Military Recruiting In High Schools

This book focuses exclusively on specific education policy instead of general military recruiting in high schools. "When the George W. Bush administration passed its landmark education legislation in 2001, dubbed the No Child Left Behind Act, legislators included a small section containing strict military recruiting mandates for public high schools. The law had two main provisions. First, a data sharing provision requires high schools to distribute the personal directory information of every student to all local armed forces recruiting stations on an annual basis. Second, the equal access provision requires high schools to provide military recruiters access to school grounds equal to university recruiters or career recruiters. For accountability, if these provisions are not fulfilled, the school will lose all federal education funds. Students or parents may “opt out” of the data collection through a bureaucratic process, but no such opt-out option exists for the soldiers visiting schools. When President Barack Obama renewed the omnibus education law in 2015, the name changed to the Every Student Succeeds Act, but the military mandates remained – the provisions were strengthened by including a passage prohibiting any local school board from instituting an “opt-in” bureaucratic structure for parents and students. This book focuses on how the two provisions have been met by parents, school staff, soldiers, and other individuals influenced by high school education policy and military recruiting. The central question is: do military recruiting methods utilized in public high schools work to promote the best interests of the students, or should policy makers rethink the freedom adult soldiers have when interacting with children within schools?

Recruiting an all-volunteer military is a formidable task. To successfully enlist one eligible recruit, the Army must contact approximately 120 young people. The National Research Council explores the various factors that will determine whether the military can realistically expect to recruit an adequate fighting force-one that will meet its upcoming needs. It also assesses the military's expected manpower needs and projects the numbers of youth who are likely to be available over the next 20 years to meet these needs. With clearly written text and useful graphics, Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth offers an overview of important issues for military recruiters, touching on a number of important topics including: sex and race, education and aptitude, physical and moral attributes, and military life and working conditions. In addition, the book looks at how a potential recruit would approach the decision to enlist, considering personal, family, and social values, and the options for other employment or college. Building on the need to increase young Americans' "propensity to enlist," this book offers useful recommendations for increasing educational opportunities while in the service and for developing advertising strategies that include concepts of patriotism and duty to country. Of primary value to military policymakers, recruitment officers, and analysts, Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth will also interest social scientists and policy makers interested in youth trends.

Military Recruiting in the United States provides a fearless and penetrating description of the deceptive practices of the U.S. military as it recruits American youth into the armed forces. Long-time antiwar activist Pat Elder exposes the underworld of American military recruiting in this explosive and consequential book. The book describes how recruiters manage to convince youth to enlist. It details a sophisticated psy-ops campaign directed at children. Elder describes how the military encourages first-person shooter games and places firearms into the hands of thousands using the schools, its JROTC programs, and the Civilian Marksmanship Program to inculcate youth with a reverence for guns. Previously unpublished investigative work reveals how indoor shooting ranges in schools are threatening the health of children and school staff through exposure to lead particulate matter. The book provides a kind of "what's coming next manual" for European peacemakers as they also confront a rising tide of militarism. The book examines the disturbing, nurturing role of the Catholic Church in recruiting youth. It surveys the wholesale military censorship of Hollywood films, pervasive military testing in the high schools, and an explosion of military programs directed toward youth. For more information, visit: www.counter-recruit.org

The viability of the All Volunteer Force (AVF) depends, in large measure, on the Department of Defense's (DOD) ability to successfully recruit several hundred thousand qualified individuals each year to fill over 1,400 occupational specialties. Since the March 2003 involvement of U.S. military forces in Iraq, attracting sufficient numbers of high-quality recruits to military service has proven to be one of the greatest personnel challenges faced by DOD since the inception of the AVF. The active Army, the Army Reserve, and the Navy Reserve, for example, failed to meet their fiscal year 2005 recruiting goals. Recruitment of high-quality personnel is a tough proposition, made even more challenging in the current environment when the nation is engaged in combat operations. To exacerbate the recruitment challenges further, DOD estimates that over half of the youth in the U.S. population between the ages of 16 and 21 do not meet the minimum requirements to enter military service. Moreover, additional factors such as the shrinking numbers of new recruits in delayed entry programs and the Army Army's use of stop loss, which delays servicemembers from leaving active duty, indicate that the components may experience continued recruiting challenges as they attempt to meet their personnel requirements. To help overcome recruiting challenges, the military services during the past several years have assigned roughly 20,000 recruiters to manage their recruiting programs and achieve their accession goals.

This book describes the various tactics used in counter-recruitment, drawing from the words of activists and case studies of successful organizing and advocacy. The United States is one of the only developed countries to allow a military presence in public schools, including an active role for military recruiters. In order to enlist 250,000 new recruits every year, the US military must market itself to youth by integrating itself into schools through programs such as JROTC (Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps), and spend billions of dollars annually on recruitment activities. This militarization of educational space has spawned a little-noticed grassroots resistance: the small, but sophisticated, “counter-recruitment” movement. Counter-recruiters visit schools to challenge recruiters' messages with information on non-military career options; activists work to make it harder for the military to operate in public schools; they conduct lobbying campaigns for policies that protect students' private information from military recruiters; and, counter-recruiters mentor youth to become involved in these activities. While attracting little attention, counter-recruitment has nonetheless been described as “the military recruiter's greatest obstacle” by a Marine Corps official.

The Army recruiter's professional magazine.

Military recruiting is thoroughly integrated in American public schools. Federal legislation mandates that every public school receiving federal funding open its doors to military recruiters in the same capacity as any postsecondary university or job organization, lest that school risk losing all federal funds. This investigation examines the military recruiting policy at work in the large, diversified contexts of the New York City Public Schools. -- Abstract.

"This is an annotated bibliography of research conducted on military recruiting by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI), the other U.S. military services, and foreign military organizations. To provide a framework for the research summaries, they are organized around a model of military recruitment showing the important factors contributing to successful recruiting. The model contains the following factors: (1) personnel selection and assessment; (2) training and development; (3) recruiting management and organization; (4) recruiter performance; (3) marketing; (6) youth supply, characteristics, and influencers; (7) propensity; (8) enlistment decisions; and (9) delayed entry programs. One hundred fifty-one reports are summarized, describing recruiting research most relevant to the current U.S. military recruiting environment. It is hoped that the review provides a comprehensive yet concise picture of the research results generated by the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and foreign service recruiting research communities."--DTIC.