Military Recruiters: They Just Won’t Give Up

A woman came to my door and asked if my sons were at home. When I inquired as to why, she stated “I’m from the Department of Peace and I’d like to leave some literature so that they might consider joining and working towards peaceful resolutions of conflict.” When I asked about sign-on bonuses like the military offers she said, “Oh, there aren’t any of those. We use our money towards real efforts towards achieving peace, without inflated promises.” [Hmmmm, I thought…] I accepted the literature and she wished me a peaceful day.

Then I woke up. Drat, it was a dream.

An article was forwarded to me yestserday in an email from Altertnet entitled US Army achieves minimal December recruiting goal. It looks like recruiting efforts are only strengthening.

The article reports that the U.S. Army achieved its seventh straight monthly recruiting target in December. The Army National Guard and Army Reserve both also met recruiting goals.

The army’s goal did fall short about 7,000 from its goal of annual goal of 80,000 recruits in fiscal 2005, but army spokespeople attribute that to the partial wariness of young people to join the all-volunteer military during the Iraq war.

It looks like the government won’t give up or scale back on recruiting efforts. The Army has added recruiters, and last month it hired a new advertising agency to handle its recruiting campaign.
With its new theme “The Army of One”, The Army intends to spend $1.35 billion in the next five years on advertising to recruit for the regular Army and Army Reserve, making this the federal government’s biggest ad account.

The recruiting efforts don’t stop there, either.

The Army in November also launched an effort to coax former troops to sign up again for active-duty military service, contacting 78,000 people who previously served in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. Unlike in the past, they now can return to the Army without giving up their previous rank or undergo the rigors of basic training.

Think of what the world might look like of the same efforts and resources were spent to recruit people for peace efforts instead of military efforts. Think what it would look like to have our children approached by people who want folks to volunteer to work on issues of peaceful resolution to conflicts…..One can only dream. We all can make it happen if we continue to stand up and speak out.