Territorial Spirits. Ventura, CA: Regal Books. [Google Scholar]).

The concept of spiritual warfare has a particular genealogy in the Third Wave Movement headed by American Peter Wagner, who taught at Fuller Seminary from 1971 to 2001. (He also founded Global Harvest Ministries in Colorado Springs, where I attended a seminar on spiritual warfare.) Wagner embraces a fivefold ministry view that sees the legitimate offices of the church to be those listed in Ephesians 4:13, that is, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. (In contrast, the ranks of apostle and prophet are seen by traditional Protestant denominations as having been dispensed with after the earliest period of Christianity.) Wagner teaches that humanity has entered a new age in which God is calling prophets and apostles to become intercessors and usher in the return of Jesus and the Kingdom of God through warfare prayer. While there is no orthodoxy in this loose international network, generally speaking, divinely “anointed prayer warriors” understand themselves to be called to do battle in the spiritual realm with Satan’s high-ranking demons.

These Christians take their understanding of this war from Ephesians 6:12: “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places”. Christian intercessors stress to one another that they are praying against the spiritual evil of Satan himself, not against people. Physical violence against people or property is anathema to the teaching and the practice of spiritual warfare, and practitioners are not connected to terrorism or armed militias, for example, in any way (although some take credit for God having caused the downfall of another as the result of their aggressive prayer). The violence of spiritual warfare is discursive and yet is part of a cultural and ideological politics supporting evangelical Christians in becoming more invested and more influential in all sectors of society.

In order to make missionary outreach more successful, evangelicals at Lausanne II appropriated geoscience technology and began to generate datasets with the help of GIS specialists like Global Mapping International. They produced maps of ethnic/racial “people groups” and coded the globe according to degrees of reachedness in an attempt to make precise the goals and strategies of missionary activity. They noted “gaps” or territories that are ruled by “spiritual wickedness”. They coined terms like “missionmetrics” and “evangelistics” and spoke of the “deployment” of missionaries in “teams” for “strategic missions” (Han 2010 Han, Ju Hui Judy. 2010. “Reaching the Unreached in the 10/40 Window: the Missionary Geoscience of Race, Difference and Distance”, in T. Sturm (ed), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Burlington, VT. Ashgate Publishing. 183–207. [Google Scholar]: 196). It was at Lausanne II that Argentinian-born pastor Luis Bush developed the image of the “resistance belt”, an area of the globe presenting a challenge to spreading the gospel. He concluded that “successful church planting in the Pacific, Africa and Latin America has largely reduced the world’s prime evangelistic real estate to a swathe of territory from 10 degrees to 40 degrees north latitude, running through Northern Africa and Asia, known as the 10/40 Window”. Bush noted that the parameters of the 10/40 Window include the Middle East and encompass “the core of the Islamic region” (Bush n.d.), and Peter Wagner pointed out that the area is also the center of other “demonic” religions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Taoism (Wagner 1992 Wagner, C. Peter. 1992. Warfare Prayer: What the Bible Says About Spiritual Warfare. Ventura, CA: Regal Books. [Google Scholar]: 143).

In the 1990s, Peter Wagner and others “promoted explicitly geographical and geopolitical analysis with a renewed emphasis on strategy and expertise”. During the First Gulf War, spiritual warfare missionaries emphasized “Iraq and the Garden of Eden as the seat of Satan on Earth” (Holvast 2009 Holvast, René. 2009. Spiritual Mapping in the United States and Argentina 1989–2005. Leiden: Brill. [Google Scholar]: 229). In 2003, some months after the US military withdrawal from Somalia, Lieutenant-General William Boykin was filmed lecturing in churches wearing his military uniform, showing a slide of a Black Hawk helicopter in Mogadishu. Pointing to a black mark in the sky, Boykin opined, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your enemy. It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy”. In another talk, Boykin said that terrorism “is our spiritual enemy that will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus” (“A Tale of Two Faces” 2003). Clearly, Boykin was invested in the spiritual warfare world view and its understanding of cosmic reality. This view, developed by theologians at Fuller Theological Seminary, informed his military service. In turn, he brought that theology back in testimony to churches at home – a stark example of the ways that evangelicalism and militarism were constituting one another.

Spiritual warfare and Christian tribal sovereignty

Spiritual warfare theologians and pastors were not only mapping international geopolitical spaces, they also concerned themselves with American domestic space. The spiritual warfare movement shares with other branches of Christian conservatism a sense that America is a chosen nation with a righteous, Christian identity (an identity that is under attack by evil forces in the form of immorality, liberalism, and secularism). So as I prepared to attend the spiritual warfare boot camp I was curious to see how Natives would find ways to reconcile this narrative with the US government’s extreme violence against tribal groups. What I found was a radical revision of evangelical Americanism and an insistence on tribal nation sovereignty.

Indeed, the teachers at the boot camp told a straightforward story of government mistreatment of Natives. One evening the lecture recounted the history of the “ratification of 371 treaties with the Indian Tribes of America”. They explained that “the United States government has broken all 371 treaties”, which resulted in the outright theft of millions of acres of land. As if this were not bad enough on its own, our teachers considered this history cosmically significant as well, amounting to a profound original or “root” national sin. They cited four scriptural passages in which God instructs people not to move property boundary lines or break covenants, including Deut. 27:17: “Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s landmark”. This disobeying of God’s commandment has resulted in opening the land and its inhabitants to the effects of God’s curse. The American government broke its own land treaties, and so white American “immigrants” and their nation are living out God’s punishment. The message was that God abandoned his chosen American “New Israel” because of its government’s sins against tribal peoples.

But in the speakers’ view, the Native Americans had also committed a deep and enduring sin of their own, and this is partly why the US government was able to steal so much Indian land. The Old Testament is full of legal agreements, covenants with God, and people breaking the covenants. Our teachers applied a logic of diplomatic protocol to the biblical story, in which Christians hold authority over demons, land, and all of Earth’s creation, through their salvation and brotherhood with Jesus. The only catch is the obligation of full obedience to the living spirit of God. Biblical scholar Regina Schwartz (1997 Schwartz, Regina M. 1997. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]: 54) writes of how, in the Old Testament, property rights are contingent upon obedience: “A self-enclosed circular system is thereby instituted: to be ‘a people’ is to be God’s people is to inherit his land, and if they are not the people of God, they will not be a people, and they will lose the land”. Idolatry is the biblical sin most often responsible for the Israelites losing their land or failing to repossess it. It is also the sin by which Native Americans, in their relationships with ancestral spirits and spirits of the land, created the spiritual conditions for losing the battle with white settlers. This theology casts the ancestral spirits of indigenous people as demonic and demands they be rejected – itself a form of symbolic cultural violence that traditionalists and others vigorously denounce. This situation means that Native people have to get to work confessing and repenting. Said one of our teachers, “My father and my forefathers, Lord, we screwed up the land before the white man came. You see, I’m included in that”. This puts in Indian hands the responsibility but also the possibility for improving things. Because of these deep iniquities of both Natives and immigrants, all Americans continue to experience problems and social ills in society, and God’s Kingdom is not yet a reality.

In the spiritual warfare view developed by Native leaders, tribal peoples (and all others) have an indigenous identity that connects them through their ancestors to the geographical land of some nation or nations on the Earth. It is part of God’s plan for people to exercise effective dominion in some spot of land in the Earth (Chosa 2004: 92). Incorporating new research on the human genome, the teachers laid out the view that genetic factors, written in the DNA of our physical cells, “become a historical and spiritual record of what our blood lineage experienced over the generations”. Spiritual DNA can carry a curse from generation to generation through a family’s bloodlines, such as that from having a murderer among one’s forebears. But spiritual DNA also carries authority over territory – the people who have lived on any given land the longest have rightful spiritual authority over that land. And this is a spiritual authority that is still legally in effect for Natives according to biblical law, since immigrants who broke their own treaties stole the land from them. One teacher explained how Indians had a special duty to be stewards, both of the spiritual ownership of the land and of God’s mysteries. In effect, Native peoples were meant to function as “heavenly minded hosts”. It is this principle that should put indigenous people at the center of the Christian project anywhere in the world, and especially in the US. “We need to awaken to this simple principle of spiritual protocol for the righteous execution of indigenous authority. The church must work towards a true relationship with Native believers and honor them as the host people of this continent. Extending forgiveness without extending the right hand of fellowship yields only a short-term work of reconciliation and produces no lasting effect in the spiritual landscape” (Chosa 2004 : 105). To be sure, no whites have turned over land to tribal groups as a result of Christian fellowship. Whites and other groups do attend to Native land issues when they prepare spiritual warfare missions, and search the historical record for massacres or broken treaties as possible sins leading to demonic activity and requiring repentance.

Indigeneity thus works as a strength in spiritual warfare. As a result, both mission work and spiritual warfare are most effective among those who share ethnic and spiritual DNA. Said one teacher, “As we mature in our heavenly and earthly identity as a warrior son of God, we can progressively exercise indigenous authority in the Spirit to launch frontal attacks upon the net and web power-grids of darkness and their tether points in our indigenous territory”. This means that Cherokee people will work best against evil in both Oklahoma and, say, North Carolina, while an Anglo and Scots-Irish person such as myself will be most effective on prayer missions in New England or in the British Isles.

As for the US as a nation, God has given Natives sovereignty over tribal lands and withdrawn his favor towards the United States because of government violence against Natives. “The Native believers are the only ones who can permanently deal with any and all ancient issues of iniquity affecting the spiritual and natural landscape”, explained our teacher. In their fine tuning of spiritual warfare theology, Native Americans are central to the work of God’s Kingdom.

The spiritual battle to defend the land

It turns out that to participate in spiritual warfare prayer is to assume a role in an elaborate, cosmic drama. And to be an actor in this drama is to understand one’s place in history, and see how one’s spiritual DNA creates weaknesses (through generational iniquities) that must be cleansed through confession and repentance and seeking healing from God. Spiritual warriors also understand that their spiritual DNA affords them strengths, such as the ability to minister to certain ethnic groups or to address “root issues” of historical significance. (For example, someone whose family owned slaves might be called to repent for the sins of slavery and anti-black racism.) Even more crucially, being a prayer warrior means understanding that one must be led by the Holy Spirit. Prayer warriors should live in holiness (which is to say, live in accordance with biblical principles, and in constant prayer). And prayer warriors, or intercessors, stay alert to the ways God is talking to them, having developed what Tanya Luhrman calls “attentional learning”, which allows people to “school their minds and senses so that they are able to experience the supernatural in ways that give them more confidence that what their sacred books say is really true” (Luhrman 2012 Luhrman, T.M. 2012. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Vintage Books. [Google Scholar]: xxii; see also 254–66).

In reading scripture, praying constantly, and paying attention to the world around them, intercessors might come to the understanding that the Holy Spirit is calling them to an “assignment”. They bring this feeling to the spiritual authority who provides them “covering”, and discuss the validity of the sentiment. The other members of their prayer group will pray about and discuss the assignment together, and remain alert for signs that might confirm the calling. While I have participated in spiritual warfare prayer in churches, in trainings, and on behalf of individual people in domestic settings, I have not been given the opportunity to join many covert mission strikes myself. What follows is a description of such a mission by one of my teachers. I chose to describe this mission, despite my own absence, because it is a particularly interesting example of how aggressive prayer is articulated with militarism, geopolitics, and ethnicity. It is also perhaps a bit unexpected: it is a case of thwarting a demonic invasion by none other than His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

My teacher read in the newspaper that the Dalai Lama intended to go to Toronto in 2004 and perform his “Kalachakra for World Peace”, an eleven-day program of Tibetan Buddhist rituals during which monks created a large multi-colored sand mandala. At issue was that according to the Buddhists themselves, the mandala contained the Kalachakra deity and 721 surrounding deities, drawn into the sand. As we might suspect, some evangelicals considered the deities to be demonic, and the drawings to be the demons materialized. The prayer warriors researched the ritual and learned that at the end of the proceedings, the monks would sweep up the sand and pour it out into a nearby body of natural water. In this case, the Dalai Lama would deposit the sand into the waters of Lake Ontario. According to the Canadian Tibetan Association, this would be “an act of blessing the surrounding” and would “serve as a universal prayer for the development of the ethics of peace and harmony within one’s self and humanity”(Harrington 2012 Harrington, Laura. 2012. “Exorcising the Mandala: Kalacakra and the Neo-Pentecostal Response.” Journal of Global Buddhism, 13: 147–71. [Google Scholar]: 147). But according to my teacher, the sand drawings were demons, and the Dalai Lama was going to try to “dump the sand mandala that is now inoculated with the virus of these 722 spirits, into the lakes, and then it opens up the lakes to these 722 spirits”.

Historian of Buddhism Laura Harrington writes that despite the view of much current research within university walls that embraces Buddhist modernism as a worthy partner in rationality and ecumenisms, evangelicals view the religion as “a belief in spirits and demons, secret sexual practices, [and] occultism” ruled by a “God-King”. What is more, spiritual warriors discern the Dalai Lama as a “spiritual master with geographical roots in the 10/40 Window, and a powerful adept with dominion over a wide range of Tibetan spirits” (Harrington 2012 Harrington, Laura. 2012. “Exorcising the Mandala: Kalacakra and the Neo-Pentecostal Response.” Journal of Global Buddhism, 13: 147–71. [Google Scholar]: 159–60). Especially galling to evangelicals are the constant appearances, prizes, and favorable publicity he receives as the rightful head of state of an occupied Tibet and a proponent of universal human rights and world peace. While the rest of America remains ignorant, Tibetan Buddhists are competing for global religious domination. While evangelicals and their public prayer are pushed out of the public sphere by hypocritical liberals, the Dalai Lama parades around doing elaborate public religious ceremonies, even in 2011 in Washington, DC, to the outrage of spiritual warfare communities. The Dalai Lama was working to gain a legal-spiritual foothold in North America and advance his position toward transforming the world into a “universal Buddhocracy”, the Kingdom of Shambhala. The Kalachakra mandala would amount to “a Trojan Horse introducing into American territory the very demons the Spiritual Mappers seek to destroy” (Harrington 2012 Harrington, Laura. 2012. “Exorcising the Mandala: Kalacakra and the Neo-Pentecostal Response.” Journal of Global Buddhism, 13: 147–71. [Google Scholar]: 160–61).

To respond to this threat, the apostle told me, “we collected a team together; we trained them first for three days. And the Holy Spirit gave us specific instruction”. He recounted how his team went up to the shores of several of the Great Lakes and prayed in certain ways that were asked of him by the Holy Spirit while the mandala was being drawn. And here is where my teacher’s knowledge of spiritual protocol, combined with his spiritual DNA as an Ojibwe whose ancestors lived in the Great Lakes region, became a powerful part of his spiritual warfare tactic. According to spiritual protocol, he told me, “if the mouth of the indigenous spirits of the lake cannot invite them [the Tantric deities], they cannot enter”. Just as a person may only legally enter another’s house upon invitation, so too must forces in the spiritual realm operate according to the rules.

My teacher continued: “So we just shut their mouths. With the authority and dominion by God as an Ojibwe I commanded the spirits of the lake to shut their mouths in the name of the Holy Spirit. So the spirits of the lake could not invite the Tibetan spirits into the lake, so they could not enter. Native people understand this. It’s protocol”. He went on to explain that when the Dalai Lama dumped the sand into the water, he knew the deities did not enter. The Dalai Lama has his own “spiritual eyesight”, and he knew he had to take his spirits home. The mission was successful, and the Native prayer warriors, in a small elite team on a specific mission strike, had honorably defended American water and American land through a covert aggressive prayer strike.

Firsting, hosting, and the warrior tradition

There are many paradoxes in militarized Christian prayer, and opening them up for analysis goes a long way to understanding why this world view might appeal in particular to Native people. For charismatics, the Holy Spirit can send new revelations to individual prophets and this means that popular theology is always subject to new understandings. Ethnic and racialized communities’ revisions can serve them for their own purposes. In general this theology both reproduced and resignified negative images about tribal peoples. The complicated historical interpretation that our Native teachers laid out for us at the Oklahoma boot camp revisited negative mainstream tropes about Native people and simultaneously reworked the tropes into new shapes.

For example, nineteenth-century literature and mass media perpetrated a myth that Indians cursed the nation, leading to America’s social, political, and economic ills, and later to the loss of their own land (Caterine 2014 Caterine, Darryl V. 2014. “Heirs through Fear: Indian Curses, Accursed Indian Lands, and White Christian Sovereignty in America.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 18(1): 37–57.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]: 38). However, the version of this story told by my teachers – that God abandoned America because of settlers’ sins of violence towards Natives – reinstated both primacy and agency to the Natives in a Christian register.

Spiritual warfare theology also renarrates settler colonialist tropes of the prehistoric Indian who “vanished” during the Anglo takeover. At the same time, this theology allows for Native people to occupy a central role in American history and the American future. They in effect reclaim the process of “firsting” that Jean O’Brien (2010 O’Brien, Jean M. 2010. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]: xii–xv) writes is the settler account that “asserts that non-Indians were the first people to erect the proper institutions of a social order worthy of notice”. The “vanishing Indian” faded away just as Europeans built settlements and towns. Local histories wrote these “firstings and lastings” narrating the modern European founders and the “last” non-modern Indians in a region. By placing themselves as “heavenly minded hosts”, Natives present a new account of “firsting” whereby they are divinely situated to belong to their ancestral lands and to the US as a whole in the spiritual, ultimately most real, realm. Now, it is arguable that by refirsting themselves, these Natives appeal to problematic logics of origins and ties to land and the natural world that essentialize indigenous identity. Yet by insisting on their spiritual authority over the stewardship of the land and on other Christians approaching them first in any diplomatic missions, they take up the central problem of the “recognition” of Indians that, in its most basic sense of the word, local and federal actors have long denied them.

There is another paradoxical historical dimension of the militarization of prayer for Native Americans, particularly those who fought in Vietnam or other US wars. Although it has been romanticized by outsiders, there does exist a warrior tradition in many tribal groups, where warrior societies protected the community and acted as the keepers of the tribes’ spiritual power in warfare. Moreover, Europeans developed a policy of conscripting Native Americans, such that the older warrior tradition melted into a later tradition of service in European armies (Holm 1996: 69). Native American historian Tom Holm (1996: 21) in interviews with Native veterans found that “while they sometimes talk of serving their country, they more often associate being in the armed forces with a much older tradition – that of being a warrior in the tribal sense, with all the responsibilities, relationships, and ritual that go along with that status”. At the time of the Vietnam War, American Indians made up less than one percent of the US population, and yet they comprised more than two percent of the troops.

In traditionalist communities, warfare has been a way for men to gain status and honor and maintain their spiritual powers (Holm 1996: 40). Evangelical Natives, learning from those who served in Vietnam, bring the same gravitas to spiritual warfare that their traditionalist ancestors once did to physical warfare. Like the warrior societies, they emphasize spiritual preparation and coming into the proper relationship with the supernatural world. Like traditionalists, evangelicals pray, fast, and practice abstinence, seeking vision and revelation – only they seek it from the Holy Spirit rather than ancestral spirits. This particular reinscription of the Native warrior tradition into evangelical spiritual warfare may partly account for the literal and material expressions of spiritual warfare taking shape as a militarized boot camp.

The figure of the Native Christian warrior is an ironic one, since Native intellectuals have argued that the twin forces of Christianity and militarism were the primary causes of ruination for tribal groups (Deloria 1973 Deloria, Vine. 1973. God is Red. New York: The Putnam Publishing Group. [Google Scholar]). It is true that Christian Americans viewed Native communities as being rife with witchcraft and needing salvation from whites. Yet spiritual warfare is paradoxically invested in a native politics of sovereignty. More recently Native Christians have argued that taking on the project of missionizing to their own communities can be a strategy to stop Anglos from missionary activities, often inflected with racism, and to take up Native leadership themselves (Smith 2008 Smith, Andrea. 2008. Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]: 98).

This essay has argued that the late twentieth century intensification of the militarization of everyday life has extended to the prayer practices of some charismatic Christians, has described the case of a Native Evangelical Spiritual Warfare boot camp, and has offered analysis of the paradoxical appeal spiritual warfare has for tribal group members. A Native spiritual warfare counter-narrative to American chosenness is emerging in which God has abandoned and punished the US because of its violence against tribal groups; Native nations insist on God-given political sovereignty that must be federally respected; and indigenous peoples are at the center of the Christian project. Yet the fact that tribal groups join white evangelicals in recasting ancestral spirits as demonic, only to take up leadership in that project and to struggle for primacy and recognition, is also a symptom of profound dispossession.

And yet, the majority of spiritual warriors in the US are white. And while the warfare in question takes place in the invisible realm, the agenda of the movement is undeniably political for all ethnic groups (see Marshall 2009). Unlike, for example, the Salvation Army, which is also organized through militaristic images but is focused on social gospel projects and on saving souls (Winston 2000 Winston, Diane. 2000. Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]), the Spiritual Warfare movement is part of a teleology of transformation where a vanguard of spiritual elites help usher in a collective radical rebirth behind the scenes. This Christian revival will result in a final era where the Holy Spirit transforms the imperfect and fallen world into the Kingdom of God. Not a system of nation-states or democratic republics, the Kingdom is figured as a restoration of an eternal original Eden where a heavenly court maintains perfect justice. In this masculinist vision, men have dominion over women and humans over animals just as in the Genesis story. Spiritual warriors will be honored soldiers in God’s army even and especially in the Kingdom. However, the details of the eternal Kingdom are rarely elaborated by warfare thinkers and teachers. Much more important is the present political condition of warfare with unseen spiritual evil, and the mapping of spheres of demonic activity – personal, cultural, and geopolitical. In this politics, people live out individual and collective lives in the tension between obedience to both divine and human authority and the aggression of their vision, intention, and language in spoken prayer.

Acknowledgements

This project was part of the New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative, funded by the Templeton Foundation through the Social Science Research Council. My profound thanks for helpful critique go to Debby Applegate, Ava Chamberlain, Matthew Engelke, David Frankfurter, Peter Geschiere, Pamela Haag, Laura Harrington, Stewart M. Hoover, J Kehaulani Kauanui, Em Kianka, Christina Klein, Laura Levitt, Ruth Marshall, Mark Minch, Deborah Dash Moore, Kathleen Newman, Ebenezer Obadare, Leonard Primiano, Peter van der Veer, and Diane Winston.

Notes

1. I use the term articulation in a particular fashion, after Stuart Hall 1986 who theorized that elements of culture, while usually tied to class, can recombine in various ways into new patterns with novel meanings or connotations. This is useful in understanding how cultural spheres as seemingly far apart as militarism and prayer can be linked together both in theory, theology, and practice, and come to create new meanings, rituals, and identities, which in turn influence politics and diplomacy, missionary projects, and even humanitarianism.

2. This network is known variously as the Spiritual Mapping Movement, the Transformation or Revival Movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, and the Third Wave Evangelical Movement.

3. As focused as they are on bringing revival and transformation in a kind of “end times” sensibility, spiritual warfare theologians avoid delving into doctrinal debates about premillennialism, the rapture, and other features of apocalyptic thought that might cause disagreement and factions. The focus of their energies is on the present moment, when their prayers can bring humanity to the verge of a “breakthrough” of Christian revival led by the Holy Spirit.

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 Nicholas Thomson / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 12 July 2018

Nicholas Thomson - The first real computer, the ENIAC, was built in 1946. The first computer war game appeared two years later. It was built by the Army Operations Research Office, and it was as rudimentary as you might think. Since then, the relationship between the military and world of games has gotten endlessly deeper. Veterans help develop popular games, and popular games help veterans recover. The US military uses games to recruit, and critics complain that modern war’s cruelty comes because it too closely resembles videogames. In 1997, this magazine ran a cover story about Marines modifying the game Doom for training purposes. This past month, news came of soldiers training with a system called Tactical Augmented Reality.

What if the relationship could be still deeper, though? What if, for example, the best game developers produced tools for the Pentagon? And then what if those tools ended up back in games? What if, instead of videogames copying war, war copied videogames—and the two things became, in a certain way, the same?

The idea comes from Will Roper, a Rhodes scholar in his late 30s with a PhD in mathematics. Roper runs the Defense Department’s secretive Strategic Capabilities Office; his job is to study where war is headed, and to develop the technological tools that help the United States win there. The military services think about today; DARPA thinks about the distant future; Roper thinks about tomorrow.

His office was founded in 2012, but remained classified until last year. Recently, he has started to come out of the shadows. This past January, he appeared on 60 Minutes to demonstrate how the military could use a swarm of tiny drones that his office has built. This March, he sat with this author at South by Southwest. And more recently, he spoke again with WIRED about how the relationship between war and videogames is going, as he says, full circle.

"In the age of the Internet of Things, our senses no longer define the boundaries of our perception,” Roper says. Soldiers in the near future will live in a world with almost infinite available information that could help them. Imagine a man or woman in urban conflict. They’d want a map of all nearby friendly soldiers; they’d want heat signatures of anyone behind a nearby wall, or images of them collected by drone swarms. They’d want a map that constantly changes based on what fellow soldiers learn: If they safely break through a wall and move forward, everyone might want to use that path. If they’re greeted by fire, everyone will want to retreat. They’d want, perhaps, a color-coding system that suggests snipers locations, which changes from yellow to red when one is confirmed. They’d want a notification if ammo runs low. Behind all of this, they’d want deep-learning algorithms predicting the enemy’s next move and proposing options for countering it. And, if they were leading a group of soldiers, they’d want strategic advice based on an initial plan for the battle that adjusts as the fight goes on.

Theoretically, the Army could just send machines into this urban conflict. They can process more information; they can take more risks; they’ve got better armor. But there’s a complex moral problem—does any country want to delegate the decision to kill someone to a machine?—and a technical one, too. As Roper says, “The state of current machine learning is that it can make good decisions when presented with things it has seen before and poorly—potentially disastrously—otherwise, which is why we don't delegate lethal decisions to machines.”

In the near future, at least the one that Roper is concerned about, the challenge is to get soldiers as much information as possible, with as much learning applied to it, in the simplest and clearest way. “If we had to do this in the Pentagon on our own,” Roper continues, “I'd view it as our hardest challenge. But the videogame industry has already cracked the code.”

It is the gaming industry, of course, that has developed the best ways for players to collaborate across countries as though they are sitting in the same room, and that has built interfaces so intuitive to users that new, complex games don’t even need to be trained.

Recognizing the potential of that collaboration doesn't mean it will happen. Changing the Pentagon is hard. And the videogame industry might not want to participate. It’s morally complicated enough to build a game that simulates killing people. But do the developers at Activision, who come from all over the world, want to play any part in really killing people?

It’s “Call of Duty for real,” says Roper, which might feel patriotic to some employees and horrifying to others.

'The videogame industry has already cracked the code.' — Will Roper, Strategic Capabilities Office

Still, the Pentagon does have a $70 billion research and development budget, and Roper’s office seems to be one part of government research that’s growing. According to a recent report, his budget has grown 18-fold since the office was founded five years ago. And so he plans to approach the gaming industry with an idea: You build the Pentagon the systems it wants and give it exclusive access for, say, six months. And then everything can go back into the game. “We don’t own the product, we own the time,” says Roper.

“I could envision calling up a videogame manufacturer and saying you have the latest augmented reality system and I want to install it on a tactical headset. And I’d like to make some improvements. Maybe we want to take someone who has, via their current AR headset, local understanding of where they are who can drop icons and 'see' objects behind walls. Maybe we want to also give them a bigger macro view so that they can expand out to the company level. That would better tie their actions to team objectives without their being collocated with team members." Roper then adds a potential selling factor, “If we had special ops go out with it, there would be a coolness factor even in our beta testing the technology.”

Roper knows this isn’t the way the government normally works, or the way the gaming industry does either. And he won’t say if he’s directly approached any gaming companies so far, or how the conversations have gone. “We are going to have to warm this pot slowly,” he says.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/will-roper-pentagon-video-games/

 Peter G. Anderheggen / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 06 September 2017

Winsted Area Peace Action has been visiting high schools in northwestern Connecticut for at least ten years. The purpose of our visits has been to introduce and discuss with students alternative methods of service to the country and non-military means of earning money after high school. Our goal is to bring some contrast to the appeal of the military, which spends many millions of dollars in its recruiting efforts. We make information available on such organizations as AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, Peace Brigades International and Heifer International, all of which take people who are age 18 or older.

We are usually invited during the lunch periods, often with a table set up in the vicinity of the cafeteria. There are several lunch sessions and invariably the students arrive in droves, hungry and eager to visit with friends. Our challenge is to present something that catches their eyes and engages them.

About five years ago, one of our members who was carrying out research for a book, Seth Kershner, went to Austin, Texas, and visited a high school along with Sustainable Options for Youth (SOY). He saw how a peace wheel could be effectively used to attract students to a table. The wheel intrigued our members and we ordered one from Thomas Heikkala, a Vietnam veteran and skilled carpenter who was one of the founding members of SOY.

So, what is a peace wheel and how do we use it? Ours is a piece of plywood about twenty-four inches in diameter attached to a tripod. The wheel is divided into 12 segments separated by wooden pegs on the outer edge of the wheel. There is a small piece of plastic at the top of the tripod that hits the pegs as the wheel spins. When the wheel stops spinning it leaves the piece of plastic pointing to one of the segments, each of which contains a question. The student who spins the wheel is asked to answer or discuss the question. The purpose at this point is to engage the student, who is rewarded with a prize even if he or she cannot answer the question correctly. These days the prize is an apple; previously, members of our group handed out candy. About 25 percent of the time the experience leads to a deeper and more informative conversation and follow-up questions from the students. The major problem these days is that we have four or five students waiting in line to spin the wheel.

The questions vary in difficulty and we keep developing new ones. We also distribute sheets to students that contain all the questions and answers.

Following are a few examples of the questions:

Q. In what year and under what president was the Peace Corp established?

A. In 1961 under President Kennedy.

Q. About how many volunteers have served in the Peace Corps since it was established in 1961?

A. About 215,000 volunteers.

Q. What is AmeriCorps NCCC?

    A. AmeriCorps NCCC is a team-based civilian service program inside the United States. Teams travel to projects focusing on disaster relief, the environment, housing and youth. Each year about 1,100 young people, ages 18 to 24, serve for ten months. (www.Americorps.gov.)

Q. If a high school graduate joins AmeriCorps NCCC, what benefits are received?

    A. Money to live on, $5,550 for future education, health care, three meals a day, housing and an opportunity to defer qualified student loans. Also valuable leadership skills and a sense of personal empowerment.

Q. Who won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize?

A. Malala Yousafzai and Kallash Satyarthi. Malala (17 years old) won for her work promoting education for girls in Pakistan. Kallash (about 60 years old) won for his work against child slavery in India.

Q. What method of conflict resolution has resolved the greatest number of conflicts, violence or nonviolence?

    A. Nonviolent actions (strikes, boycotts, petitions) have resolved twice as many conflicts both within and between nations as violent actions such as war and the threat of violence (Erica Chenwith and Maria J. Stephen, Why Civil Resistance Works). Gene Sharp in Waging Nonviolent Struggles identifies 198 methods of conflict resolution that have been used, past and present, including marches, occupations, strikes and refusal to pay taxes.

This is just a sample of the questions we ask students. It is in no way the purpose of the questions to stump the students, but rather to engage them, so it is good to include on the peace wheel some questions that they may be able to answer.

For more information on Winsted Area Peace Action, visit them on Facebook.
Editor’s note: A number of counter-recruitment groups around the country use tabletop prize wheels with different themes. For example, Project YANO (www.projectyano.org) uses a “leaders of social change” quiz theme. For information on ordering wheels, contact www.trainerswarehouse.com or Thomas Heikkala, tomas_heikkala@yahoo.com.

###

This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (http://www.comdsd.org/).

Sarah Jaffe / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 26 March 2017

Donald Trump's budget slashes social programs while inflating an already massive military budget, meaning that for many people in already underserved and underemployed communities, the military will be the closest thing to a welfare state they have.

Today we bring you a conversation with Rory Fanning, a veteran and conscientious objector, and author of the book Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger's Journey Out of the Military and Across America. His work centers on opposing US militarism at home. He is also the coauthor, with Craig Hodges, of the new book Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter. He lives in Chicago, which has become ground zero for military recruiting in the country, and often speaks at high schools there. "There are more kids signed up in Chicago JROTC and NJROTC than any other school district in the country; ten thousand kids: 50 percent Latino and 45 percent Black," he told me. We spoke about opposing Trump's military buildup, the roles that veterans and athletes can play in movements for change, and the long tradition of imperialism in the US.

Sarah Jaffe: We will circle back, certainly, to talk about military recruiting, but because we are in the wake of Donald Trump's first quasi-budget (and it has a lot of cuts to social programs in order to put all of this money into the military), I wanted to talk to you about the role the military plays in this right-wing nationalist political buildup and how people can resist that.

Rory Fanning: I think it is important first to note that this request by this budget, particularly through defense, is not unprecedented. It really only takes us back to 2011 numbers when they kind of set a cap on military spending. But Obama asked for $700 billion for defense in 2012. I think Trump is asking for $600 billion, which is an increase of $56 billion over the previous year. It is still more military spending than the next thirteen countries combined. One of the most alarming things about this budget is the number of active-duty Army troops that are going to be increased. It is going to go from 475,000 to about 540,000 at a time when there is really no existential threat to the United States. It is kind of ridiculous. I think that is just going to mean more intense recruiting in the most vulnerable communities in the US.

Obviously, when we are talking about the proposal to Make America Great Again, the military is seen as a key component of it. Talk about the role of this recruiting in communities of color and what kind of flawed promises are being made to people if they join.

You don't see this kind of recruiting out in the suburbs. I have spoken at high schools out in the suburbs and I have spoken at high schools in the inner city, and these recruiters ... know kids in poverty-stricken areas have less options after graduation. They know that paying for college is more difficult in poverty-stricken areas. So, they go there and promise kids education. They promise them leadership skills. They promise them discipline and structure. These programs are seen largely as positive in [many] school districts because of the lack of jobs and opportunities.

So there really is [minimal] pushback against these recruiters. There are ten thousand recruiters stalking the hallways, working with a $700 million advertising budget each year, to say nothing of the movies and the video games. It is next to impossible to offer a counternarrative....

In terms of when you are talking to high school students, what are some of the arguments that you make to counter this narrative?

I go in there first and foremost knowing that they are going to do what they are going to do regardless of what I tell them. I just try to plant a few seeds. I don't go in there and finger wag and say, "Don't join the military." I emphasize the importance of critical thinking -- right now, in the present, in high school and also if they do decide to go ahead and join the military....

The politics are completely detached from the mission in the military by design. It is about the person to your right and left. It is not about unending trillion-dollar wars. It is really brought down into the very micro levels of the day-to-day. I just ask them to think broader if they do decide to join up for the military. I communicate the fact that there is nothing worse than killing somebody for a cause that you don't understand.... It is almost maybe even better to lose your own life or get injured yourself as opposed to taking somebody's life who is innocent.

Their experience with the military [often] doesn't go further than movies and video games. [Many] say, "How much is the military like 'Call of Duty?'" (a popular first-person shooter game). I'll say, "Do you hear babies and moms crying when they watch people die in front of them, innocent people die in front of them?" "No, not really" is their answer. "Are the majority of the people you kill in 'Call of Duty' innocent?" "No, not really." "Is there torture in 'Call of Duty'?" "No, not really." "Can you turn off 'Call of Duty'?" "Yes." "Well, you can't really turn off war after you have been there."

I cite some statistics. There are 40,000 homeless US veterans, people who just can't get their minds straight after seeing what they saw overseas, can't get reintegrated into society because they have lost parts of themselves that can never be recovered. It is important to highlight some of that stuff.

And Trump's budget does not -- as far as I know -- increase programs to take care of people when they get back from war, right?

Well, once you sign up for the military, you are kind of a piece of equipment. You are not good to anybody after. You are just a drag on the system after you have left the military. There are hundreds of millions of dollars every year ... dedicated to veteran services. It is a huge drain on the system, the medical care of returning veterans. It is far from adequate. But, yes, as far as specifically -- I think he talks and pretends like he is going to, but as we know, what he says and what he does are completely different things.

Rory Fanning sits in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick at a Chicago Cubs baseball game in 2016. (Photo: Courtesy of Rory Fanning)

 We are talking about a budget that pulls funds from social programs to beef up the military and then recruits its new soldiers from communities that are being devastated by those cuts. Then, when people come home from serving, they are facing further cuts and a lack of a social safety net. The military ... sort of steps in and replaces an actual universal welfare state. What does it look like to actually make these connections and say, "What we are doing here is building this up at the expense of taking care of people?"

Recognize that people do the best with the information they have access to, and most people think that the US is fighting for freedom and democracy around the world and they sign up with very good intentions. I think a lot of people are disillusioned by what they actually see when they are overseas.... There is very little space for veterans to come back and tell their stories. There is a lot of patting on the back at sporting events and concerts and whatnot, but as far as actual space to hear the realities of war, there are next to none. Unless you have a very positive take on the last 15 years, people don't ask you to talk.

I think [there are] upwards of 50,000 war resisters who signed up for the military since 2001. So, there is a huge number of people that have had negative experiences that we could draw from.... I think the potential for veterans who come back to become positive influences in the fight against exploitation and oppression is really high. Reaching out to veterans to organize and to call out injustices that they see is high. Communicating with veterans is really important.

Yes, we have seen that several times in the last year. In particular I am thinking about the veterans going to Standing Rock and the way that, in particular, they used at least the lip service reverence that this country gives to veterans to really make a powerful political point.

Yes, absolutely. There is a lot of leverage in conversations when you are a veteran as to what is and isn't necessarily good for society, right or wrong. I think that is overblown on a lot of levels, but the whole Veterans for Kaepernick response, you saw that trending on Twitter. I think veterans are very sensitive to the fact that this largely is not a free country. There are more people in prison than any other country in the world per capita. The majority of [them are] Black and Latino.

When you sign up, allegedly, to fight for freedom and democracy and you see nothing of that kind being practiced here in the US, with the mass surveillance and the reach of agencies like the National Security Agency, etc., this is not what you put your life on the line for. When I see someone like Colin Kaepernick refusing to put his hand over his heart and stand for the national anthem, I think people who have actually sacrificed for freedom and democracy really respond well to that in a lot of ways.

There is a lot of history around that, particularly around returning Black veterans getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement. A lot of leaders from that movement had been people who served overseas and were told they were fighting for freedom and equality against a racist regime only to come back to Jim Crow America.

Absolutely. You are seeing veterans getting deported here in the US under Trump's new policies. It doesn't matter if they went overseas and fought two or three times. There is a case here in Chicago of a veteran who had been to Afghanistan twice, had a drug conviction 10 years ago and now is basically suing not to be deported and is requiring intervention from a Senator. Yes, there is a lot of hypocrisy in the system.

That reminds me, the DREAM Act, which never ended up getting passed, was partly for college students, but it was also for people who joined the military -- which in itself is an incentive for people to join.

Right. So many of these kids who came here when they were like eight years old or whatever, they sign up for the military thinking they are set. "OK, I don't have anything to worry about as far as my residency in the United States is concerned." Trump is showing that certainly is not the case and it is certainly not supporting the troops or supporting the veterans.

You were one of the people, the veterans sitting with Kaepernick at the Cubs game, right? For people who are reading this or listening who are veterans, do you have advice for them on how to use that moral authority? I think you have done it in a few moments. Also, I am thinking about the big Chicago protest against Trump on the campaign trail where he ultimately never ended up speaking.

Yes, I think the best advice is to find a group or an organization. Even if you are a veteran, it is way easier to stand up against something if you have a lot of people with you. I am a member of Veterans for Peace. Iraq Veterans Against the War exists. But, all of these groups need to be strengthened. We're at a lull in the anti-war movement, despite the fact that we are engaged in wars in seven countries right now. I think gathering together with other like-minded veterans is really important to recognizing your leverage as a veteran to be heard....

We were talking about Colin Kaepernick. You have a new book out with a fairly well-known athlete. I wanted to ask you about that book and about the role that professional athletes can play in social movements.

Yes, that is one of the reasons I was sensitive to what was happening to Colin Kaepernick, because people were saying that Colin Kaepernick was spoiled and he didn't appreciate what he was given and he was a coward for not respecting the flag. I found his case to be the complete opposite of that because I realized by working with Craig Hodges, who was black-balled by the NBA for demanding the league do more to fight racism, economic inequality. Not just the NBA, but also the president of the United States when he visited George Bush, Sr., after his second championship. He called on power, essentially, to do more to fight these problems in our society and he lost everything as a result.

I saw Colin Kaepernick subject himself to the same fate, potentially. We are seeing NFL owners turn their back on Kaepernick now as he is out in the market trying to get acquired by a team. A lot of what is happening to Kaepernick now happened to Craig Hodges. He lost, potentially, millions of dollars standing up for justice. But, he also recognized that he had a platform that could be heard. He realized that the people in his community weren't going to have the opportunity to have a microphone, or the New York Times interview you, or visit the White House, so he wanted to make the most out of it because he felt like he owed, not just his community, but his ancestors who came to this country as slaves and were subject to exploitation and oppression for the last couple hundred years. For him to just acquire all of these things and not acknowledge that, it just didn't sit well with him.

One thing that Craig and Colin Kaepernick have the same is they both understand history very well and they are connected to history. People like Michael Jordan are often criticized for not speaking up when they had the platform. Craig is actually pretty sympathetic to people like Jordan saying, "He just was very disconnected from his history. Of course, he experienced racism as a kid, but he didn't know how to really articulate his situation in this country that is all about personal responsibility and everybody is a clean slate." But, Craig, because he was so interested in people's history, the history of his people, recognized injustice when he saw it. I think Colin Kaepernick does the same thing, is similar.

Anything else that you are paying attention to right now that we should talk about?

The issues with crumbling infrastructure and the fact that it is going to take about $4.5 trillion to repair all the bridges, all the pipes, all the roads, all the failing infrastructure in this country. We spend about $1 trillion a year on our military; if we took just a percentage of that, we would have completely new infrastructure in this country. This failing infrastructure is a far greater threat than any terrorism here in the US. I think the odds of you dying in a terrorist attack are one in twenty-five million, but the odds of dying in a car crash in Mississippi are one in two thousand. I am writing an article on it now.

If a terrorist attack happened in this country or if we provoked Iran into some kind of war, I think the justification for further crackdowns on minorities in this country would be absolutely suffocating. I think it is important that people stay vigilant, pushing back against militarism as much as they can. We just don't want to; ideally not respond to, the next war that this administration seems hell-bent on pursuing. We already came extremely close to a war with Iran when Secretary of Defense Matthis was about to board an Iranian ship looking for weapons headed toward Yemen. I just think it is important to be as vigilant as possible right now against how this administration would respond to a terrorist attack or they could lead us into another war. If we were to go to war against Iran, I think there would be devastating consequences.

I know the anti-war movement is kind of still at a lull, but if we can connect the huge movements around the Women's March, the Day Without Immigrants, and all that kind of stuff to anti-imperialist/antimilitarist actions, I think we would be better for it.

A lot of people say, "Having 800 military bases around the world is a deterrent. Having 7,700 nuclear weapons is a deterrent." But, it can also be seen as provocation. Another country is only going to feel the need to amp up its own military as a result of the US amping up its [own]. If there was a collective disarmament, there is a retraction of these bases that are just draining our budgets ... I just think all of that stuff has to be connected. Then, if you are going to spend another $56 billion a year on the military each year, there is going to be overflow into police departments because the military doesn't need any more of these weapons. So, "Well, they already exist. Just give them to the police." And in such a pro-police administration, you can only assume that they are going to become even more militarized and target the most vulnerable.

It was interesting, because the NYPD is currently angry because Trump's budget cuts their personal antiterrorism funding in order to put more money into military.

If all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail.

How can people keep up with you then?

I am usually on Facebook more than I am on Twitter. If they would like to invite me to their school, they can just reach out to me on either of those two things. I am constantly looking to talk to more high schools and colleges, wanting to give these kids the full story, because if [military recruiting] is already predatory, it is just going to be on steroids with this administration, the pressures of sending kids overseas to fight wars for billionaires.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.

Sarah Jaffe is a reporting fellow at The Nation Institute and has covered labor, social and economic justice and politics for Truthout, The Atlantic, The Guardian, In These Times and many other publications. She is the cohost of Belabored, a labor podcast hosted by Dissent magazine, and the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans In Revolt (Nation Books, 2016). Follow her on Twitter: @sarahljaffe.

Mark Karlin / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 28 February 2017

Delving into the underbelly of the US military, longtime antiwar activist Pat Elder reveals how military recruiters are assisted by the Department of Education, the film industry, the video game industry and mainstream media in order to fuel never-ending war -- using the country's most vulnerable young people as fodder. Get the book Military Recruiting in the United States by donating to Truthout now!

Military recruiting is the beast that feeds the US military empire that spans the globe. It is unacceptable that many US schools allow military recruiters extensive access to young people who will become fodder for the Pentagon's acts of war around the world, Pat Elder argues in this interview with Truthout.

Mark Karlin: Is it safe to say that like the Roman Empire, the United States military is the power that futilely tries to secure the US as an empire in its waning days of hegemony?

Pat Elder: Our military, like Rome's, secures a dying empire while accelerating its demise.

The behemoth US military is a cancer on the national body politic. It has led to financial ruin while contributing to the destruction of our cherished constitutional separation of powers. We've become a violent people, addicted to war.

America is witnessing the "grave implications" of the "economic, political and even spiritual" influence of the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about. A single F-35 fighter jet costs more than the budget of a medium-sized city's school system and the US is building 2,500 of them while the schools crumble.

Our military is a double-edged sword. One side of the blade is the unconscionable use of force to "protect" American investments. Major General Smedley Butler framed it so eloquently: "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."

The sword’s back edge hangs precariously over us like the sword of Dionysius dangling from a horse hair, ready to sever Damocles’ head. America's military largess will be its sudden undoing. Rome took centuries to collapse. America's demise is upon us.

Given that the US has a volunteer army, military recruitment is essential to the military's survival. You state in one chapter that military recruiting is "psy-ops at home." How so?

It's a coerced, recruited Army as much as it is a volunteer Army.

American military recruiting is a despicable, psychological pursuit that pits carefully selected and highly trained soldiers against vulnerable children. The American Public Health Association, (APHA) calls for the cessation of military recruiting in the nation's schools, claiming recruiters engage in aggressive behaviors to gain a child's confidence and trust. They say recruiters are exceptionally charming while failing to honor clear boundaries. It is despicable public policy, and it's time to end it.

Nearly 40 percent of all Army enlistees never complete their first term. Imagine the torment.

Recruiters are child predators. They have monthly quotas, and they're signing up kids who have no business joining the military. Kids with anxiety disorders, ADHD and severe learning disabilities are being coerced to sign up. They're crushed and spit out as broken souls in a few months by a malicious system.

There were more than 20,000 deserters from the Army alone during the period from 2006 to 2014. Most got a slap on the wrist. The way the Army sees it, it's easier for recruiters to chill with kids in high school cafeterias to drum up new recruits than it is to chase down and reintegrate the deserters. Still, most kids are resistant because they have far better options.

From electronic trolling of social websites, recruiters know intimate details about our children and they use them to prepare a psychological dossier before first contact. It is insidious.

What role do Madison Avenue and Hollywood play in military recruiting? 

It seems everything these days carries a military insignia, including banks, credit card companies, hats (made in China), toys, models, games, watches, jewelry -- the list would fill this page. The Marines have their own "Devil Dog" cologne for $45 a bottle. The America's Army Comic Book app has a five-star rating from the Apple App store, apparently for its sterilized glimpse of Army life produced for recruiting purposes.

Producers who desire access to military bases, soldiers and weapons in the production of motion pictures and television shows are directed to contact the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs (OCPA) to submit their scripts and plans for editorial approval. Censors regularly edit the scripts of thousands of productions, [such as] "American Idol,"  "Cupcake Wars," and hundreds of movies. The Pentagon rejects productions they don't like and rewrites scripts to enhance the military image to "safeguard recruiting and retention numbers."

Failure to submit to the process forces filmmakers and others wanting to tell a story involving the military to potentially spend additional millions in production costs, effectively eliminating low-budget filmmakers not content with toeing the line.

Movies like Top Gun have enjoyed complete access to men, machines and bases. It's unlikely that a movie based on a script by Howard Zinn or Chalmers Johnson would receive the same treatment. This ideologically-rooted discrimination by the government, in which it favors one form of speech over another, is a blatant violation of the First Amendment.

Can you expand on the role of video games in both recruiting and glorification of the military? 

Fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal fired eight rounds in fast succession at a high school youth prayer group, killing three and wounding five. In the words of author Lt. Col Dave Grossman, "He fired just once at each person's head, as one would do to rack up bonus points in a video game." Carneal spent a good portion of his life playing first-person shooter games.

For many, there's an undeniable appeal to taking virtual human life. Although the wildly popular America's Army video game (rated Teen, Blood, Violence) can't quite match the gore of Mortal Kombat or the splattering brains in Manhunt 2, it's not bad for a free download, children contend. According to a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the game has had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.

Many of America's child mass murderers spent significant portions of their lives playing first-person shooter games: Jared Lee Loughner (Arizona), Adam Lanza (Newtown), Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (Columbine), Evan Ramsey (Alaska), Devin Moore (Alabama), Kip Kinkel (Oregon), James Holmes (Colorado). The list goes on ...

First-person shooter games have the propensity to attract and nurture killers, especially those who spend significant portions of their lives immersed in this virtual netherworld. Meanwhile, the real world places a premium on securing the services of those who are wired to kill.

What role do our schools play in enabling military recruiting?

The answer to this question depends on multiple socio-political variables, the most important of which is the location of the school. For instance, youth from Georgia are about three times more likely to enlist in the armed services than are youth from Rhode Island. Georgia's culture and schools are far more militarized than Rhode Island's.

According to the Army's School Recruiting Program Handbook, "The objective of the Army's school recruiting program is to assist recruiters with programs and services so they can effectively penetrate the school market. The goal is school ownership that can only lead to a greater number of Army enlistments." The access military recruiters enjoy on a given high school campus is largely determined by the principal. Although the military is chipping away at its goal of school influence, local communities are still legally empowered to exercise day-to-day control over their schools.

Many high schools allow recruiters unfettered access to kids. The recruiters are often free to roam the hallways and "chill" with kids. On campus, they may perform the following functions:

• Career and academic counseling

• Coaching teams, conditioning athletes

• Providing interactive recruiting vans with shooting simulators

• Presentations to the Student Government, PTA and School Board

• Training the school color guard and facilitating flag raising/Pledge of Allegiance

• Helping with school registration

• Assuming a leading role in the homecoming parade

• Chaperoning at homecoming dance and other dances throughout the year

• Presenting reactionary views to history and government classes

• Attending home football games and officiating halftime football ceremonies

• Timekeeper

• Recruiter vs. Faculty basketball games

• On stage at graduation

• Security -- recruiters carry concealed weapons

Why does "military enlistment ruin lives," as you write?

Excruciating musculoskeletal injuries, many that last a lifetime, account for 2 million medical encounters yearly. Forty-five percent of the 1.6 million veterans of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have filed injury claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Furthermore, the veterans are claiming an average of eight to nine physical or mental injuries each. The VA still has a list of a half million veterans who must wait more than a month to be seen by medical staff. People have died while waiting.
Suicide is at or near record levels, and so are rapes and assaults. Most victims don't report their attacks to their commanders. Nearly half of the survivors who had the courage to report sexual assaults on four of the country's largest bases dropped out of the military "justice" process. Toxic leadership is endemic in the military's chain of command.

Looking back at the question, I answered how the military ruins lives. You asked why. That answer is simple. The US maintains a world empire with 800 foreign military bases in 70 nations, while the rest of the world combined has a few dozen. The US has killed more than 10 million people in 35 nations since the end of World War II. Some say it's three times that number. The US is the world's judge, jury and executioner.

The US military is a monstrous institution in desperate need of reform, but the public fails to hold it responsible for the staggering level of human death (including the recruited themselves) and misery it causes, thanks to one of the most expensive and sophisticated propaganda campaigns in human history.

Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout. He served as editor and publisher of BuzzFlash for 10 years before joining Truthout in 2010. BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards. Karlin writes a commentary five days a week for BuzzFlash, as well as articles (ranging from the failed "war on drugs" to reviews relating to political art) for Truthout. He also interviews authors and filmmakers whose works are featured in Truthout's Progressive Picks of the Week. Before linking with Truthout, Karlin conducted interviews with cultural figures, political progressives and innovative advocates on a weekly basis for 10 years. He authored many columns about the lies propagated to launch the Iraq War.

Source: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/39538-the-us-military-like-ancient-rome-s-is-trying-to-secure-a-dying-empire

Gary Ghirardi / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 28 January 2017

 The rise of militainment. 

The country of Ghanzia is embroiled in a civil war. As a soldier in America’s Army, your job is to do everything from protect U.S. military convoys against AK-47-wielding attackers to sneak up on a mountain observatory where arms dealers are hiding out. It is a tough and dangerous tour of duty that requires dedication, focus, and a bit of luck. Fortunately, if you get hit by a bullet and bleed to death, you can reboot your computer and sign on under a new name.

America’s Army is a video game — a “tactical multiplayer first-person shooter” in gaming lingo — that was originally developed by the U.S. military to aid in its recruiting and training, but is now available for anyone to play. Among the most downloaded Internet games of all time, it is perhaps the best known of a vast array of video game-based military training programs and combat simulations whose scope and importance are rapidly changing not just the video-game marketplace, but also the way the U.S. military finds and trains its future warriors and even how the American public interfaces with the wars carried out in its name. For all the attention to the strategic debates of the post-9/11 era, a different sort of transformation has taken place over the last decade — largely escaping public scrutiny, at modest cost relative to the enormous sums spent elsewhere in the Pentagon budget, and with little planning but enormous consequences.

These “games” range from the deadly serious, like programs designed to train soldiers in cultural sensitivity or help veterans overcome the trauma of combat, to the truly outlandish, like a human-sized hamster wheel that makes virtual-reality software feel more realistic. There are even video-game modules that teach soldiers about the perils of sexual harassment. All told, the U.S. military is spending roughly $6 billion each year on its virtual side, embracing the view, as author Tom Chatfield put it, that “games are the 21st century’s most serious business.”

The link between games and war goes all the way back to “boards” scratched onto the back of statues by Assyrian guards almost 3,000 years ago. Three millennia later, as the U.S. military recruits from, and is increasingly led by, a generation raised on Grand Theft Auto, real warfare is taking on the look and feel of a video game, from the aerial drones launching precision strikes at terrorists in remote hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the joystick-controlled robots defusing roadside explosives in Iraq. “The biggest change is that it’s gone from being unique to being ubiquitous. It’s everywhere now,” Mark Sinclair, a staff vice president at military contractor General Dynamics, told a U.S. Navy journal.

The Pentagon’s embrace of video games is part of a much larger phenomenon — “militainment” — that is reshaping how the public understands today’s conflicts. The term was first coined to describe any public entertainment that celebrated the military, but today it could be redefined to mean the fascinating, but also worrisome, blurring of the line between entertainment and war. For example, while America‘s Army is technically a publicly funded recruiting and training platform, its main commercial rival is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a game published by Activision Blizzard. The two games compete for market share, but also over who can better define contemporary war zones. In America‘s Army, you deploy to the fictitious country of Ghanzia; in Modern Warfare 2, you join a U.S. special operations team that roams from Afghanistan to the Caucasus, winning hearts and minds (or losing them) with a mix of machine pistols and Predator strikes. The players also fight it out in a range of potential future areas of conflict, from Brazil’s rough urban favelas to a simulated Russian invasion of Washington, D.C. (This is actually a major flaw in the game; any invasion force would clearly get stuck in Beltway traffic.)

The stakes are high. Modern Warfare 2 came out on Nov. 10, 2009. By the end of the next day, it had racked up $310 million in sales. To put this in perspective, Avatar, James Cameron’s latest Hollywood blockbuster (notably following an ex-Marine remotely fighting through a video-game-like battle environment), earned a measly $27 million on its first day. Another comparison might be even more apt. Roughly 70,000 young Americans chose to join the U.S. Army last year. By contrast, 4.7 million chose to spend Veterans Day playing war at home.

And this is no mere American trend. More than 350 million people play video games worldwide, with the war-oriented sector perhaps the most important part of the global market. Modern Warfare 2 may have players join a U.S. special operations team, but one out of every 49 British citizens did so in its first 24 hours. Niche games have also amassed huge followings; in the polarized Middle East, Hezbollah-produced Special Force plays out an attack on Israeli soldiers, while Ummah Defense provides the vicarious thrill of taking on the U.S. military, Israeli settlers, and killer robots.

Reporting on militainment sometimes suffers from either an uncomfortable gee-whiz quality or blanket condemnation, when the story is far more complex. There’s much to be impressed by: The Pentagon is saving millions in training costs while creating a learning environment that can look astonishingly like the real thing, potentially saving real-world lives. But as the training and fighting — and even the public’s relationship with war — becomes ever more distant and virtual, there is also an emerging dark side to keep our (glazed-over) eyes on.

Be (Online) All That You Can Be

Like many innovations, America‘s Army and the broader rise of militainment didn’t grow out of a grand strategic plan. Almost a decade ago, a group of U.S. Marines hacked the commercial video game Doom II to create “Marine Doom,” a software program that helped them teach urban warfare (instead of fighting the demons of hell, the Marine version has players team up to take out an enemy bunker). Col. Casey Wardynski, then a professor at West Point, was impressed by the program, as well as by the fact that his two teenage sons were fans of action video games. While researching how to build an increasingly high-tech U.S. military, he approached the Pentagon about making an online game as a recruiting tool. The idea stuck, and in 2000 the Army contracted the Naval Postgraduate School to create it.

After two years of development, the game, called America’s Army, was released at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a sort of annual pilgrimage for video-gamers that draws some 60,000 people to the Los Angeles Convention Center. What happened next surprised all: The Army didn’t just have a new recruiting tool, but an actual market hit. It quickly became one of the top 10 most popular games on the Internet, and within its first five years, some 9 million individuals had signed up to join America’s video-game army, spending some 160 million hours on the site and making it one of the top 10 of all video games, online or otherwise.

From the Army’s perspective, commercial triumph was secondary. Its goal was to recruit. And at this, too, the game proved to be a wild success. To log on to the game, you have to connect via the Army’s recruitment website and fork over your information. Gamers can also check out profiles of current Army soldiers and video testimonials of why they joined. Just one year after America’s Army was released, one-fifth of West Point’s freshman class said they had played the game. By 2008, a study by two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that “30 percent of all Americans age 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game and, even more amazingly, the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.” Notably, this is from a game that the Pentagon has spent an average of $3.28 million a year developing and promoting over the last 10 years — compared with the military’s roughly $8 billion annual recruiting budget.

Behind the success of America’s Army lies a story of entrepreneurship and good old-fashioned interservice rivalry. As one of the developers explained in an online forum, “The Navy started to get pissed at the Army because there was never any mention that the game was actually built within a Naval think tank.” So, with the Navy angry, the Army did the only logical thing: It brought in the French. Future versions of America’s Army were licensed to French game company Ubisoft, which also allowed the game to be used on Microsoft Xboxes — a breakthrough because it meant the game could penetrate a much wider marketplace. Ubisoft paid the Army $2 million upfront, plus 5 percent in royalties per game sold. The Army also kept its right to edit content; video games were becoming too violent even for the U.S. military. As Wardynski, the program’s originator who now directs the Army Game Project that administers it, told National Defense, the military wanted to ensure that it wouldn’t be “the sort of game where you tear off someone’s arm and beat them to death with it.”

Instead, America‘s Army is meant to imbue potential recruits with traditional military values. To join, would-be video soldiers have to pass training sessions not only for the game but also for U.S. military systems, lingo, and values. Over time, they can go through added training to specialize in becoming anything from a Javelin missile operator to a Humvee driver.

Once in, players enter a virtual battle built around a scenario from recent real-world U.S. Army experience — in a squad with other online soldiers anywhere in the world. America‘s Army has proven so popular globally that, with so many users signing on from Internet cafes in China, the Chinese government tried to ban it. Real soldiers play too, usually identifiable by the unit insignias listed in their gamer names.

The game itself isn’t just a regular shoot ’em up, but features an “honor system.” Those who cooperate the best tend to win the most, while the go-it-alone Rambo types tend not to last too long. Following the rules of engagement wins extra points, as does stopping to give medical care to your buddies. Commit a “friendly fire” incident, and you get banned from the server. If you log back on under that same account, your point of view is from behind jail bars in a virtual Fort Leavenworth military prison.

The game is not without its shortcomings, suggesting a far more antiseptic version of war than the real thing. Get hit by a bullet and there is only a tiny puff of pink smoke that quickly disappears. And the real world’s “fog of war” — the chaos, confusion, and mistakes in battle that Prussian überstrategist Carl von Clausewitz defined as an enduring feature of warfare — doesn’t cloud the game.

One scenario, for example, is built around a real battle during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A team of Green Berets was attacked by an Iraqi motorized infantry company backed by artillery, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. As the real-life Green Berets did, you can beat back the virtual Iraqis by deftly firing Javelin anti-tank missiles. However, the game leaves out the part when the Green Berets called in an airstrike. Instead of hitting the Iraqis, the plane mistakenly dropped a bomb on friendly forces, killing 17 U.S. troops and their Kurdish allies.

Virtual Vets

America‘s Army quickly expanded from a potent recruiting tool into a valuable training system for soldiers already in the military. Military contractor Foster-Miller’s Talon robot, for example, is used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan to dismantle roadside bombs, the most deadly weapon used against U.S. troops there. The game’s Talon training module cost just $60,000 to develop, but took training in how to operate robots in war to a whole new level. “Prior to this, the only way to train was to take the robot and the controller to the trainees, give them some verbal instruction, and get them started,” Bill Davis, head of the America’s Army future applications program, told National Defense. “This allows them to train without breaking anything.”

But with these advances, it‘s getting harder to figure out where the games end and the war begins. In Talon the game and the real-life version, soldiers are watching the action through a screen and even holding the very same physical controllers in their hands. And these controllers are modeled after the video-game controllers that the kids grew up with. This makes the transition from training to actual use nearly seamless. As one Foster-Miller executive explained to me, describing the game’s training package for the Talon’s pissed-off big brother, the machine gun-armed Swords robot, “With a flip of the switch, he has a real robot and a real weapon.” Because of “the realism,” he said, the company is finding that “the soldiers train on them endlessly in their free time.”

Such “serious games,” as the Army calls them, go well beyond the America’s Army series. One program trains aerial drone operators while Saving Sergeant Pabletti teaches some 80,000 Army soldiers a year what is and isn’t sexual harassment. This use of gaming extends across the entire experience of war. Virtual Iraq is being used at 40 clinics around the United States to help the thousands of veterans returning from war cope with post-traumatic stress disorder. The game platform allows them to re-experience traumatic episodes in a safe environment.

These training tools are not just for raw recruits. For example, Gator Six is built around 260 realistic video clips that simulate many of the difficult judgment calls an officer might have to make in modern wars. Designed with the help of 20 Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans, it is broken into three parts: pre-deployment, combat, and transitioning into post-conflict.

The military is also turning to video games to help raise its soldiers’ cross-cultural understanding. Army 360 presents 11 “choose your own adventure” mission episodes that take place in present-day Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. The player chooses from four or more decision paths at various stages in the mission, which ultimately lead to as many as 20 different outcomes. Produced by Ken Robinson, a 24-year Special Forces veteran, the game aims to prep soldiers for the real conundrums that they might experience when deploying into different cultures. For instance, upon hearing a burst of AK-47 fire, an infantry patrol leader might mistake a wedding celebration for an ambush, taking the game down a far more dangerous path.

Much like their civilian counterparts, military game designers are moving from two-dimensional screens and sitting behind simulator mock-ups to three-dimensional experiences that hit multiple senses. At the Institute for Creative Technologies, founded with a $100 million Pentagon grant and housed at the University of Southern California, the self-described mission is to tap the best of Hollywood to create “synthetic experiences so compelling that participants react as if they are real.” Its Army leader training module, for example, builds off a scenario that has more than 300 pages of script, works in 75 characters, and was even coordinated with USC’s School of Theatre. The program sends trainees out wearing not just 3-D goggles, but also a “scent collar,” which sprays what one reporter described as “aromatic microbursts — of anything from cordite to spices.” One driving simulator is said to be so lifelike that the participants often unconsciously wave to virtual trucks that drive by. A few of the virtual drivers even get carsick. Another center for military gaming research — conveniently located just a short drive from Walt Disney World — bills itself as “a theme park on steroids.” It marries physical sets with virtual-reality projectors for an experience its creators dub “mixed reality.”

The Pentagon’s ultimate goal with all this gaming technology is to create “simulation on demand” for almost any military skill set. The concept is not unlike Neo’s kung fu crash courses in the movie The Matrix: When the military needs its people to learn something, it’ll be able to get personally tailored, realistic training instantly.

A good example is a tool for young officers called Self-Directed Learning Internet Modules, or SLIMs. They turn the latest military intelligence reports into packets that can be “played” by soldiers. Instead of just getting a briefing a few hours before a mission, the officer can virtually “play” what he might have to do in his real-world mission. For example, a Sadr City SLIM, layered on top of a 3-D map of the Baghdad neighborhood, is the game’s version of what a patrol there might entail. Kids come out and warn of a mine, and then the player has to figure out whether to believe them. A woman screams that the Americans killed her husband, and he has to decide how to respond. Hidden within the training are also lessons the Army wants the young officer to pick up. Taking digital photos and GPS locations of key sites, for example, bumps up the tally, and a “hearts and minds” score measures interaction with the public.

The collective effect is potentially revolutionary. Game-based training can be tailored to specific scenarios as well as to an individual’s own rate of learning, sped up or slowed down based on how quickly he or she acquires knowledge. The result is an enormous gain in efficiency. The Navy, for example, switched to such programs for its communications technicians and estimates that it saved some 58 man-years in training time. Virtual training is also appealing because it allows soldiers to learn and exercise their skills, again and again, without the accompanying physical risks. “Combat veterans live longer,” Col. Matthew Caffrey, professor of war gaming and planning at the Air Command and Staff College, told National Defense. “One reason we use war games is to make virtual vets.”

For the military as a whole, there are also tens of millions of dollars saved by conducting virtual training at the unit level. One recent war game, for instance, linked the crew of a U.S. aircraft carrier at sea, British and German submarines (docked in harbor, but the crews were on simulators), British airplane crews (sitting at simulators), and a set of Patriot missile batteries (working on practice mode). The players shared information and made joint decisions, just as if the exercise were real. The Navy estimates that its use of gaming at bases, in lieu of doing the same exercises at sea, saves it some 4,000 barrels of fuel a year, while simulated missile launches, rather than firing the real thing, save some $33 million annually.

Avatar Fatigue

Not everything about militainment is controversial: Who is going to complain, after all, about trying to find a better way to save soldiers’ lives, help trauma victims, or prevent sexual harassment? And as Maj. Gen. John Custer told Training & Simulation Journal, the world has changed: “You have to realize what generation you’re trying to teach. You know what? PowerPoint is not the way to go.”

But there are many concerns about what these dramatic changes mean for war’s future. With only so many hours in the day, some in the military worry that video games are beginning to edge out real-world training. Navy Capt. Stephen David complained in the service’s in-house journal that the virtual vets arriving aboard his ship lacked “the requisite familiarity with even the most basic shiphandling skills.” Others raise what is called the “O’Brien Effect,” referring to the time talk-show host Conan O’Brien challenged tennis champion Serena Williams to a match, only to defeat her on the Nintendo Wii. At some point, piloting a plane in combat is different from piloting a computer workstation, just as hitting a real tennis ball is not the same as hitting the Wii version.

The real danger of militainment, though, might be in how it risks changing the perceptions of war. “You lose an avatar; just reboot the game,” is how Ken Robinson, the Special Forces veteran who produced Army 360, put it in Training & Simulation Journal. “In real life, you lose your guy; you’ve lost your guy. And then you’ve got to bury him, and then you’ve got to call his wife.”

This is not just an issue for the military, but also for a broader public that has less and less to do with actual war. As Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, a mother who lost her son in Iraq, told Salon, “I’ve always believed when people participate in virtual violence, it makes the victims of violence become less empathetic and less real, and people become immune to the real pain people suffer.” But for most parents, having to send their children to war is not something they worry about, even as it becomes something that more of them play at.

At the same time, the nexus of video gaming, war, and militainment is growing even fuzzier with the rapid growth in unmanned systems that use video-gaming technology to conduct actual military operations (the United States now has some 7,000 unmanned systems in its aerial inventory and another 12,000 on the ground). Indeed, the executive at robot-maker Foster-Miller worries that it is becoming too fuzzy. “It’s a Nintendo issue,” he told me. “You get kids used to playing Grand Theft Auto moving on to armed robots. Are you going to feel guilt after killing someone?”

With more and more soldiers sitting at a robot’s computer controls, experiencing no real danger other than carpal tunnel syndrome, the experience of war is not merely distanced from risk, but now fully disconnected from it. One Air Force officer speaking to Wired‘s Noah Shachtman about his experiences in the Iraq war, which he fought from a cubicle hundreds of miles away, described the feeling: “It’s like a video game…. It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s fucking cool.”

A commander of a Predator drone squadron based in Nevada probably best summed up to me the quandaries, for both the military and the public. A former F-15 pilot, the officer described the new generation of unmanned systems operators with awe. Years of video gaming had made them “naturals” in the fast-moving, multitasking skills required for modern warfare. But there was also a cost. “The video-game generation is worse at distorting the reality of it [war] from the virtual nature. They don’t have that sense of what’s really going on,” he told me. This might be the essence of this new era of militainment: a greater fidelity to detail, but perhaps a greater distortion in the end.

Every day, this officer heads off to virtual war. But when he comes home, he doesn’t let his own children play the many war games aimed at them. “We do the car ones instead.”

Source: http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/02/11/meet-the-sims-and-shoot-them/

Emily Yates / Parent Category: NNOMY / Articles 18 July 2016

Emily Yates  | Originally published in Truthout - July 16, 2016

"Back when we started, recruiters were just blatantly lying to the kids," said Susan Quinlan, the co-founder and volunteer coordinator of the peace and justice group, Better Alternatives for Youth–Peace (BAY-Peace). For 12 years, she's been bringing teams of youth into Oakland, California, schools to inform students about deceptive military recruiting practices. In that time, she has seen the recruitment climate in schools change drastically -- and not necessarily for the better.

"It used to be that recruiters would make promises to the kids that were patently untrue, like offering benefits that wouldn't materialize, for example, so our job was to go in and say, 'No, that's not true,'" Quinlan said. Then over the years, as the wars grew increasingly unpopular and recruitment dropped, the military beefed up the benefits and incentives to more closely match its promises. Many student activists saw that as a victory, she said, and as a result, the work lost urgency.

"The recruiters are still being dishonest," she said, "but it's become less obvious. And they haven't gone away. Now, recruitment is back up where it was before we started, and we're losing our funding."

Divestment from Truth

BAY-Peace's accomplishments include a Youth Manifesto Campaign that established a student privacy policy throughout the entire Oakland Unified School District. Yet, this unique organization is about to lose the support of the city whose youth it serves. And it's not the only one -- on a national level, the counter-recruitment movement is suffering from low funds and low participation, even as recruiters target younger children and wars rage on.

Rick Jahnkow remembers a time when the military did not have any official presence in schools. But in 1973, the draft ended, the "all-volunteer" force began, and a new era of military recruitment strode through American classroom doors. Right behind it, hustling to keep up, came the counter-recruitment movement. Nearly 50 years later, the race to reach the youth has become a marathon, and the Department of Defense has continuously stepped up its game.

"Since the end of conscription, military recruiting began to evolve based on the assumption that they couldn't open up a tap and have bodies come pouring out anymore," said Jahnkow, a former activist in the Vietnam War-era draft-resistance movement and current program coordinator of the San Diego-based Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO). "Recruitment had marketing and strategists," he explained. "That was how it evolved. As a response, counter-recruitment evolved as well."

Evolution doesn't always mean progress, however. Although activists keep moving toward the goal of bringing transparency to the military's messaging, the once-thriving movement's pace has slowed to a crawl. With funding and public involvement in a lull, the question haunting the minds of counter-recruiters like Quinlan and Jahnkow is, "What's next?"

Perpetual War -- Fighting and Recruitment

The two competing sides, military and counter-recruitment, are as closely matched in strength as a bull and a Corgi, but counter-recruiters still attempt to make up in grit, creativity and adaptability for what they lack in resources, numbers and establishment backing. They've avoided being entirely consumed by the military's superior staying power in schools because the counter-recruitment movement is fueled by the one factor that reliably hinders recruitment -- war.

"We now have a movement that's distinguished itself as specifically counter-recruitment, and it has ebbed and flowed during active wartime," said Seth Kershner, co-author of the 2015 book Counter-Recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools. "When the war dies down, so does counter-recruitment. The big change in the movement now is that everyone doing full-time counter-recruitment is doing it on a volunteer basis. Since public interest in war has changed, funding has diminished."

The United States has been actively waging two controversial wars for 15 years, but now even progressive support for counter-recruitment is drying up, Kershner said.

The movement has gone through cycles, Jahnkow said, and the current state of "perpetual war-fighting," as he and Kershner both call it, has made Americans less sensitive to aggressive military recruitment tactics. Counter-recruiters have had to use several alternative strategies to communicate with youth, due to the unlimited resources and access to schools that military recruiters enjoy in this climate. As well as visiting high schools and talking with students about the realities of military service, counter-recruiters work diligently to promote non-military alternatives for students and to push legislation regulating the presence of recruiters on campuses.

"Pervasive Penetration"

In the decades since recruitment in schools began, the practice has grown considerably.

"This 'new American militarism' … is a response to the challenge of annually recruiting more than 240,000 new volunteers into the military," Kershner said. "The result has been the pervasive penetration of the nation's schools by military recruiters and a massive propaganda effort to shape public consciousness and culture."

This appropriately named "pervasive penetration" takes many forms -- not only does the military have a recruitment budget of over $1.4 billion, but federal policies like the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and its 2015 successor, the Every Child Succeeds Act, actually tie schools' funding to a requirement to turn over students' information to military recruiters unless parents specifically "opt out." There's also the massive Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program, whose goal is to channel students into the military after graduation.

Fed up with having their privacy invaded and their curriculum militarized, students in Oakland, San Diego and Santa Barbara, California, have used both the hands-on and legislative approaches to counter-recruitment in an effort to keep the military out of their places of learning. Student activists in those cities successfully ousted JROTC from the Santa Barbara campus and won policy changes to restrict military access to students' information and recruiters' access to schools.

"The legislative approach takes longer, but victories are much easier to see," Kershner said. "In Massachusetts, for example, a veteran and a high school student led a coalition to pass a state bill that regulates ASVAB [Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery] testing in schools. In New Hampshire, the ASVAB used to be mandatory, and now it isn't. These legislative victories are important to see as progress -- and motivation to keep working."

Military Curriculum

Ideally, organizations would focus on high schools, but would also have the numbers and interest to work with middle and elementary schools, Kershner said. In 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, he reported that the Department of Defense was administering more than a dozen different programs and spending close to $50 million on K–12 outreach, targeting students pursuing the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

"Twenty years ago, there was hardly anything that sophisticated," Kershner said. "Now we have these programs, as well as the growth of military-style charter schools all over the country. It used to just be in Chicago, but now there are more like two dozen public schools putting students in uniforms every day."

Despite (or perhaps, because of) the increased military presence in schools, he said counter-recruitment groups have had difficulty with their own access.

"It's interesting to note that there is a legal precedent for counter-recruiters to have equal access … there are more and more groups that want to be involved in counter-recruiting, but they have great difficulty getting into schools," Kershner said. "Districts will just reflexively refuse, but … by allowing recruiters in, schools are creating a public forum, and opposing views are allowed to be present."

New responses to youth-targeted militarism are regularly being developed, Jahnkow said, often using technological advances to "present information in a distilled way." From designing computer games in the 1980s to developing apps in the 2010s, he and his colleagues in the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) are constantly tracking the best ways to inform students.

Students and Veterans as Powerful Voices

Throughout the decades, word-of-mouth has continued to be a crucial way to spread the word about the realities of recruitment, according to Jahnkow.

"If we stand near schools on the corner handing out leaflets to the kids, they'll bring them into school and start talking about them with their friends," he said. He believes the second most effective messengers for the counter-recruitment movement are students themselves, especially those supported by organizations like NNOMY, BAY-Peace or Project YANO, with whose help San Diego students effectively organized to rid their schools of the JROTC program.

But the most powerful voice is that of military veterans, Jahnkow emphasized. "Veterans expose contradictions," he said. "When we get students to question what they're told about the military, to think critically, we're helping them to evolve."

In Counter-Recruitment, Kershner interviews a veteran named Yvette, who "relishes the chance to talk with the military recruiters she meets in schools and to challenge the stories they tell students":

She always introduces herself as a veteran when approaching a recruiter and takes care to be cordial, not confrontational. She shares the pamphlets … photocopied flyers with titles like Know Before You Go and What Every Girl Should Know About the U.S. Military. The response from recruiters varies wildly. "I've had lots of recruiters say, 'Yeah, they need to know that information'," [Yvette said.] "But then a lot of recruiters look at me like I'm the scum of the earth."

This pushback from recruiters, as well as the need to relive painful experiences, can be "an occupational hazard of counter-recruitment" to veterans, who are already prone to post-traumatic stress that can be triggered by confrontations, Kershner said. "If you have war trauma, activism can be very draining."

"In 2009, half of our conference attendees were youth activists," he said. "Youth are not as interested now. Most of the people doing counter-recruitment are older folks, and they've reported difficulty relating to teens. They wish they had more youth and veterans to work with."

June Brumer is one of the "older folks" who has been counter-recruiting for decades, first as a member of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, and currently with Grandmothers Against War. Based in Oakland, she's been visiting classrooms and career fairs with veterans since the 1990s. As grandmothers, it's not too difficult for members of her group to get into schools ("white hair is helpful," she smiled), but it's not the grandmothers who capture the students' attention.

"The veteran who speaks to the kids makes the biggest impact," she said. "The kids want to hear about the veterans' experience, and they want to ask questions … although over the years, the kids' reaction has changed to 'What war?'"

But these days, Brumer said, it's hard to find enough veterans to participate.

Even veterans committed to the cause are often unable to keep up the work, Kershner said. Ever since the so-called "end" of the Iraq war (in quotes because there are still around 3,600 U.S. troops in Iraq on any given day), he said both veteran and youth interest in counter-recruitment has dropped.

Hart Viges, an Iraq veteran in Austin, Texas, spends many of his days talking with high school students about his military experience. He has been doing counter-recruitment work for nearly 10 years and sees it as a major part of the long-term struggle against militarism. He finds the work he does with the direct-outreach group Sustainable Options for Youth to be healing, if also exhausting.

"To me, every action is significant," he said. "It's the slow grind to the long game. Every time I leave a school, there is a feeling of accomplishment that replenishes the soul."

"Plant a Seed, Sow a Harvest"

It's the long game that matters, Jahnkow believes.

"When it comes to planning and strategy, the military is all about that, and when we don't do that, we shoot ourselves in the foot," he said. "The movement does see the big picture, but until many more people who are actively involved in working on various issues pay attention to [long-term strategy], they're going to keep having to put out fires."

He added, "You might be concerned about Palestine, women's right to choose, etc., but if seeds are being planted by the military at this point for people in elementary and high school, you're going to keep having your movement depressed."

The metaphor of planting seeds is a familiar one, Kershner said. "'Plant a seed, sow a harvest' -- this is recruiters' language. Counter-recruiters need to be using this language, too." To be most effective, he said, activists should work with teachers' unions, as individual control over their curriculum is being lost to the Department of Defense and JROTC programs.

The movement also needs to be training the next generation of activists, Kershner asserted. "Veterans, especially members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, can help by sharing their recruitment stories," he said. "Counter-recruiters can reach out to educators' journals and conferences."

He suggested Americans should be concerned about the privacy violations schools flirt with when they mandate ASVAB testing and release of students' scores to recruiters, noting that privacy "isn't just a left-wing issue."

"People aren't aware that recruiters can wander around schools at all times," he said. "No other group has that kind of access, not even college recruiters. And there are documented cases of sexual assault by military recruiters. It really underlines the need for more regulation."

With the military firmly implanted within the educational system, the future looks like a bumpy one for the counter-recruitment movement, unless organizations like BAY-Peace and are able to find funding and volunteers to continue their work. There's literature to be researched and printed, classrooms to visit, career fairs to attend, school boards and city councils to petition -- all this requires more time, energy and money.

However, counter-recruitment activists aren't giving up anytime soon. Brumer, who's now in her sixth decade of organizing for peace, has some advice for those who are interested in getting involved.

"Bring it down to you, what you can do," she said. "There's a saying in the Talmud: 'If you save one life, you save the world.' So I feel like if I keep one kid out of the military, I've done my job."

Emily Yates is a writer in many modes, from songs and poetry to essays and articles. She began writing professionally in 2002, when she enlisted in the US Army as a "journalist" (public affairs specialist), and has been trying to make up for this error in judgment since getting out of the military in 2008. In an effort to use her powers for good rather than evil, she now performs as a comedic/political singer-songwriter and volunteers with Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace.

Source: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36822-bringing-truth-to-the-youth-the-counter-recruitment-movement-then-and-now

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy / Parent Category: NNOMY Articles / 16 July 2016

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy | Originally published in National Catholic Reporter - June 28, 2016

Recent legislative efforts to extend draft registration to young women have raised an old conundrum for some feminists. Does pursuit of gender equality include support for universal conscription?

While not all feminists are anti-militarists, opposition to war and militarism has been a strong current within the women's movement. Prominent suffragists like Quaker Alice Paul, and Barbara Deming, a feminist activist and thinker of the 1960s and '70s, were ardent pacifists. Moreover, feminist critique has often regarded the military as a hierarchical, male-dominated institution promoting destructive forms of power.

In late April, the House Armed Services Committee voted for an amendment to the national defense bill that would extend draft registration -- already a requirement for men -- to women ages 18-26. The amendment was later dropped, but in mid-June, the Senate approved a similar provision in its version of the national defense bill.

Among the amendment's staunchest defenders was Armed Services Committee member Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.).

"If we want equality in this country, if we want women to be treated precisely like men are treated and that they should not be discriminated against, then we should support a universal conscription," Speier told the political website The Hill in April.

 Not all feminists agree with Speier's path to equality. Days after the House Armed Services Committee approved the amendment, 24-year-old Julie Mastrine, an activist and media professional, authored an online petition calling on Congress not to force women to register and instead dump the draft entirely.

Mastrine, a self-described feminist libertarian, argues that draft registration violates individual choice.

"I can't imagine a more tragic loss of liberty than forcing a citizen, whether male or female, to fight in a war with which they may disagree. Equality is a moot point if personal choice and bodily autonomy must first be eliminated to achieve it," Mastrine said in a statement.

In an online editorial for Playboy, Lucy Steigerwald, a contributing editor to Antiwar.com, acknowledged that excluding women from draft registration was "unfair" and "sexist."

"But the solution to the decrepit notion that the young of the country are communal property is not to remove the sexism, it's to remove the draft," she wrote.

Like Mastrine, Steigerwald supports equal access to the military for women, but opposes conscription. She does not believe, as some have argued, that the return of the draft would make the U.S. more cautious about engaging in conflicts.

"You don't stop the runaway truck of U.S. foreign policy by throwing a man in front of it, and you definitely don't stop it by throwing a man and a woman, just to make things equal," Steigerwald wrote.

The linking of women's equality to universal conscription dates back to the early 1980s. Draft registration had ended in 1975 with the conclusion of the Vietnam War. In 1980, a nervous President Jimmy Carter, alarmed over the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, reinstated registration to demonstrate U.S. war readiness. Carter actually wanted universal draft registration, but Congress limited the mandate to men.

The male-only system was quickly challenged as sex discrimination. In 1981, a group of men brought a case before the Supreme Court that argued being singled out for compulsory registration violated their right to equal protection. A number of women's groups, including the National Organization for Women (NOW), filed briefs contending that exclusion from the draft violated the constitutional rights of women.

"Compulsory universal military service is central to the concept of citizenship in a democracy," the NOW brief asserted. It predicted "devastating long-term psychological and political repercussions" would result if women were excluded from "the compulsory involvement in the community's survival that is perceived as entitling people to lead it and to derive from it the full rights and privileges of citizenship."

A similar brief filed by 12 other women's organizations, including the League of Women Voters, argued that exempting women from draft registration echoed "the stereotypic notions about women's proper place in society that in the past promoted 'protective' labor laws and the exclusion of women from juries."

NOW had previously opposed the draft, and its apparent about-face infuriated its members at the grassroots level, according to Cynthia Enloe, a research professor of political science and women's studies at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

Enloe, who has written extensively on women and the military, said she was just starting her research at the time, but as she recalls, "The local chapters were really angry. They were full of women activists who disagreed, who saw the draft as something to oppose."

So why the switch? Enloe thinks it had more to do with NOW's then-recent defeat in getting the Equal Rights Amendment passed than it did zeal for military service. The amendment, which pacifist Alice Paul originally penned in 1923, simply states, "Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." After Congress passed it in 1972, NOW led the unsuccessful fight for its ratification at the state level during the 1970s and early 1980s.

Eleanor Smeal, at the time president of NOW, "had just gone through a terrible defeat," Enloe noted. "When the next thing comes up, you tend to see it through the lens of what you were defeated by. The people in the Washington office were terribly affected by the anti-ERA battle."

Speaking in defense of the NOW brief back in 1981, Smeal told The New York Times that wherever she lobbied for the Equal Rights Amendment, male legislators frequently said to her, "When you women fight in a war, then we'll talk about equal rights."

That "argument of entitlement," Smeal said, helped persuade her that exclusion from the draft hurt the interests of women. Ever since ancient Egypt, "the secondary class has not been given the right to serve in the military," she told the newspaper.

Lory Manning, a retired U.S. Navy captain, echoes that thought today, noting, "Except for taxes, women have had to fight for the right to the assumption of the duties of citizenship, including jury duty."

A senior researcher at Service Women's Action Network (SWAN), Manning said she remembers well the anti-war feminism of the Vietnam War era, and agrees with its critique of the military.

"It is hierarchical," she said. "It is also very powerful. People think that an organization with that kind of power should not be left to men. Having women on the ground as peacekeepers has shown to improve the fate of women on the other side."

Like many feminists, Enloe thinks it is risky to frame any military issue around just equality. "A lot of feminists were not sure how to articulate their support for gays in the military," she said. "Those against the ban found themselves having to promote gay men and lesbians as the perfect soldier."

It's a dilemma Enloe said her European counterparts do not face.

"While there are many societies which are more militarized than the U.S., militarism has sunk its roots down so deep in U.S. popular culture, it's made a conundrum of how you carve out a space of equality without embracing military ideals of citizenship," she said.

"The acuteness of this political, cultural dilemma is much sharper in the U.S. than in Europe," she said. "European feminists have been surprised at the prevalence of the military's footprint in our civilian settings. Most soccer games in Europe don't start with fighter jet flyovers."

In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a male-only system for draft registration, arguing that since women were "excluded from combat service" they were not "similarly situated" as men for the draft or draft registration. In this instance, the court said, Congress had the authority to consider "military need" over "equity."

With the removal of combat restrictions for women last December, that argument no longer applies. Maria Santelli, at the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Conscience and War, said it is quite likely the courts could soon strike down the current male-only system of draft registration on grounds of discrimination. "Before Congress lets that happen, they might vote for universal conscription," she said.

Santelli thinks improvement in equity and justice within the military is a good thing, but these improvements are overridden by the "other justice issue, which is our reliance on war as a means for conflict resolution," she said.

She pointed out that men who oppose draft registration for reasons of conscience face numerous penalties. Under what is commonly known as "the Solomon Amendment," these penalties include denial of federal student loans, federal job training, and employment with federal executive agencies, and denial of citizenship to immigrants. According to the Center on Conscience and War, there are Solomon-like penalties in 44 states, with some denying state employment, state student loans, a driver's license, or photo ID to non-registrants.

"These laws penalize men for the rest of their lives," Santelli said. "Do we want to put women in that same position?"

How soon women who oppose the draft will face the registration dilemma remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the ERA has yet to be ratified.

[Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, a freelance writer, lives and works at the Sts. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker of Worcester, Mass.]

This story appeared in the July 1-14, 2016 print issue under the headline: Feminists weigh in on draft registration for women .

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I was interviewed by Vylma Ortiz on her show “Goddess on the Radio” (KPFB Berkeley, 89.3 FM) about some of the barriers that women veterans face upon returning home from war

Listen Here

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Source: https://www.ncronline.org/news/politics/feminists-weigh-draft-registration-women

Jan 19, 2016 / Pat Elder / studentprivacy.org

For years DOD recruiting commanders have attempted to circumvent student privacy protections that are designed to shield minors from the wholesale transfer of student information from the nation's high schools to the Pentagon's Military Entrance Processing Command.

The DOD markets "career opportunities" through the schools, relying on a variety of methods, from Channel One, a 12-minute, highly commercialized, daily TV program that reaches as many as 5 million children a day, to various posters and announcements touting military service or other schemes like the Career Exploration Program. For the most part, however, these outreach efforts ultimately rely on the schools as a third party from which to extract student data. Until now, the DOD's quest for greater access to children has been somewhat stymied by pesky state and federal laws that regulate the flow of student information from the schools.

Imagine then, the Pentagon's keen interest in a plan by upstart SkoolLive LLC of Fallbrook, CA to install thousands of giant 6-foot i-phones with flashing, screaming, streaming interactive screens in thousands of high school hallways across the country. These life-size digital kiosks allow kids to directly upload their personal information without having to deal with school policies or state and federal laws! The company has agreements with more than 2,000 schools in 27 states and intends to triple that number, according to press reports.

According to SkoolLive, school officials allow the free installation of these devices because they are convinced the gadgets "enrich a student's school experience by replacing mundane printed posters with high quality digital ads that require less space, reduce visual clutter, move schools into the digital age, and saves tons of time, money and trees."  http://www.skoollive.com/#!about-us/mainPage But these officials may not be seeing the entire picture. From the screen of the SkoolLive website directed toward potential advertisers, "The SkoolLive Kiosk screens are touch sensitive. The feature allows the company to offer "interactive" ads. With this interactive feature, advertisers are able to conduct student surveys, determine product preferences, enter contests, send text messages containing promo codes, discount coupons, etc. Our proprietary software captures and analyzes this valuable data, providing advertisers the analytics and feedback necessary to effectively measure audience acceptance as well as the effectiveness of their ad."

The placement of these SkoolLive kiosks may, however, circumvent The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Generally, the law states that schools may disclose information such as a student's name, address, telephone number, etc., but the schools are required to allow parents to request that the school not disclose information about children. Many state laws go even further in protecting student rights. By allowing the placement of these giant interactive kiosks, schools, in essence, may be allowing the transfer of student information without providing for parental consent.

Additionally, SkoolLive's interactive hallway contraptions may be violating Section 8025 of the Every Student Succeeds Act, (ESSA) <https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/1177/text> https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/1177/text

Interactive Army advertising on giant kiosks

The law says schools shall provide, upon a request made by a military recruiter, access to the name, address, and telephone listing of a high school student, unless the parent submits a written request, to the school, that the child's information not be released. Schools must notify parents of their right to opt out. SkoolLive's kiosks remove the role of the school and allow the military to extract information directly from unassuming minors.

Not only that, but schools stand to make thousands off of each kiosk per month, the company claims, depending on the marketing dollars each generates, although SkoolLive may be exaggerating the income potential of the 6 foot i-pads. SkoolLive officials apparently told Chris Marczak, assistant superintendent of Oak Ridge High School in Tennessee, the company had estimated each kiosk could generate between $2,000 and $5,000 monthly for each of its schools.

The interactive capability is sold as a way for students to access more information about a particular notice or event. Need to know more about purchasing high school rings or yearbooks? Click here. Want to leave your contact info for an advertiser to get in touch? It's simple!

Want to know more about jobs in the Army or more specifically, how to find out more about taking the military's enlistment test, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery? That information is readily available is a slick, colorful, interactive format in high schools across the country and it may be coming to a school near you. SkoolLive describes the Army's use of their interactive kiosks this way, "The Army wanted students to be aware of Army career options while learning student preferences. As a part of their Career Exploration Program, the Army ran a full-screen video interactive career survey. Students entered their grade, selected their career preference and registered to win one of three prizes given away monthly. Winners were showcased in a follow up ad.

Jim Metrock, of Birmingham, AL heads Obligation Inc., http://www.obligation.org a brilliant public interest group that opposes commercialism in schools. "A captive audience of school children is very attractive to advertisers," he said. "This is taxpayer-funded school time, and it doesn't make sense that companies can buy time to have with students." Nonetheless, SkoolLive's venture is much in line with the corporatization and militarization of America's schools. For more information on the role of the military in SkoolLive's business plan, contact Armed Forces Representative MAJ (Ret) Jason C. Hall, jhall@skoollive.com

Source: http://www.studentprivacy.org