Paintballers! Uncle Sam Wants You!
Mon Apr 02, 2007 at 05:58:30 PM PDT
Military recruiting during wartime is hard werk, y'know. Almost as hard a clearin' brush offa ranch that don't have no cows.
We've been hearing for some time that the military has had a rough time recruiting and there's been some hoopla made over the fact that recruiting standards have been lowered, but two recent new stories have suggested that it's now so bad that recruiters are trolling internet job sites and ... paintball businesses.
C'mon, paratrooper. You know you wanna jump.
Back in 2005, we started seeing headlines telling us that the military, especially the Army, was having problems meeting recruiting goals.
In February of 2005, WaPo told us how the looming crunch was impacting the the Army to the extent that new recruits were being rushed into training:
...the Army is rushing incoming recruits into training as quickly as it can. Compared with last year, it has cut by 50 percent the average number of days between the time a recruit signs up and enters boot camp. It is adding more than 800 active-duty recruiters to the 5,201 who were on the job last year, as attracting each enlistee requires more effort and monetary incentives. Driving the manpower crunch is the Army's goal of boosting the number of combat brigades needed to rotate into Iraq....
Driving the manpower crunch at that time was the Army's goal of boosting the number of combat brigades needed to rotate into Iraq.
In September of 2005, Military.com told us
The Army has not published official figures yet, but it apparently finished the 12-month counting period that ends Friday with about 73,000 recruits. Its goal was 80,000. A gap of 7,000 enlistees would be the largest - in absolute number as well as in percentage terms - since 1979, according to Army records.
The Army National Guard and the Army Reserve, which are smaller than the regular Army, had even worse results.
The active-duty Army had not missed its target since 1999, when it was 6,290 recruits short; in 1998 it fell short by 801, and in 1995 it was off by 33. Prior to that the last shortfall was in 1979 when the Army missed by 17,054 during a period when the Army was much bigger and its recruiting goals were double today's.
And if that wasn't enough, The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) issued a report telling us that "Army Recruitment Goals [are] Endangered as [the] Percent[age] of African American Enlistees Declines". You can read the report for yourself, but in short, the PRB said that "the decline in African American military enlistments during the first five years of the 21st century has been striking," especially in the Army and the Marines, who bear the brunt of the action and fatalities in Iraq. The PRB says that, in 2000, African Americans comprised 24% of all Army recruits and that number had dropped to 14% in the 2005 recruiting year. There had been other declines, in the early 1980s, and again in the early '90s (there's another diary here regarding historic reasons for African American over-representation in the Armed Forces, of course.) One other statistic the PRB report notes - and which will become important further down in this diary - is that 15% of African American high school seniors "perceived the military to be a racially discriminatory workplace".
Add on to that, as the as the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out in the fall of 2006,
... despite NASCAR, professional bull-riding and Arena Football sponsorships, popular video games that doubled as recruiting tools, TV commercials dripping with seductive scenes of military glory, a "joint marketing communications and market research and studies" program designed to attract, among others, dropouts and those with criminal records for military service, and at least $16,000 in promotional costs for each soldier it managed to sign up, the U.S. military failed to meet its recruiting goals.
What else did the SF Chronicle point out? That a little-known Pentagon study, published in 2004, explored the topic of "pre-Service behaviors and subsequent Service success." The SF Chronicle goes on to tell us that the result of that study was reported in February of 2006 by the Baltimore Sun in very clear terms. There was "a significant increase in the number of recruits with what the Army terms 'serious criminal misconduct' in their background" -- a category that included 'aggravated assault, robbery, vehicular manslaughter, receiving stolen property and making terrorist threats.' From 2004 to 2005, the number of those recruits rose by more than 54 percent, while alcohol and illegal drug waivers...increased by more than 13 percent." The entire SF Chronicle article is chilling: it talks of the success of this new recruting push, citing reports from numerous other newspapers that recruiters have visited a youth prison in Utah, that recruiters are knowingly recruiting "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists", and even that a neo-Nazi magazine has been encouraging "skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units," because "The coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war. ... It will be house-to-house ... until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.'"
Remember those African American high school seniors mentioned above? If this is true, who could blame them for not seeing the military as a viable option?
A week after the SF Chronicle article appeared, The USA Today reported that "Lower standards [are] help[ing] the Army meet" it's recruting goals, and that some 17% of new recruits were accepted into the Army under a variety of waivers for "medical, moral or criminal problems".
Convinced yet? In February of 2007, the NYC reported that waivers for criminal problems of new Army recruits had increased 65% in the last three years, although in terms of total numbers of "moral waivers", the Marine Corps - by far the smaller branch - issued more such waivers than the Army, 20,750 and 8,129 respectively, 2006.
Still, we should note that all of the above constitute only a fraction of our military personnel; but, a growing fraction.
Even relaxed recruitment standards have not helped the military meet personnel needs, and so we come to online job sites and paintball.
As was diaried several times last week, to U.S. Army recruiter, Sgt. Marcia Ramode went on a homophobic tirade against one Corey Andrew, whom she was trying to recruit. Pam has the whole story over at pamshouseblend but the significant thing here for this diary is how Ramode first contacted Andrew; he'd posted his resume on a job search website, and Ramode had been trolling the site, randomly contacting people to try to recruit them into the Army.
Recruiting into the US Military by trolling job search websites....
But you have to give strapped recruiters credit for their creativity; my local news (via Yahoo) has reported that the National Guard has figured out that the best place to recruit is... Poynette's Apocalypse Paintball, in Poynette, WI, which
has become a popular place for the military to recruit and train Wisconsin soldiers.
Michael Saatzer-Bishop is a paintball referee and a member of the Wisconsin National Guard's 832 Metavac Company.
"People come out and have a good time, and while they are having a good time, people feel more comfortable around recruiters," said Saatzer-Bishop. "They'll ask more questions and get to know the military a little more."
snip
"It's easier, it's faster and it's less work for them," said Apocalypse Paintball owner David Breed.
Targeting paintball businesses is a growing trend across the nation as recruiters look to target future enlistees.
"Basically the recruiters bring a group out here," said Breed. "Some are in the military, some are going to be in the military."
And one last bit from that same article: "Last month the Army agreed to a $100,000 advertising deal with Paintball Sports Magazine. With that, players will also see tanks, choppers, and an Army recruiting booth at a major paintball tournament in May."
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