Largest branch of military struggles in a strong economy; a pilot program in Chicago

Ben Kesling, Wall Street Journal - CHICAGO —The U.S. Army is experimenting with new recruiting tactics as it struggles to connect with young people who have other job options in a strong economy.

Last year the nation’s largest military branch recruited just under 70,000 troops, about 10% short of its target of 76,500, which marked the first time in a decade the Army missed its goal. For this fiscal year ending in September, they met a more-modest goal of 68,000.

Experts say the military’s appeal has been waning among young people, and a tight labor market is typically the toughest time to recruit.

In a pilot program in Chicago, the Army is tailoring its message by neighborhood, adjusting advertising and staffing to match an area’s demographics. The program here is part of a push into nearly two dozen cities where the Army has missed targets in the past. Across the country, the service is tapping into market data the way corporations or political campaigns might, and it is making sure recruiters are the first ones who get issued new eye-catching uniforms.

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

August 19, 2019 / 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.”

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.

Elizabeth King, In These Times - 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.

“As students were coming out of classrooms, [recruiters] would be by the door waiting for them."

Danielle Corcione - Teen Vogue

Since its inception, the United States military has recruited teenagers to enlist. During the Revolutionary War, when the military was formally established, young men were encouraged to fight for their country voluntarily. During the Civil War, conscription — essentially mandatory military enrollment for men of a certain age — was implemented, initially targeting men age 21 to 30. The draft was later expanded to include men as young as 18, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and continued over centuries as a way to maintain a base of military servicepeople. In a statement to Teen Vogue, Lisa M. Ferguson, media relations chief for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, said, “The Army seeks qualified individuals 17 [to] 34 years old.”

Since the draft ended in 1973, the military has relied on an all-volunteer service and has targeted young people, using strategies that include placing recruiters in schools. This is allowed because the No Child Left Behind Act, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, requires military recruiters be granted the same access in schools as college recruiters.

The military markets to teenagers, particularly those in poorer school districts, because the armed services need a large population, and the sooner young people join, the more likely they are to stay and build a career. (According to the government, “184,000 personnel must be recruited into the Armed Forces each year to replace those who complete their commitment or retire.”) Modern-day recruiters sell the idea of an experience that often resonates more with poorer students because, for many, service with an honorable discharge can mean a free ride to college, or potentially a path to citizenship. (Only the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Dept. can grant citizenship, but the military can only accelerate the process. If a person doesn't qualify for citizenship, they would still have to complete their service years in the military.)