Gary Ghirardi / NNOMY - First disclosures: This Op-ed is being offered up by myself, Gary Ghirardi, for the September 2020 newsletter of the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth, themed: Teaching Kids to Kill, a vehicle of NNOMY's communications efforts to give voice to the few who stand up to endless wars and largely public ignorance and indifference to what is done in their names. It in no way reflects the opinions of the diversity of those organizations that collectively represent the bulk of groups, large and small, who offer up youth demilitarization efforts nationally in the not so United States of America.
This Op-ed is short and not so sweet, like the Psychology Today Op-ed proceeding this in our lineup of offerings for the September NNOMY Newsletter. Short seems to be the new formula because people are adverse to reading long articles now and actually prefer videos where they only need to watch and maybe listen. Those have to be short also. Attention spans have shortened.
What has been stirring in my mind is not a popular idea likely to be supported by many if even a few. Yet I cannot escape this prescient thought about what is the business of the USA and its global military in this seemingly culminating moment of the November Presidential election in a few weeks time; kind of a not so calm thought before the storm that is likely coming.
If I am to take the rhetoric of the election as a guide to informing my thinking about our culture, I can only surmise that the televised back-and-forth serves only to maintain the status-quo with a faux battle over which dressing will be applied to coat the business of defending a dollarized global economy. After-all, isn't that what the project of the U.S. military really is?
I think back to all I have seen and those I have known in my intervening forty-two years of legal adulthood and the best formula for succeeding in this success driven culture is the endless and uncritical pursuit of wealth creation and the little power that can be acquired over others along the way with no holds barred.
Surveying the nativist and immigrant propensities to follow this path, I now believe the United States of America is a monster factory, and now franchised to a country near you. It seems like a harsh characterization on the surface to explain so many places and lives spread out over generations but those most successful adherents to the pursuit of the rewards of worshiping money and power above all other priorities, if we take those constant ques from our 24/7 media's talking heads, surely identifies us as cultural monstrosities.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday proposed blocking the military from recruiting in schools, describing the practice as a predatory attack on disadvantaged children who already suffer from underfunded resources in their learning environments. 
The corona virus crisis has been a double-edged sword for military recruitment in the United States. On the one hand, the tightening of the labor market contributed to higher rates of retention than the Army brass expected, meaning that many soldiers decided to reenlist this spring rather than pursue civilian employment when their terms of service expired. On the other hand, recruiting stations across the country have had to shut down to comply with social distancing guidelines, limiting recruiters’ access to young people and inhibiting the “kneecap-to-kneecap” conversations recruiters widely acknowledge to be essential to their work.
Less than one percent of the Armed Forces’ target demographic — seventeen- to twenty-four-year-olds — is actively interested in a military career. After a “kneecap-to-kneecap” encounter with a recruiter, whether at a recruiting station or a school event, probability of enlistment climbs to more than 50 percent, according to the Army.
The reasons for this have been well-documented by anti-recruitment activists for decades. Recruiters, who are expected to meet regular enlistment quotas, aggressively pursue young people who express interest, generally attempting to separate them from parents, teachers, counselors, and others who might advocate for civilian careers.
Gary Ghirardi – OpEd – June 2020
Back in May of 2020, I caught an interview on Pacifica's KPFK radio on a morning program where a young woman was explaining the loss of her aunt that was a nurse in a hospital engaging the Coronavirus. She recounted her aunt telling her that she was not provided with masks or gloves and that a patient had sneezed in her face a week prior to her falling ill. All this culminated with a Zoom meeting with the family saying goodbye before she died. Later that day I passed a local hospital that had placed a large banner on the street honoring our heroes that were fighting the current epidemic.
In my work for The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth, I am constantly reminded of a similar refrain from those pushing back against our work of getting youth, with limited opportunities for their futures, to consider all the ramifications of serving in the United State's post 9/11 military. That push-back always invokes the heroic diatribes defending those who serve in our military branches and a forceful reminder of how dare we try to diminish the sacrifice of heroes who have served or are considering serving by revealing the harmful realities of military service. Of course we do not diminish their service but try to put it in context to a fuller and more accurate disclosure of what military recruiters manage to leave out of their enlistment appeals. The relationship between these two scenarios, and the contradictions inherent in both, stayed with me all week and encouraged this short OpEd.
How COVID-19 is impacting the Delayed Entry Program and threatening the health of recruits.
By Pat Elder / National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth, NNOMY - June 8, 2020
- Leer la versión en español
COVID-19 has profoundly impacted the way the military finds new soldiers. The recruiting command was caught unprepared to face the pandemic and is facing a challenging new reality.
Military recruiting is an intense, psychological pursuit that has traditionally relied on the ability of recruiters to develop close relationships with teenage prospects. These relationships were cultivated in the nation’s high schools where recruiters enjoyed access to children. Recruiters served as coaches and tutors. They brought donuts to the faculty. They ate lunch with prospects, sometimes a hundred times in a single school year. Military recruiters played one-on-one basketball after school with potential recruits and became best of friends with some kids. So friendly, hundreds of male recruiters have been implicated in inappropriate sexual relationships with underaged girls.
High schools were the center of the recruiting universe, but that ended abruptly in March when the enlistment pipeline was ruptured. Recruiters enlisted seniors and placed them into the Delayed Entry Program (DEP) in which a student’s entry into active duty is postponed for up to 365 days. (The Army now calls it the Future Soldier Program.) The thrust of the DEP program is to maintain future soldier motivation while minimizing attrition. When DEP members report to basic training, they are accessed (enlisted) into active duty.