A few months ago, I received an email from a Marine Corps recruiter in Columbia asking me to consider the officer training programs that they offered. The recruiter characterized military training as far superior to anything else a young person could be doing with their life. Another line implied that the only way to find purpose in your life is to join the Marines. Then it said that by successfully becoming a Marine, you’ll earn the privilege to defend America. At the end it asked me if I was going to answer the call, to which I yelled at the computer screen a resounding “No.”
I found such rhetoric to be over the top, degrading and offensive. Based on the email I received, it seems as if the military’s recruiting strategy is to make people feel unaccomplished and juvenile, and then suggest to them that training for war is the perfect way to grow up and achieve something in your life. That message is highly misleading. While some people who sign up for the military are a good fit, and enjoy long careers, many others who join could be equally or more successful doing something else with their talents. There are thousands of other jobs where people can mature and discover who they are that do not require you to sign your life away for a few years.
The military’s targeting of younger and less affluent Americans is also questionable. Promising extensive education, healthcare and housing benefits to teenagers from lower income families is often hard to pass up. These promises are often not fulfilled either. Sixty-five percent of recruits who sign up for the GI Bill never receive any money for college, and for those who do, only 15 percent get their degree. Of the many recruits join expecting to work in a specific job, only to be told after basic training that there is an oversupply of that position, and assigned to a different role. Former Vice President Dick Cheney put it best, “The military is not a social welfare agency, it is not a jobs program”. Recruiters should take that message to heart, and stop selling the military as such.
Although recruiters like to tout how a military career is the best way for a person to defend the U.S. and protect freedom, actions speak louder than words. There has been little, if any opposition to the NSA’s warrantless surveillance of millions of innocent Americans from within the military, and that does not appear set to change in the near future. In addition, the Navy is still spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to imprison and torture over 150 suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay without charging them with a crime or allowing them to stand trial to determine if they are guilty. In December, 17 guests at a wedding party were killed by an American drone strike in Yemen, the vast majority of whom weren’t even suspected of any wrongdoing. Given these examples, it seems as if the military is at best doing a lousy job of protecting freedom, and at worst, infringing upon it. As such, both the military’s recruitment tactics and it’s overall mission should be reexamined.