Deciding who bears the burdens of war
Col. Casey Wardynski was schmoozing with some friends at a Los Angeles cocktail party a few years back when the idea of the Game came to him. What better way, he mused, than a video game to give potential Army recruits a taste of the military -- everything from boot camp to hostage rescues? What better method to attract techno-savvy prospects than with a state-of-the-art electronic come-on?
After an investment of more than $6 million by the Army, Wardynski's brainchild was loaded onto the Army's official Web site in July, where it immediately became one of the most popular free downloads on the Internet. To date, more than 1.3 million players have registered to play the "America's Army" game online, triple the military's initial expectation.
At any given moment, thousands of people -- most of them the Army's prime target, high school students -- are waiting to download the sophisticated program. What the Army gets in return is an entree into a prospective recruit's computer and a chance to make military life look exciting, fun and enticing.
And with a click, a player can make contact with an Army recruiter.
"The game idea was sort of a natural," said Wardynski, the director of the Army's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis. "It's been wildly popular with recruiters."
The game has state-of-the-art graphics with enough bang-bang to keep almost any teen player happy. It is played in stages, with participants working their way through the ranks toward the goal of becoming a first sergeant.
So it goes in the world of modern military recruiting, in which it no longer suffices to sit in an office and wait for the next volunteer to walk through the door. In this era of the all-volunteer military, the armed services have had to come up with measures that would have been unheard of in the past, when more high school students entered the service immediately after graduation.
To that end, the military is ratcheting up its efforts, offering signing bonuses, pouring money into television ads and movie promotions, and getting its message out to the adrenaline crowd, all with some success. And, under a new bill, the military may soon be accepting shorter hitches, encouraging many to sign up who otherwise might have balked at the four-year average.
One such promotion is the Army's decision to sponsor both a top fuel dragster dubbed "the Sarge" and a stock car that's running on the Winston Cup circuit. The stock car has the number "01" emblazoned on its side to underline the current "Army of One" slogan. The pit crew is held up as a prime example of teamwork on the Army Web site, http://www.goarmy.com.
The Marines and the Navy teamed up last year to produce a $1.2-million movie trailer designed to buff up the image of those two services. The nearly five-minute trailer, which opened to some controversy at Regal Cinemas, is the first military booster film to be shown in theaters since World War II. The Air Force seeks to ingratiate itself with its target audience by offering tips on its Web site about going to the prom, complete with grooming, make-up and tuxedo advice.
And the Navy is offering a $6,000 signing bonus for morticians who join the service. "We are looking for candidates nationwide!!!!" gushes the ad on the Hotjobs.com Web site. Navy Cmdr. Steve Lowry, a spokesman for the naval recruiting command, said there is no connection between the need for morticians and the fact that the United States may soon be at war with Iraq.
"There are 16 jobs for morticians in the Navy," he said. "We now have nine. So there's a need. We work strictly on supply and demand." There is a catch, though. Anyone who applies must already be a certified mortician -- and be willing to move.
There are many such bonuses in the military these days in job categories that have personnel shortages, with some paying as much as $20,000 as an incentive to sign up. That there should be a need for such gimmicks and lures speaks to the way the military has evolved in recent years.
After years of debate, the American military became a voluntary force in 1973. In the 1990s, its numbers were drastically reduced with the military stand down at the end of the Cold War. The U.S. active duty military now numbers 1.4 million.
As the military was cut back, so were recruiting expenses. At the same time, the super-heated '90s economy offered attractive civilian employment opportunities, even for high school graduates. Coupled with that, many military bases in urban areas were abandoned in favor of more rural locales, both for the space and as a cost-cutting measure. The result was that in many areas of the country, particularly urban settings, the number of people who even knew a soldier or veteran slipped to record lows. That, in turn, made recruiting far more difficult.
"The military has become somewhat divided from the society it protects," said Joseph Galloway, a war correspondent and co-author of "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." "And the society they protect no longer knows the institution."
By the late '90s, the military wasn't making its quota of new recruits, even though the goals were small compared to the Cold War years. In 1999, the year Wardynski proposed his Internet game, the Army was more than 6,000 recruits short of its quota of 74,500 new soldiers. Hence, the increase in perks, bonuses, showmanship and Internet presence.
The Armed Forces also poured money into its old-fashioned method of making the military look appealing through television advertising, which eats up hundreds of millions of dollars a year. When the Army launched its "Army of One" ad campaign several years ago, the first year's budget was $150 million.
The ads attempt to show how one person makes a large contribution to the overall picture. In one, a soldier struggles to the top of a snow-covered mountain, seemingly alone. The next scene shows other snow-suited soldiers who have followed his path to the summit.
The Air Force is running an ad geared more toward younger thrill-seekers: It shows a series of shots of youngsters performing extreme sports, then segues into an airborne F-22 jet. The words "We've been waiting for you" flash across the screen.
The efforts seem to be working -- for now, anyway. The Army, for instance, has made its recruiting quota for the last three years and is well ahead of the pace to meet its goal this year. But it's not cheap. The average cost of getting a single recruit to sign up is more than $11,000, and the four branches of the military require about 200,000 new members each year just to stay even. But that is a pittance compared to the days when the military was at full strength. The Army's recruiting goal for this year is 73,800. In 1983, it was 145,000.
With war with Iraq looming, the question of how the United States fills its military ranks has become a question of major debate.
That was highlighted last month when Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) announced he was preparing legislation to reinstate the draft because too large a burden of military service was being carried by the lower economic classes, adding that well-heeled legislators might reconsider sanctioning the war if they knew their own children might be pressed into service.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld added fuel to the debate by saying that draftees from the past had been terrible failures who were "sucked into the intake" of the military but added no value to it.
Rumsfeld later apologized for his remarks, but the battle was joined, and others have entered the fray. For one, former Navy Secretary John Lehman said today's military contains a kind of boring sameness, primarily because soldiers are recruited with the aim of having them spend a career in the military. His answer: Instead of concentrating on recruiting lifers, go for a diverse range of soldiers who can sign up for varying lengths of service.
Charles Moskos, a military expert from Northwestern University, said the American armed services are "understrength and overstretched" while recruiters are unable to attract a representative sample of the nation into uniform. Elvis Presley, he pointed out, was drafted at the pinnacle of his career, and there was no debate about whether he would serve.
"I was once talking to a bunch of military recruiters, and I asked them whether they'd rather have their budget tripled or have Chelsea Clinton enlist," Moskos recalled. "They unanimously chose Chelsea. You know who I'd draft first? Eminem."
Other factors have caused concern as well, including a little-noticed provision in a recently passed federal education law that requires high schools to hand over key data about their juniors and seniors -- names, addresses and phone numbers -- to military recruiters. Before its passage, such information was privileged, but now schools must comply or risk losing federal funding.
The face of military recruitment may change yet again with the so-called National Call to Service bill, which passed the Congress late last year and is part of the fiscal 2003 defense authorization bill.
The bill calls for military enlistments of as few as 18 months, instead of the four-year average. Marc Magee, director of the new Center for Civic Enterprise, a Washington think tank, said the shorter enlistments are a way for the military to attract a broader range of soldiers, including those bound for, or already attending, college.
The 18-month enlistment would be followed by two years of service in the reserves or one to two years of civilian service in the domestic Americorps or the Peace Corps.
Magee said the major question is how seriously the military will take the bill. Hearings on implementation begin next month.
"We anticipate there will be a pretty strong demand [by the public] if this gets advertised," he said. "We've gotten a sense from the military that this might be a token program, but we'd like to see something more robust than that."
Meanwhile, Wardynski said more than 840,000 gamers had made it through the "America's Army" basic training phase. A new version of the online game coming this spring will show how medics operate in crisis situations.
"It will be textbook-level quality," Wardynski said. "If you get through it, you'll know what to do in an emergency."