Steve Burns: Interest in Army plummets

Since the beginning of the Iraq war, the U.S. military has had greater and greater difficulty meeting its recruitment goals, and an April 17 report on National Public Radio described some of the measures the Army is taking to meet their quota in a tough recruiting environment.

The Army has increased the number of waivers issued to new recruits who suffer from medical conditions that would have previously made them ineligible, and issued more waivers for recruits with criminal records.

But the most interesting part of the report went unmentioned by reporter Tom Bowman. This graph was posted on the NPR website, accompanying the story:
These are really staggering drops in interest in joining the Army, regardless of race or ethnicity. Even including youth who are only "probably interested" in joining the army, the percentage of African-Americans who have an interest in the Army is now at about 10%, a drop of more than half since the invasion of Iraq. Equally dramatic is the nearly 60% drop in interest among Hispanics over the past two years.

The Army had become increasingly dependent on Hispanic enlistment due to the precipitous drop in African-American enlistment following the Iraq invasion (African-Americans, who were once represented in the military in numbers greater than their share of the the population, now represent a percentage of the military roughly equal to their share of the population.)

Although general opposition to the Iraq war (exceeding 80% in the African-American community) goes a long way to explain the decline, the relatively recent and dramatic drop in interest in the military among Hispanics caused me to recall a passage I had read recently in the book Army of None: Strategies to Counter Military Recruitment, End War, and Build a Better World.

The book reports on the growing use of Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) programs in many inner-city schools, starting as early as middle school. Arlene Inouye, founder of the California-based organization Coalition Against Militarism in our Schools (CAMS) tells the story of one Hispanic youth who had been recruited into the JROTC program in his local school:


"Sal is a bright JROTC student who lacked support for success in school and beyond. His father was deported to Mexico about two years ago, and he was told by the military recruiter that if Sal enlisted, his father could come back to the US. His father begged him to enlist after high school. Sal later learned that the military was lying, and that he couldn't help his father come home."

The Army has dangled promises of citizenship in front of people who are increasingly desperate to escape the growing crackdown by another branch of our militarized government -- the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency -- but those promises have often turned out to be false, or citizenship has only come posthumously. Now that word of the Army's bait-and-switch tactic has spread, the Army finds itself facing even greater, and well-deserved, difficulties in recruitment.

What the Army sees as a source of difficulty, I see as a sign of hope. I see communities, well aware that their government has no interest in their opinions or opposition to the war, taking the most effective step possible toward ending the war, by denying the military the soldiers needed to continue the war. If Dick Cheney answers "So?" when told that the American people don't think the war is worth fighting, if Congress continues to shovel billions into the war machine, that machine can still grind to a halt when it runs out of bodies. In the end, stopping the Iraq war may come down to something as simple as the answer to this question: "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"