Hearts and Minds: Military Recruitment and the High School Battlefield

In recent years, military recruitment has failed, with rare exceptions, to meet its quotas. The nations's high schools have thus become battlefields for the hearts and minds of young people as recruiters dangle gifts and promises of future benefits before teenagers in an effort to fill the ranks of an all-volunteer military. In this article, the author discusses the recruitment efforts among high school students. One of the most effective recruitment tools is Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC), the high school version of ROTC that was established by an act of Congress in 1916 "to develop citizenship and responsibility in young people." However, two years into the invasion of Iraq, recruiters are consistently failing to meet monthly enlistment quotas, despite deep penetration into high schools, sponsorship of NASCAR and other sporting events, and a $3-billion Pentagon recruitment budget. Increasingly, recruiters are offering higher bonuses and shortened tours of duty, and violations of ethical guidelines and the military's own putative standards are becoming commonplace--in one highly publicized case, a recruiter was heard on tape coaching a high school kid about how to fake a mandatory drug test. "One of the most common lies told by recruiters," writes Kathy Dobie, "is that it's easy to get out of the military if you change your mind. But once they arrive at training, the recruits are told there's no exit, period." Although recruiters are known to lie, the number of young people signing up is still plummeting. (Contains 20 endnotes.)