Steve Burns: The “Forbidden Fruit” of Army recruiting

Peace Action and Vets for Peace were right to celebrate their accomplishments last week, when they brought new attention to the Army’s use of violent videogames as a recruitment tool at Milwaukee’s Summerfest. As a result of pressure from the peace movement, Army recruiters began to require a minimum age of 18 for anyone who wanted to participate in their “Virtual Army Experience” video game. Before the protests, recruiters were admitting children as young as 13 – or possibly younger – to fire a truck-mounted machine gun at images of dark-skinned “Arab terrorists” projected on a screen. Recruiters were also handing out free copies of the game to teens and preteens to play at home.

And now, as a result of protests against the same display at the upcoming Duluth airshow, military recruiters and airshow organizers have already announced that no one under the age of 17 will be allowed to participate in the Army’s ultra-violent “war games.”

While these accomplishments are real, and we should all celebrate the fact that the Army has been prevented from offering machine-gun training to twelve-year-olds, we should also be wary of these developments and understand how these age restrictions can actually help the Army meet its recruitment quotas.

The best analogy comes from the long struggle against the tobacco industry, and its efforts to market cigarettes to youth. For the tobacco companies, age restrictions are a double-edged sword. Tobacco executives know that if someone doesn’t start smoking in their teens, they’re probably not going to start smoking – ever. At the same time, the message that “smoking is for adults” is exactly the message the tobacco execs want to send out, because it makes cigarettes more attractive to young people.

This “forbidden fruit” effect can work to the advantage of military recruiters, too. What could make an ultra-violent video game more attractive to a 13-year-old than being told that he’s not old enough to get a copy?

A “not in front of the children” approach also sends an implicit message to youth that we don’t trust them to make important decisions about their lives. Of course, there are good reasons for that distrust: both tobacco companies and military recruiters rely on the sense of immortality that teens possess, an effect that seems to wear off once one enters the mid-twenties. But recruiters can play on a young person’s resentment at being “protected,” and use that as a way to build trust with a potential young recruit.

That’s why most national peace organizations that support counter-recruitment, like American Friends Service Committee, prefer to provide youth with the information and arguments they need to resist the recruiter’s pitch, rather than attempting to follow a strategy of “protecting” youth from recruiters.

These two approaches aren’t necessarily opposed. A policy limiting the access of recruiters to a high school can help strengthen a student counter-recruitment group by allowing it to organize its opposition around a few distinct recruitment events, rather than having to constantly react to recruiters roaming the hallways at will.

So what’s the proper mix of strategies for a public event like Summerfest or the Duluth Air Show, the next stop for the “Virtual Army Experience”? I think two approaches would be useful. The first is for parents, to make them aware that their tax dollars are being used to market a militarized version of “Grand Theft Auto” to their kids. I call this the “Do you know what your kids are up to in the recruiter’s tent?” approach. But, more importantly, we need to have an approach that puts youth in charge, and provides new opportunities for young people to get involved in counter-recruitment work.

For example, one obvious need is to have more timely information about exactly what the recruiters are up to. During the Summerfest controversy, we were often forced to rely on secondhand information, day-old reports in the Journal Sentinel, and even right-wing talk radio to find out what age limits were being applied and whether the Army had changed its display from life-sized live-action images to stationary targets. What if we had helped young peace activists organize themselves into a monitoring force, to report day-by-day on recruiter activities?

As much as the Army sees events like Summerfest as an opportunity to bring new recruits into the military, we should be looking at the Army’s presence at these events as an opportunity to bring new recruits into the peace movement. If, at the end of the day, the Army has done its sales job, but we leave with a half-dozen newly-experienced counter-recruitment activists, eager to take their new skills back to their own high schools, I would count that as a “win” for the peace movement.