This is a factsheet of sorts compiled by Dan DiMaggio on military recruitment. I post it here not to try to convince any people not to join the military, but to provide more facts to anyone considering it. Note, if you see any citations ([x]), these refer to sources that I did not include in this note.
1.Recently the military has expanded education benefits through the GI Bill. Yet in the past, only a small minority of recruits have actually received money for college, despite promises made by recruiters. According to one study, only 15% of those who paid into the G.I. Bill graduated with 4-year degrees. Expanding education benefits met significant resistance from military officials who fear that it will make it harder to retain soldiers and convince them to re-enlist.
2.The military itself admits that the top purpose of financial education incentives is not humanitarian, but ‘to encourage college-capable individuals to defer their college until after they have served in the military.” (Recruitment Handbook)
3.The military spends $4 billion a year on recruitment.
4.Only 10% of recruits initiate the recruitment process themselves.
5.In Philadelphia, the Army has opened a $13 million recruiting center disguised as a video arcade. It’s complete with leather seats, the latest in video games, and big Army simulator games – extremely realistic except that you can die as many times as you want. It has replaced the 5 other recruiting centers in Philadelphia. The military is hoping it will be a model for other urban areas, traditionally the hardest places to recruit.
6.The Pentagon is increasingly partnering with Hollywood studios to showcase the military in blockbuster films. This includes the recent Transformers movie. As the film's Army liaison, Lt. Col. Gregory Bishop, notes: "As far as I know, this is the biggest joint military operation movie ever made, in terms of Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines. I can't think of one that's bigger."
7.Recruiters are so focused on getting into high schools because the military’s own studies show that the likelihood of joining declines with age and with increased education. “A 2007 Defense Department study reported the percentage of youths who would consider joining the military dropped from more than 25 percent at age 16 to less than 15 percent at age 21… "If you wait until they're (high school) seniors," instructs the U.S. Army's School Recruiting Program Handbook, "it's probably too late."”
8.The military can unilaterally change the terms of the enlistment contract at any time. According to the Department of Defense's own Enlistment/Re-enlistment Document: Laws and regulations that govern military personnel may change without notice to me. Such changes may affect my status, pay, allowances, benefits, and responsibilities as a member of the Armed Forces REGARDLESS of the provisions of this enlistment/re-enlistment document (DD Form 4/1, 1998, Sec. 9.5b).
9.While recruiters may make all sorts of promises, “if you do enlist, the military does not have to place you in your chosen career field or give you the specific training requested. Even if enlistees do receive training, it is often to develop military skills that will not transfer to the civilian job market. (There aren’t many jobs for M240 machine-gunners stateside).” (New Yorkers guide to counter-recruitment)
10.Veterans are much more likely to be unemployed than those who have never served in the military. The 2000 Census recorded a 17% unemployment rate among veterans, about four times the national average at the time. One study showed that only 12% of male vets and 6% of female vets use skills learned in the military in their current jobs. 1 in 3 homeless men in the U.S. are veterans, with nearly 200,000 veterans homeless on any given day.
11.Many people hope that joining the military will help them find the discipline they need in their life to make good on their potential. Yet the stress of combat, military life, and moral dilemmas posed by participating in a foreign occupying army wear on many veterans’ nerves and mental health. 1 in 5 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 soldiers - report experiencing symptoms of PTSD or major depression, and 19% report experiencing a potentially traumatic brain injury while deployed.
12.The army’s mental health services for veterans are vastly inadequate. 121 soldiers committed suicide in 2007, a record, and another 2,100 attempted suicide or injured themselves, up from 350 in 2002. A January 2008 article further found 121 cases of murders committed by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the Times writes, “In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment -- along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems -- appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.”
13.As one journalist who visited Walter Reed Veterans’ Hospital reported in 2005, “The soldiers told me about their textbook symptoms of PTSD: sudden, ferocious bouts of rage, utter detachment, anxiety attacks accompanied by shortness of breath, and increased perspiration and rapid eye movement. They complained of relentless insomnia, racing thoughts, self-loathing, blackouts, hallucinations and the constant reliving of war through flashbacks by day and nightmares at night. Some described vivid fantasies of violence toward the Army brass in charge of patients there -- slicing their throats, throwing them out windows or shooting them. One psychiatric outpatient, who watched as his best friend was blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq, said: ‘It does not matter how hardcore you are. Once you go to that war and you start to see dead bodies -- you see an arm over here, you see guts over there. There is no way you are ever going to erase that.’”[6]
14.“The military claims it treats everyone the same, regardless of skin color; but in reality, it has serious problems with inequality in the ranks. In 2004, 36.2% of the enlisted personnel were people of color, but they made up only 18.2% of the officers. Latinos in the Marine Corps, for example, made up 14.5% of the enlisted ranks, but only 6.2% of the officers (Dept. of Defense, Demographic Profile of the DoD and Coast Guard, Sept. 2004).
15.60% of women have experienced military sexual trauma (sexual assault or harassment), with 23% reporting sexual assault while in the military.
16. “In January, 2006, Col. Janis Karpinski told a forum in New York (the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration) that several female soldiers at Camp Victory in Iraq had died from dehydration. These women stopped drinking any fluids late in the day out of fear that they would be raped walking to isolated latrines at night. Karpinski stated that an Army surgeon who reported these deaths to his superiors was told to leave the facts and cause of death vague in these cases in future briefings…”
17.The Pentagon maintains a database with information on all young people ages 16-25. In 2002 the Department of Defense began its Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies project (JAMRS) to compile the info on 30 million youth ages 16 to 25. This database “includes names, birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers, individuals' e-mail addresses, ethnicity, telephone numbers, students' grade-point averages, field of academic study and other data” – over 700 pieces of information in all!
18.In the military, you will lose your basic rights. If you leave your work without permission, you can be arrested. Any disobedience can result in criminal punishment. You can be punished without the right to see a lawyer or have a trial. Your right to say what you think when and how you want will be restricted. Individual expression through the way you dress and wear your hair won’t be tolerated. You will be subject to routine urine tests for drugs. (. (From Project YANO’s pamphlet, “The Military’s Not Just a Job … It’s Eight Years of Your Life!”)
19.Section 9c of the military enlistment contract says that the length of service can change in the case of war: “In the event of war, my enlistment in the Armed Forces continues until six (6) months after the war ends, unless my enlistment is ended sooner by the President of the United States.” Nearly 60,000 soldiers have had their military service involuntarily extended since 2002 under the stop-loss policy.
20.Section 8c of the military enlistment contract implicitly acknowledges that recruiters may make false promises: “The agreements in this section and attached annex(es) are all the promises made to me by the Government. ANYTHING ELSE ANYONE HAS PROMISED ME IS NOT VALID AND WILL NOT BE HONORED.”
21.Recruiters lie. According to the NY Times, nearly one in five U.S. Army recruiters was under investigation in 2004 for offenses varying from ‘threats and coercion to false promises that applicants would be sent to Iraq.’ One veteran recruiter told a reporter for the Albany Times Union, ‘I’ve been recruiting for years and I don’t know one recruiter who wasn’t dishonest about it. I did it myself.”
22.In the midst of an unpopular war in Iraq, youth have routinely accused recruiters’ of lying, distorting information, and engaging in improper behavior to get them to enlist. There were 6,600 allegations of wrongdoing by recruiters in 2005 alone, according to the Government Accounting Office. Public outrage over recruiters’ tactics forced the military to declare a one day “stand-down” for all recruiters in May 2005.
23.A 2006 ABC television investigation, which sent undercover students into 10 recruitment offices in New York and New Jersey “reported that more than half of the recruiters were ‘stretching the truth or even worse, lying.’” “Some recruiters told our students if they enlisted there was little chance they’d go to war.” One recruiter even told a student, “We're not at war. War ended a long time ago.”
24. In 2008 in Minneapolis, 4 military recruiters were suspended after an investigative report by Fox9 News. Recruiters told youth they could get $400,000 to start a small business (the real figure is $40,000, and it is quite difficult to get), that they would never see combat duty, and more.
25. The U.S. spends nearly as much on its military than the entire rest of the world combined. For 2009, the Pentagon has requested $711 billion, including $170 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. military spending is over 6 times that of the next leading military spender, China ($122 billion), and ten times that of #3 Russia ($70 billion). With this money, in addition to occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. maintains over 700 military bases in 130 countries across the world.
Cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
$2.9 billion per week; $410 million per day; $17 million per hour; $284,722 per minute
$4,745 per second
26. While state and local governments across the country face huge budget deficits, and the federal government deficit stands at $1.2 trillion, there are no proposals to cut the military budget, even under new president Obama.
27. Professor Paul Street writes, “American ‘defense’ spending outweighs domestic U.S federal expenditure on education by more than 8 to 1; income security by more than 4.5 to 1; nutrition by more than 11 to 1; housing by 14 to 1; and job training by 32 to 1. The military accounts for more than half of all discretionary federal spending.” Further, “a 2004 poll by the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations found that just 29 percent of Americans support the expansion of government spending on ‘defense.’ By contrast, 79 percent support increased spending on health care, 69 percent support increased spending on education, and 69 percent support increased spending on Social Security.”
28. The money spent on the war in Iraq alone could have provided: 25 million four-year scholarships for university students OR
5 million affordable housing units OR
29 million children with health care for ten years OR
68 million homes with renewable electricity for ten years OR
1 million music and arts teachers for ten years OR
90 million Head Start places for children OR
10.7 million elementary school teachers for one year
I end with this quote:
"Above all else, military recruitment is a PROGRAM TO SOLICIT LABOR. Its
goal is to get people to contract for employment up to 24/7 for an
indeterminate period (usually misrepresented as limited to 3 years),
with a signing bonus (recoverable, however), low pay,
attractive-sounding but in part cancelable benefits, no rights to
unionize, limited rights of defense to charges of violation of its own
code of laws, and morally, psychologically, and physically dangerous
working conditions. . ."
-- Joe Maizlish
Los Angeles
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