Breaking It Down: Military Steps Up Recruitment

March 12, 2005 — -- You have to have seen them. They're all over prime-time television: commercials for the Army, the Marines and the Air Force. I haven't seen any for the Navy or Coast Guard recently. But in last week's episode of the TV series "24," there were two commercials extolling the rewards of working for the FBI.

These commercials are as slick and glitzy as commercials get. Expensive productions, glitzy editing, music that swells your pride in country. They innocently offer young people opportunities for world travel, a college education, marketable skills, a future. There are no mentions of the war in Iraq. No mentions of those who have been killed and injured.

What's going on?

The Pentagon has finally acknowledged it is having trouble getting enough volunteers for our all-volunteer army. The Army for the first time in five years missed its recruiting goal. The Marines have failed to meet their goals the last two months.

The Army and Army Reserves alone need 100,000 new recruits this year. They say only about 10 percent of them walk into recruitment offices to enlist. The rest -- 90 percent of them -- have to be rounded up.

So the military, in 2003, spent an estimated $4 billion on advertising and recruitment activities. That budget is expected to increase.

I first wondered "what's going on?" last fall when I saw Marine recruiters -- in their snappy dress uniforms -- talking to a group of students in a Kansas City high school parking lot. But now I've been seeing uniformed military officers outside movie cineplexes, McDonald's and Wal-Marts. They are usually found at inner-city high schools and the places where black and Latino kids hang out.

I recently learned that U.S. military recruiters can now go into public schools and sit in guidance counseling offices to pursue their recruitment efforts. Then I discovered it is a provision of the No Child Left Behind legislation, which I have talked about before. The law says that any schools accepting federal funds (well, that's virtually every public school in the country) must give military recruiters the same access to students and data about students that college recruiters get.