August 10th UPDATE: US Military Recruits Kids, Meets Quota
Originally posted 2010-01-23
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USMilitary.com — 24 October 2009 — “This is much to the amazement and pleasure of the US military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps.”
— THIS HAS BEEN QUITE THE ACCOMPLISHMENT FOR THE MILITARY, which has seen a decline in enrollments in the last few years, since the beginning of the current Iraqi war. The Army alone recruited close to 5,000 people in the month of October, which was over two percent of their originated goal. For the Marine Corps, there were close to 3,000 people recruited that were eager to sign up to join the military. This amount for the Marine Corps was well a little over one percent of their target as well.
The figures for meeting the military quota have been highly pleasurable for all companies that are involved, as they eagerly await the new troops from the registered enrollment. The numbers do not lie — there is now a higher interest for the joining the military’s forces from the civilian end. This is much to the amazement and pleasure of the US military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps, who both saw substantial numbers increase in their recruiting. Many of the civilians that are signing up are high school graduates that have preferred to enroll in the military to proudly serve our country. There is a great number of these recruitments that have claimed that they will continue their education while in the military, which is often paid for.
See also Pentagon Invades Our Schools
A FEW GOOD KIDS???
JOHN TRAVERS WAS STRIDING PURPOSEFULLY into the Westfield mall in Wheaton, Maryland, for some back-to-school shopping before starting his junior year at Bowling Green State University. When I asked him whether he’d ever talked to a military recruiter, Travers, a 19-year-old African American with a buzz cut, a crisp white T-shirt, and a diamond stud in his left ear, smiled wryly. “To get to lunch in my high school, you had to pass recruiters,” he said. “It was overwhelming.” Then he added, “I thought the recruiters had too much information about me. They called me, but I never gave them my phone number.”
Nor did he give the recruiters his email address, Social Security number, or details about his ethnicity, shopping habits, or college plans. Yet they probably knew all that, too. In the past few years, the military has mounted a virtual invasion into the lives of young Americans. Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students’ GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect like Travers, the soldier may know more about the kid’s habits than do his own parents.
The military has long struggled to find more effective ways to reach potential enlistees; for every new GI it signed up last year, the Army spent $24,500 on recruitment. (In contrast, four-year colleges spend an average of $2,000 per incoming student.) Recruiters hit pay dirt in 2002, when then-Rep. (now Sen.) David Vitter (R-La.) slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires high schools to give recruiters the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors. Schools that fail to comply risk losing their NCLB funding. This little-known regulation effectively transformed President George W. Bush’s signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft. Students may sign an opt-out form — but not all school districts let them know about it.
Yet NCLB is just the tip of the data iceberg. In 2005, privacy advocates discovered that the Pentagon had spent the past two years quietly amassing records from Selective Service, state DMVs, and data brokers to create a database of tens of millions of young adults and teens, some as young as 15. The massive data-mining project is overseen by the Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies program, whose website has described the database, which now holds 34 million names, as “arguably the largest repository of 16-25-year-old youth data in the country.” The JAMRS database is in turn run by Equifax, the credit reporting giant.
Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says the Pentagon’s initial failure to disclose the collection of the information likely violated the Privacy Act. In 2007, the Pentagon settled a lawsuit (filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union) by agreeing to stop collecting the names and Social Security numbers of anyone younger than 17 and promising not to share its database records with other government agencies. Students may opt out of having their JAMRS database information sent to recruiters, but only 8,700 have invoked this obscure safeguard.
The Pentagon also spends about $600,000 a year on commercial data brokers, notably the Student Marketing Group and the American Student List, which boasts that it has records for 8 million high school students. Both companies have been accused of using deceptive practices to gather information: In 2002, New York’s attorney general sued SMG for telling high schools it was surveying students for scholarship and financial aid opportunities yet selling the info to telemarketers; the Federal Trade Commission charged ASL with similar tactics. Both companies eventually settled.
The Pentagon is also gathering data from unsuspecting Web surfers. This year, the Army spent $1.2 million on the website March2Success.com, which provides free standardized test-taking tips devised by prep firms such as Peterson's, Kaplan, and Princeton Review. The only indications that the Army runs the site, which registers an average of 17,000 new users each month, are a tiny tagline and a small logo that links to the main recruitment website, GoArmy.com. Yet visitors’ contact information can be sent to recruiters unless they opt out, and students also have the option of having a recruiter monitor their practice test scores. Terry Backstrom, who runs March2Success.com for the US Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, insists that it is about “good will,” not recruiting. “We are providing a great service to schools that normally would cost them.”
Recruiters are also data mining the classroom. More than 12,000 high schools administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a three-hour multiple-choice test originally created in 1968 to match conscripts with military assignments. Rebranded in the mid-1990s as the “ASVAB Career Exploration Program,” the test has a cheerful home page that makes no reference to its military applications, instead declaring that it “is designed to help students learn more about themselves and the world of work”" A student who takes the test is asked to divulge his or her Social Security number, GPA, ethnicity, and career interests — all of which is then logged into the JAMRS database. In 2008, more than 641,000 high school students took the ASVAB; 90 percent had their scores sent to recruiters. Tony Castillo of the Army’s Houston Recruiting Battalion says that ASVAB is “much more than a test to join the military. It is really a gift to public education.”
Child As Flag
Concerns about the ASVAB’s links to recruiting have led to a nearly 20 percent decline in the number of test takers between 2003 and 2008. But the test is mandatory at approximately 1,000 high schools. Last February, three North Carolina students were sent to detention for refusing to take it. One, a junior named Dakota Ling, told the local paper, “I just really don’t want the military to have all the info it can on me.” Last year, the California Legislature barred schools from sending ASVAB results to military recruiters, though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill. The Los Angeles and Washington, DC, school districts have tried to protect students’ information by releasing their scores only on request.
To put all its data to use, the military has enlisted the help of Nielsen Claritas, a research and marketing firm whose clients include BMW, AOL, and Starbucks. Last year, it rolled out a “custom segmentation” program that allows a recruiter armed with the address, age, race, and gender of a potential “lead” to call up a wealth of information about young people in the immediate area, including recreation and consumption patterns. The program even suggests pitches that might work while cold-calling teenagers. “It’s just a foot in the door for a recruiter to start a relevant conversation with a young person,” says Donna Dorminey of the US Army Center for Accessions Research.
Still, no amount of data slicing can fix the challenge of recruiting during wartime. Last year, a JAMRS survey identified recruiters’ single biggest obstacle: Only 5 percent of parents would recommend military service to their kids, a situation blamed on “a constant barrage of negative media coverage on the War in Iraq.” Not surprisingly, more and more kids are opting out of having their information shared with recruiters under No Child Left Behind; in New York City, the number of students opting out has doubled in the past five years, to 45,000 in 2008. At some schools, 90 percent of students have opted out. In 2007, JAMRS awarded a $50 million contract to Mullen Advertising to continue its marketing campaign to target “influencers” such as parents, coaches, and guidance counselors. The result: print ads that declare, “Your son wants to join the military. The question isn’t whether he’s prepared enough, but whether you are.”
Not far from the mall in Maryland, I asked 21-year-old Marcelo Salazar, who'd been a cadet in his high school’s Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, why he decided not to enlist after graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 2005. Now a community college student, he replied that his mother was firmly against it.
Then, as if on cue, his cell phone chirped: It was a recruiter who called him constantly. He ignored it. “War is cool,” he said, flipping on his aviator sunglasses. “But if you're dying, it's not.”
NEW UPDATE
• Military Training Program for Teens Expands in USA •
Dozens of teens dressed in uniforms provided by the US Marines stand at attention in the gym of a Chicago public high school as a drill sergeant goes through a list of the day’s do’s and don’ts.
Bring your books to class. Come for extra help if you need it. And wear your uniform with pride.
“Young men, you think you can get a haircut and say I'm done for two or three weeks. WRONG,” Sgt. Major Thomas Smith Jr. intones.
“Young ladies. There's been no problem with your uniforms but there is a problem with your ties. Again, I will go through it again. Wear your ties when you come to my class.”
One in 10 public high school students in Chicago wears a military uniform to school and takes classes — including how to shoot a gun properly — from retired veterans.
That number is expected to rise as junior military reserve programs expand across the country now that a congressional cap of 3,500 units has been lifted from the nearly century-old scheme.
Proponents of the junior reserve programs say they provide stability and a sense of purpose for troubled youth and help to instill values such as leadership and responsibility.
But opponents say the programs divert critical resources from crumbling public schools and lead to a militarization of US society.
“To call these young people child soldiers might be technically inaccurate, but it does reveal the truth of it,” said Oscar Castro, a spokesman for the National Youth and Militarism Program, an advocacy group.
Military recruiters already have the right to give presentations in public schools and to access databases with the contact information of all public school students whose parents do not remove their children from the list.
But they don’t have nearly the same impact as daily interaction with teachers and students in uniform, Castro said.
While military officials say the junior reserve programs are not used as recruiting tools, about 30 to 50 percent of cadets eventually enlist, according to congressional testimony by the chiefs of staff of the various armed services in February 2000.
This is particularly troubling given that the programs are concentrated in low-income and minority neighborhoods, said Sheena Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the Chicago branch of the American Friends Service Committee which lobbies against the programs.
“If you want to teach discipline and leadership then do it for everyone and don't make them wear military uniforms,” Gibbs said. “Students at regular schools protest they have to still share books but the military academy gives laptops.”
At Chicago's Marine Military Math and Science Academy, the first public Marine academy in the nation and the fifth military academy run by the city's school district, it's easy to see how signing up for service would be a logical post-graduation step.
The hallways are lined with prints depicting historic recruiting posters and great moments in military history, like the Battle of the Bulge. Teachers in uniform lead classes in military history, civics, health, and physical fitness.
"The purpose of our school is to send all of our students to post-secondary education," principal Paul Stroh told AFP.
"What's different about this school is we take the military model of discipline, structure and leadership and put it into a high school.
"All of our students wear a uniform and all of our students are expected to be accountable for their actions."
And every morning in formation, Sgt. Major Smith draws a line between the discipline and stability of the Marines and the chaos of the high-crime, low income neighborhood where most of the students live.
"My elementary school was out of control. Everybody just did whatever they wanted," said Mariah Coleman, 14.
"Here there's discipline, but there's freedom as well. Everybody just respects each other and we get respect from the teachers."
Standing with her hands clasped firmly behind her back, Coleman wrinkles her nose at the thought of enlisting and explains that she wants to be a mathematician. She enrolled in the Marine academy because she thought it would help her get into college.
She has four years until graduation.
2009-10-24 17:19:07 -0400
2010-01-16 23:42:07 -0400
• Counter-Recruitment Expert Speaks in Collingswood January 20th •
Collingswood Public Library
771 Haddon Avenue
Collingswood NJ 08108
856.858.0649
7pm January 20th
Guest speaker is Janine Schwab from AFSC — American Friends Service Committee.
Free and open to all, refreshments will be served.
CLICK DIRECTIONS
For more information contact SUE
Sponsored by PDA — Progressive Democrats of America and DFA — Democracy for America.
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