For many, war is preferable to the hassle of recruiting. "Rolling a donut," i.e., coming up with no recruits for a month, can be tortuous. Consider the five Houston battalion recruiters who've killed themselves in a relatively short period of time. Recruiters work 12- to 14-hour days, six or seven days a week. If they don't fill monthly quotas, they're criticized as failures, punished with even longer hours and threatened with losing rank or receiving poor evaluations, according to media sources. It's all about producing "bodies on the floor," that is, recruits at MEPS, the local Military Entrance Processing Command. These changes are evidence of a fundamental paradigm shift.
This shift is also characterized by a drift toward a more cloistered existence for recruiters, as evidenced by the successful unveiling of the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia. Increasingly, recruiters are persona-non-grata in thousands of communities across the nation. Their calls are anathema to parents and teens in millions of households. To counter this trend, the military is micro-targeting potential recruits. At Franklin Mills Mall, the Pentagon is going after teens "who don't have X-boxes at home," according to an active recruiter in the battalion. The Army has been disconnected from the entire southeast Pennsylvania region since the Philadelphia Battalion was moved to exurban Lakehurst Naval Air Station in NJ and renamed the Mid-Atlantic Battalion. Also, the Philadelphia MEPS wasmoved from the cityproper to Fort Dix, NJ. These actions further cloistered recruiting leadership and MEPS personnel from the citizenry they serve.
These trends will continue nationally. Since the AEC opened, five area recruiting stations have closed. Recruiters will no longer be coming into contact with the mainstream and that's just fine with the Pentagon. Developing a Warrior Caste isn't dependent on popular support. With the AEC, the Army is exposing/indoctrinating teens to a very narrow slice of what the Army does - "killing bad guys." There are nearly 200 occupational specialties in the Army. Even those serving in the infantry are called on to do a whole lot more than shoot people. The Pentagon's agenda is very clear - present a narrow view of the Army experience and hope that those indoctrinated will a) enlist; and b) volunteer for a combat MOS on their own accord.
Throughout world history, warrior castes have been built from particular regions and/or ethnicities within the territorial confines of an empire -- and we're no exception today. Our warrior caste is being built disproportionately from recruits who reign from the old south. We are witnessing the development of a military radically unmoored from the intellectual and popular center of American socio-political thought, further contributing to the refinement and further development of a new caste in American society - the warrior caste.
That brings us back to the two 13 year-olds giving each other high fives in a suburban shopping mall in Philadelphia for "wiping out ragheads" with automatic machine gun fire. The Army has plans to extend these "Experience Centers" across the country. We'd better wake up before it's too late. Join us on September 12, 2009. See: www.shutdowntheaec.net
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