Recruiting minorities out of high school to serve in the military is a sensitive topic hardly broached in American society. It carries major social implications that could leave our war machine’s tank near empty.
How misdirected are our priorities when the best escape from poverty we can offer teens is to volunteer for life-threatening service in the military during a war? In what way are we practicing peace if we need to tap inner-city schools to fight what politicians can’t settle through diplomatic means?
With the national unemployment rate above 10 percent and ongoing wars we can measure with a slow metronome, it’s easy to conceive that many youth might fall prey to sophisticated, over-zealous military recruiting practices.
Recruiting in urban high schools teeters on violating accepted international protocol the United Nations determined following a 2008 report from the American Civil Liberties Union. The 46-page report “Soldiers of Misfortune” prepared for the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child pointed out that the “U.S. military disproportionately targets poor and minority public school students.”
The report asserted that recruiting tactics include “exaggerated promises of financial rewards for enlistment, [which] undermines the voluntariness of their enlistment.” The “financial rewards” include frequently unguaranteed bonuses and offers for paid college educations.
The ACLU charged that recruiters “target children as young as 11 years old,” with documented instances of “coercion, deception, and even sexual abuse in order to gain recruits.”
Tapping the vulnerabilities of low-income and minority youth has been extremely beneficial in maintaining quotas.
All four branches with active and reserve duty components serving throughout the world met or surpassed recruiting goals for February, a recent Department of Defense report boasted. The Navy and Air Force hit the mark at 100 percent, while the Army and Marines surpassed expectations at 105 percent and 136 percent, respectively.
This translated to more than 13,000 enlistees for the month, with many joining at 17 years old, the minimum age recruiters are supposed to be allowed access according to rules imposed by the U.S. Senate.
The U.S. is one of only two countries that refused to ratify the U.N. protocol making 18 the minimum age for recruiting. The other country ignoring the call to not use children under 18 is Somalia — hardly a nation with high standards.
The pressure to meet quotas not only places teens in jeopardy, but recruiters themselves are prone to the psychological aftermath that increasingly leads to suicide, according to another recent DoD report.
The Senate Armed Services Committee began hearings last week into a spate of Army recruiter suicides in Texas, the Houston Chronicle reported. The article cited the suicides of four Houston-based recruiters between January 2005 and September 2008. All had served in Iraq or Afghanistan before being assigned as recruiters.
Among possible reasons being investigated is low morale and fear of retaliation for low production. In a memo to the Department of the Army, Brigadier General F.D. Turner, while investigating the suicides, wrote, “There is a great fear of reprisal among the recruiters,” and that recruiters’ commanding officers, “[U]se the threat of ‘sending [them] back to mainstream Army’ with negative report.”
One remedy the Army is considering is to anchor recruiters in their hometowns. This, according to the Houston Chronicle, could ease recruiter stress by placing them where “[T]hey’ve already created close ties in the local school districts, churches and neighborhood groups.”
This plan, however, is merely intended to address mental health issues among the recruiters. It stops short of changing the rules about enticing adolescents into service.
To address that, we must insist that the military conform to the U.N. protocol. It’s time to demand that new recruiting policies are implemented, including making it illegal to speak to a teen under 18 without a parent or legal guardian present.
If we don’t stop the military from luring low-income and minority students with pie-in-the-sky offers, defenseless teens will continue being sent to fight old men’s wars.
If you did any actual research on this topic, you would know that low income folks usually don’t even qualify for the military.