Recruit This!

How the US Military is Trying to Recruit Your Children, and What You Can Do About it.
Mark T. Rutkowski

The War on Terror (or as it is now being called, the Long War) is into its sixth year with no sign of an end in sight. While Democrats continue to stall on Capitol Hill, more and more Americans die each week. To date over 3,200 Americans have been killed in combat and more than 24, 000 have been wounded. Meanwhile the military has experienced its lowest levels of enlistment since the Vietnam War.

In response to this massive personnel loss the Bush administration has stepped up its effort in military recruitment. Waivers have been given to criminal offenders while the standards for the Arm Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) have been lowered. The enlistment age has been raised twice: from 35 to 40 in 2005 and from 40 to 42 just last year. However the most effective element of this enlistment campaign has been the No Child Left Behind Act.

Signed into law in January 2002, No Child Left Behind narrows testing standards, increases state accountability and cuts federal funding to schools that are considered to be failing. In addition, section 9528 of the act requires that high schools turn over information of all students or risk losing federal funding. The legislation was co-authored by Department of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, Texas lawyer Sandy Kress, and Spelling's Chief of Staff David L. Dunn. The act reads “…each local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students names, addresses, and telephone listings.”

Additionally the Army’s Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) is used to give students an early lesson in military indoctrination. The Army defines JROTC as “a course of instruction taught for academic credit in high schools by retired officers and non-commissioned officers. In public schools, students select Junior ROTC as an elective course. In some private schools, such as military schools, enrollment in JROTC may be a mandatory part of the curriculum.” JROTC programs can be found in many inner city schools where the chances or recruiting students are very high. Such programs can cost school districts tens of thousands of dollars each year. Most JROTC graduates actually go on to be privates in the Army, not officers.

There are things people can do to curtail the military’s recruitment efforts. Parents have the right to opt their children out of section 9528 (links to the forms and additional information can be found at the end of this article). Letters must be submitted to both your high school district superintendent and the Pentagon. The first letter keeps the student’s information private from military recruiters while the second (supposedly) keeps his or her name out of the Pentagon’s JARMS database (the Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies database claims to be “the largest repository of 16-25 year old youth data in the country, containing roughly 30 million records.” Information private is purchased from school emergency cards, motor vehicle departments, college recruiters and even companies that sell class rings.) Parents should aware that unfortunately opting their children out of section 9528 means they may not receive valuable information from college recruiters. The War Resisters League has a counter-JROTC campaign known as Revolution Out Of Truth and Struggle (ROOTS) that seeks to dismantle current JROTC programs and prevent others from forming. Remember, no matter what a military recruiter may tell you, the ASVAB is completely voluntary.