You Go to War With The Army You recruit

Kat Steiger notes that the US Army is using video games in its recruiting including one that features the delightful "curb stomp" move (speaking of which: go watch American History X if you haven't seen it). Kay goes in one direction with this, but I'm curious as to how this sort of thing is supposed to fit in with the new kinder, gentler, counterinsurgency-oriented Army that's decided things like "massive firepower" are "be of limited utility, or even counter-productive in COIN operations."

Or, to put it another way, I've been approached twice by Army recruiters while playing Time Crisis II and never while browsing the Middle East History section of my local bookstore. There's nothing surprising about any of this, but there's an obvious tension here. If you genuinely want to reorient the force around a whole new approach to warfare, you can't hold everything in place but then hand people a new manual.

Comments

Army recruiters cruise video arcades? That is frankly really disturbing.

Posted by ajay | July 6, 2007 9:40 AM

Gears of War is an incredible game. Highly recommended. Pulling off the curb stomp is pretty tough, and being able to do so demonstrates fairly good coordination and reflexes. Interestingly, in GoW, the characters are the insurgents against a massive invasion of aliens (okay technically not alien, as they are native to the planet). Perhaps the game does have some relevance to teaching insurgent tactics. You spend the game in hit and run attacks against an always superior foe -- sometimes having to hightail it fast when heavy firepowers shows up.

Posted by carethus | July 6, 2007 9:50 AM

Example # 534 of a case where it's a mistake to refer to large institutions as unitary and rational actors. What do you (being the army, and/or the American public and/or Congress) "genuinely want"? Well, nothing at all, or else a few hundred thousand different things. No doubt there are a lot of policy-makers in the army who want a gentle, amiable occupation devoted entirely to counter-insurgency, but there are also probably a fair amount of Vietnam relics or complete wingnuts in Iraq and/or the Pentagon who think we just need to find the desert's equivalent of Agent Orange. It would be impossibly lucky of us to have the former in all the positions of influence and authority (and to have the latter listen to them).

Posted by Cyrus | July 6, 2007 9:56 AM

Yes, why is it that the Army isn't recruiting in the Middle Eastern History section of a college-town bookstore?

Well, let's see. It might be that the Army isn't having nearly as much difficulty filling its officer corps as it is finding footsoldiers. For that matter, it's not as if SOCOM is having trouble finding soldiers to volunteer for Special Forces. (Retaining special operators or officers is something else again, but it's a separate topic.) In other words, what the army most needs are tens of thousands of young men and women who are willing to enlist, and to serve in support functions and in line units. By and large, they're going to be driven by a blend of economic incentives and a desire to serve. The ideal recruit is probably a high school senior, looking to convert his time in service into cash for college. They'll be trained, drilled, and deployed.

If your point is that we need to be recruiting forces to supplement these conventional soldiers, and training and deploying troops who possess greater cultural literacy and the ability to implement the high-minded counterinsurgency strategies that have been forumulated over the past few years, it's well taken. And the Armed Forces are, in fact, dipping into Middle Eastern Studies departments across the country in search of such recruits. (Not that it's an easy task - these tend to be the most relentlessly anti-militaristic, if not outright anti-American, departments on most campuses. That's one reason why the military generally prefers to recruit personnel who believe in the mission, and *then* provide them with training and education.) But even if we succeed in recruiting tens of thousands of such soldiers, expanding their role far beyond any present proposal, we're still going to need hundreds of thousands of ordinary grunts. And video games are always going to be a better way to reach American adolescents than bookstores.

Posted by FlyOnTheWall | July 6, 2007 10:13 AM

No doubt there are a lot of policy-makers in the army who want a gentle, amiable occupation devoted entirely to counter-insurgency

I think that after so many years of fruitless war, it's time to put this notion to bed that there could be a productive, institution-building, benevolent military invasion and occupation. That is why I've definitely rejected the perennial call for some non-military corps of benevolent institution builders that is supposed to address both the government's needs oversees and the perceived lack of involvement of the privileged in national service.

Let me say this once and for all: INVADING AND OCCUPYING A COUNTRY IS BY ITS NATURE COERCIVE. It is possible to execute the occupation better or worse, but do not delude yourself into thinking that if only the right people in the military establishment, those fully inculcated with the Petraeus doctrine or whatever bullshit's being pedaled this Friedman Unit, were in charge, our problems would go away.

And because an occupation is by its nature coercive, it will attract the Rambo wannabes and whatever else. Now, there will also be good guys who are not gleeful at the thought of firing indiscriminately into a crowd of brown people, but when we choose the military option, we are of necessity choosing violence and violent people.

Posted by Marshall | July 6, 2007 10:20 AM

"And the Armed Forces are, in fact, dipping into Middle Eastern Studies departments across the country in search of such recruits. (Not that it's an easy task - these tend to be the most relentlessly anti-militaristic, if not outright anti-American, departments on most campuses."

Which must be because of some chemical pumped into the ventilation ducts by evil Islamofascist libruls and certainly NOT because people who actually know things about the Middle East realize that the US' policy towards the Middle East is a disaster.

Posted by Jake H. | July 6, 2007 11:06 AM

Curb-stomping is one thing, but it's really the Hammer of Dawn that flies in the face of a kinder, gentler and more precise anti-insurgency strategy. That thing's impossible to control, causes extensive collateral damage and, if you're me, usually leads to a few friendly-fire casualties.

Posted by Houdini's Ghost | July 6, 2007 1:14 PM

Armies are for killing people and breaking things. That's what they do.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 6, 2007 1:41 PM

"It might be that the Army isn't having nearly as much difficulty filling its officer corps as it is finding footsoldiers."

To win a counterinsurgency campaign, you need intelligence. To gather intelligence in an Arab country, you need Arabic speakers. Where do you think Arabic speakers are more likely to gather? Without better intelligence-gathering capabilities, the marginal gain of gathering one more soldier to replace another soldier will be rather low. This is why occupations tend to be bad for militaries. Also, it must be pointed out that many of the professors in Middle Eastern Studies departments tend to be (shock!) from the Middle East. They have seen the effects of American foreign policy in the ME. Their students are going to hear about that and probably less likely to simply dismiss the opinions of non-Americans just because those foreigners don't get it. How is a mission that the "anti-American" Arabs in the ME won't get supposed to succeed? It doesn't matter if every American supports it if the average Arab doesn't. Otherwise, we are just babbling to ourselves while sacrificing our soldiers to a pipe dream.

Posted by Reality Man | July 6, 2007 2:22 PM

"That's one reason why the military generally prefers to recruit personnel who believe in the mission, and *then* provide them with training and education."

The above statement is completely false.
The Armed Forces recruit individuals who want to serve. Command could care less if you believe in the current mission or some untold future mission as long as you follow orders and do your duty.
When I joined no one asked me what I thought of Desert Storm and when I received my commission there was no questionnaire on Operation Restore Democracy and before I was deployed, command did not ask for my opinion on Task Force Eagle.

Posted by John McGrath knows | July 6, 2007 4:40 PM

Enlisting in the military is never going to be the career path of choice for smart people

And I say this as after a twenty-year career in the Army. When I enlisted in the Infantry lo those many years ago, it made no more practical sense than more obvioulsy self-destructive juvenile male activities like beer-binging, riding motrocycles, or smoking cigarrettes. You were getting into a career of preparing for a war, fighting the Red Army in the Fulda Gap, that would either never arrive (And then what kind of career would you have devoted your life to?), or it would arrive, and your life expectancy as an Infantryman would be measured in hours or days. Dead hero or live nothing. Some set of alternatives.

It's even more obviously self-defeating a proposition, more hopeless a situation, now that the Army has evolved away from being an actual military service, where the aim of training is to hone skills at defeating enemy armed forces, and into an occupation force. Your skills will be used alright, but against a people, not an enemy army. Only folks uninsightful enough to not understand how their talents, their energy, and their sacred honor, will be squandered killing civilians, would sign up in such an Army. Back when the US Army was an actual army, you could at least tell yourself that your suicidal career choice at least filled the honorable function of insuring that the Army, even if manned by the suicidally crazy, would not be led into dishonor by the Lt. Calley types who would fill your place if you weren't willing to be sufficiently crazy to play your part in the human tragedy. Now? Lt. Calley types are what they need. Don't use propaganda buzz words like "counter-insurgency" to delude yourself that we're presently engaged in anything less pointlessly destructive, and self-destructive, than My Lai.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | July 6, 2007 6:22 PM

Why bother recruiting normal people and turning them into psychopaths when you can start with ones who are already crazy?

Posted by SqueakyRat | July 6, 2007 9:09 PM

I'm a little confused about why people are surprised that when the Army wants to recruit young people, it offers them games that they're interested in. The fact that the games are violent is rather besides the point - if teenagers were clamoring for the latest edition of Hello Kitty's Island Adventure, the Army would give them that instead.

It may come as a bit of a surprise, but most Army recruits don't set US foreign policy - thus, their interest in the geopolitics of the Middle East is rather irrelevant. Shooting people, on the other hand, is a fairly regular requirement.

I'd also note that both Kay and Think Progress seem to be fairly ignorant of the medium they're criticizing: Gears of War is a violent game, but it's hardly more violent than, say, The Sopranos (which also featured curb-stomping, in rather more graphic detail). They also seem ignorant of the rather enormous flaws in psychological literature around video games - most confuse correlation with causation and aggression with violence.

It appears that all concerned would rather find knee-jerk criticisms of the military than attempt to build an argument more significant than "I don't like it, therefore it's bad."

Posted by Geoff | July 6, 2007 9:22 PM

I wonder what Matt said to the recruiters the first time, and then the second time. Did he daydream some profound response after the first go round, then deploy it the second? Or, did he stick with "Uh, no thanks." ?

Posted by ferd | July 7, 2007 12:30 AM