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August 22, 2004
Recruiting Games
There have been a number of articles lately on the tools the military uses to recruit. Military recruiting is a combination of aiming for the kids with limited opportunities in the job market, and creating a military “brand” that is appealing to that demographic. The latest article in the NY Times Magazine continues to explore how computer games have been used quite successfully to create a positive image of the military, to grab the attention of kids who at that age are very much into gaming, and also to provide a simulated, interesting environment that is implicitly promised to the recruit if he or she were to join.
I have also just finished reading “Jarhead” by Anthony Swofford, the memoir of a Marine who was stationed in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. The first thing that strikes the reader is how incredibly misleading army’s current recruiting slogan, “An Army of One,” really is. Swofford’s describes being treated like a cog in a machine, in spite of the fact that he is chosen to be part of an elite unit of snipers, which allows for a lot more utilization of individual skill. It’s just that when there is so much firepower on your side, and so little on theirs, all there is to do is to blow up the enemy from a distance while they rush to surrender. It’s all made very clear in one situation where his skills as a sniper could actually be used, Iraqi officers visible in a distant air command tower seemingly arguing about whether to surrender or not. But, Swofford’s superiors don’t give him permission to fire simply because the question isn’t whether the Americans will win or not, but who will get more combat lines in their service record. In that light, sniping isn’t efficient, Swofford explains:
I can’t help but assume that certain commanders, at the company level, don’t want to use us because they know that two snipers with two of the finest rifles in the world and a few hundred rounds between them will in a short time inflict severe and debilitating havoc on the enemy, causing the entire airfield to surrender. The captains want war, and they must know that the possibilities are dwindling. The captains want war just as badly as we do. And also, the same as us, the captains want no war, but here it is, and when you’re a captain with a company to command and two snipers want to take a dozen easy shots and try to call it a day, of course you tell them no, because you are the captain and you have a company of infantry and what you need is some war ink spilled on your Service Record Book.
Given the hierarchy and the rigidity common to many military environments, the whole machine is designed to crush individuality. But, of course, that doesn’t stop them from what should be called misleading branding because that’s the heart of the contradiction the military shares with the general culture: somehow, our human desire to be distinct is deftly transformed into desire to acquire homogenous products, follow mass fads, and participate in institutions that relate to us as if we were as interchangeable as a bottle of coke or “uniquely you” hair color products, also in a bottle. The army knew to move with the times and the cultural environment:
After the Army missed its quotas by over 6,000 enlistees in 1999, private-sector specialists were brought in to form the Army Marketing Brand Group. Leo Burnett, a top advertising agency that has also worked with McDonald's and Coca-Cola, developed a new Army advertising campaign that debuted in January 2001. The two-decades-old "Be All You Can Be" slogan was dropped in favor of "An Army of One," which aims to promote the dubious notion that the Army is a place where individualism can flourish.
Constructing a highly-organized, rigid, hierarchical, and very technically oriented structure is probably only way an institution could recruit from a pool that is the product of a very, very dysfunctional education system, mostly pick-up the kids that couldn’t grab a scholarship or a job, and still remain the supreme military machine in the world. There is a self-reinforcing logic there: technology allows for overwhelming firepower and both demands and allows for strict organizational control.
One thing the American public is not willing to face is casualties -- no matter how immoral the war, how disproportionate the number of victims on the other side, the argument against the war that seems to resonate with most people is that Americans will die. Now, let me be clear: this not a unique American moral weakness. This would be true for the almost all peoples of the world: that is, most people are overwhelmingly more concerned with whether or not people “on their side” will die than whether or not people on the “other side” will get killed. What is unique in the American case is the absolute imbalance between our and their ability to kill. In some sense, in previous wars even if you were mostly concerned with how many were killed on your side, your concern was intrinsically correlated with how many died on their side because those numbers moved together in some fashion.
With our increasing unilateral military might, there is an almost total disconnect between those two numbers and that’s partially what makes these wars so cruel. The number of Americans killed in the first Gulf War by enemy fire (as opposed to friendly fire) is about 148. The number of Iraqis killed is in the hundreds of thousands -- nobody knows for sure because nobody is counting although I can even find out the name and brief life story of each and every American killed by hostile action in the first and last Gulf war with a few minutes of googling.
So, naturally, the main priority of this military is force protection and minimizing casualties on this side. In other words, there is never any question whether or not the American military can win the military battle. The only questions to be decided are political: how few can we lose, and how many -and what kind- can we get away with killing? That’s what stopped them in Fallujah last April. Of course, they could have leveled the town and “won,” but killing tens of thousands of civilians wasn’t a strategically viable option at that point. They could take the town without killing that many civilians but that would require real urban combat, the kind that might cause maybe hundreds of American casualties. And that is absolutely unacceptable.
Perhaps part of the reason is that there is so much concern over military casualties is the collective guilt the American middle class must feel, knowing that they are the beneficiaries of an empire the footsoldiers of which are never their children. It’s obviously not moral squeamishness about casualties in a war, as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis weren’t much of a concern in the previous Gulf War -- although, there is a growing and welcome sensibility towards what are perceived as civilian casualties on the other side. I say perceived because who counts is a shifting definition. Neither civilians who die from indirect effects of our actions, for example from the sanctions, or the poor, barely armed conscripts on the other side who are thrown into military uniforms by dictators register as high in our consciousness as civilians killed by direct gunshots or bombs. The distaste over casualties on our side does not seem to result from a concern for the poor in this country either: after all, there is very little political will to improve their schools, their crumbling housing projects, their health-care options or their chances in life.
All of this ends up with the expected result: a trigger-happy military with overwhelming firepower. Trigger-happy because they are trained to kill, however many, in order to protect themselves as much as possible so as not to upset the folks back home watching the war on television, between commercials. And given the overwhelming firepower, they do kill many.
All of which leads to a problem for the military if it is to remain engaged in colonial missions. This kind of a military can defeat any force in the world. It can crush everything in its path. It can credibly threaten any other power with annihilation. It cannot, however, carry out an occupation that depends fundamentally on accommodation, which seems to be what the neo-imperialists were counting on. It simply cannot peacefully control an urban area, a population center, any country with the slightest resistance to their presence because their methods will turn that slight resistance into an uprising. The trainees aren’t taught to try to hold their fire when unsure, to try to befriend the locals, to try to isolate the insurgents. They are trained in very rigid operational modes where the rule is to shoot first, then duck and call-in air strikes.
Which brings me to an important consideration when evaluating the strategy the United States ended up carrying out in Iraq. I think it has to be discussed in light not just of the wishes of the planners but rather the nature of the tool, the military. (I also feel that a feeling of superiority, arrogance and strong racism towards non-Americans is and important part of this mix limiting the ability of U.S. military in running more friendly occupations, but that’s another long and complicated subject.) In other words, I don’t know if this is what they intended to do but I suspect that their choices are limited as long as the nature of the U.S. military and the U.S. public remain as they are.
In the latest New York Times article, there is a striking nugget of information which makes it obvious that the military is obviously aware of the problem:
In fact, the Army is now one of the industry's most innovative creators, hiring high-end programmers and designers from Silicon Valley and Hollywood to devise and refine its games. Some of these games are action-packed, like Full Spectrum Warrior. Others, like one that the military's Special Operations Command is currently designing to help recruits practice their Arabic, are less so. All the games, however, speak to the military's urgent need to train recruits for the new challenges of peacekeeping efforts in places like Iraq. Teaching someone to be an accurate shot is not particularly hard to do. Military trainers have learned that if you put someone through a week of intensive work with a point-and-shoot simulator (not unlike today's commercially available shoot-'em-up video games), he will be reasonably good with a rifle. Teaching judgment, however, is much harder than teaching hand-eye coordination. Today's military is in the market for games that train soldiers, in effect, how not to shoot -- how to avoid conflict whenever possible, to recognize danger and find a route around it. As a squad leader in Full Spectrum Warrior, you do not even carry a gun that fires, which makes it the first military-action video game in which the player never discharges a weapon.
Skipping over the revealing absurdity the author of the piece engages in by calling what’s going on in Iraq “peacekeeping,” it’s very striking to hear of a military-initiated game where the main player personally does not have a weapon to shoot --instead deploys people under his command to shoot and kill-- and the main environment is urban combat.
And that’s what the future holds for us if we are to remain a hyper-consumptive society in a world with decreasing resources, a world where we have to permanently occupy key resource regions of the world. That’s what Mike Davis is talking about when he refers to the Pentagon as the Global slumlord:
The battle of Fallujah, together with the conflicts unfolding in Shiia cities and Baghdad slums, are high-stakes tests, not just of U.S. policy in Iraq, but of Washington's ability to dominate what Pentagon planners consider the "key battlespace of the future" -- the Third World city.
As the NY Times article explains, that’s exactly the environment that the military tries to recreate in its virtual and real simulations: Middle Eastern cities reminiscent of Baghdad and installations set up like Iraqi villages:
In early 2003, he landed a $3.5 million, four-year contract from the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command to build a simulator geared to model warfare against insurgents in urban settings.... Forterra's designers also started erecting a Middle Eastern city reminiscent of Baghdad and before long had produced one square mile of tightly nested buildings, which Army soldiers all over the world could roam simultaneously.Kondrat's unit, a battalion, particularly needed to practice convoy maneuvers -- piloting a large number of vehicles down a road while keeping them safe. Kondrat said that he would like to take the battalion more often to one of the Army's desert outposts in California, where installations are set up like Iraqi villages, but that those resources, too, are now in high demand.
Is this to be the new world order?
Posted by zeynep at August 22, 2004 09:00 PM
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Comments
There are only so many tracks this record can be
played on:
http://www.countercurrents.org/us-tristam300703.htm
http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887
Posted by: sk at August 23, 2004 12:22 AM
the george orwell short story is great, and relevant.
sk, thanks.
Posted by: van at August 23, 2004 03:16 AM
The "kids with limited opportunities in the job market" target group now extends to adults in a variety of defunded social work professions. A friend of mine had worked for over ten years as an early childhood intervention specialist employed by the government to help young children with "special needs" and their families. She did diagnoses, prescribed therapies, performed physical therapy herself, connected families with social services, and counseled. Recently, with all the cuts to social services in the US, she was "let go," along with several of her coworkers, all of whom were those who had been there the longest and had the most experience. She applied for jobs all over the country and in Canada, got a few responses, but budget cuts were affecting all potential US employers and she's not a Canadian citizen so she was starting to worry. She found out that if she applied to do the same job under the aegis of the US military on one of their international bases, they would not only pay her salary but would pay all her living expenses (separate from her salary), pay for her move to and from the base, and move all her stuff for her. Lacking many other options (or so it seemed to her), she contacted them, was heavily recruited, applied, and accepted. She has since found out through professional networks that this is increasingly common among social work professionals. So as US tax money continues the Reaganite trend of being moved from non-military to military uses, social services may come to exist only within the military.
Posted by: deang at August 23, 2004 09:30 AM
Hopefully this comment won't be considered too off-topic, but while the subject of computer games and the Army's use of them has been brought up, I feel the need to say that not all computer/video games are endorsing the US military and its efforts to recruit people, nor are all gamers neo-conservatives who support the US worldwide hegemony. Yes, the Army has used computer/video games to further its own insidious recruiting efforts and make propaganda, but like any tool in life, computer/video games can be used for good or evil.
Let me point out some examples of how computer/video games have sometimes been used for purposes other than propaganda, and how gamers are increasingly becoming engaged in the debate of just how computer/video games are being used, and by whom.
One good example is the game Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. Yes, I know the first game in the series, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (just that, no addition), is as much propaganda as they come, with the primary antagonists being from former Soviet republics, evoking a sense of Cold War jingoism. But we see a reversal of sorts in the more recent sequel, Pandora Tomorrow, in that it's more intelligent storyline at least attempts to show the good and bad sides of the US government and military, as this article from the Village Voice points out (it can be found at http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0416/joysticks.php ):
"Pandora Tomorrow, the latest-greatest Tom Clancy fancy, set in 2006, actually infiltrates America's propaganda machine: Your aim, as Sam Fisher, is to sneak in and destroy secret documents after once-CIA-supported rebels seize the U.S. embassy in Jakarta — not save the world or even any of the dozens of hostages, the scenario suggested in ads for Rainbow Six 3. And when you end up in an exquisitely rendered Jerusalem, you'll meet an agent for Shin Bet, Israel's secret police, who the game's manual credits with handling 'the country's less savory intelligence-related tasks...' Aided by, and armed with, the cream of the military-industrial complex — yet facing entrenched, sophisticated enemies while short on good intel (hello, George Tenet!) — Fisher puts a scowling face on American might that not even Cheney can match."
If that's not enough to convince you that this game's not entirely propaganda, then here are some choice quotes from the game's script (these aren't ad verbatim since, being human, I can't recall everything perfectly; also note that Fisher is the character you play, Lambert and Brunton are your commanding officers in the game):
(A mission where you board a train to confront Norman Soth, a former CIA agent and a primary antagonist for the game.)
Lambert: Your first priority is to locate Soth. We need to know if he's still a US agent, or a terrorist.
Fisher: Those two aren't mutually exclusive, you know.
Lambert: Hippie...
(Immediately after a mission where you kill a female Israeli Shin Bet officer who previously assisted you in locating your mission objective.)
Fisher: Tell me what I just did, Lambert.
Lambert: The right thing. Hard work, but it had to be done.
Brunton: Shin Bet wasn't playing a straight game.
Fisher: Killing unarmed women seems awfully close to terrorism--
Lambert: Shut up, Fisher!
On the Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow web site, there are also character dossiers. The one for the Shin Bet officer you work with (and subsequently kill, and express remorse for) describes the Israeli Shin Bet agency like this:
"Shin Bet, the Israeli Secret Police, handles the country's less savory intelligence-related tasks, such as interrogations (torture), public relations (torture), and psyops (torture)."
There are more examples that are more poignant than the ones in this game, but for the purposes of saving time, I'll link to a couple of articles with game examples of diversity of speech beyond propaganda for the military:
Reason Magazine: Free Play - The Politics of the Video Game
http://www.reason.com/0404/fe.kp.free.shtml
PopMatters Multimedia Review: Legacy of Kain - Defiance
http://www.popmatters.com/multimedia/reviews/l/legacy-of-kain-defiance.shtml
Salon.com: Playing Games with Free Speech
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/05/06/games_as_speech/index.html
And, for good measure, an article showing the potential for computer/video games to be embraced by something other than corporate America to be used for any speech imaginable:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2002/12/23/indiegames.html
On the end of how gamers themselves are reacting to the co-optation of computer/video games for Army recruiting/propaganda purposes, there definitely is debate going on, and a lot of gamers are dealing with the issue, rather than burying their heads in the sand. Major online game publication GameSpy recently did an article about whether or not the setting of the Vietnam War would be an ethical setting to use in computer/video games:
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/500/500932p1.html
If desired, I can add more material later, but hopefully this is sufficient enough to prove my point. Right now, I gotta run, though.
Posted by: Phil at August 23, 2004 02:08 PM
Re: Medical involvement in abuse at Abu Grhaib:
This is horrifying.
It adds to my observations that the military desensitizes our ability to feel, to be civil.
But this takes it to new lows.
I fear for the future of our nation and our world if we cannot correct these terrible wrongs. I fear that not even the Holocaust of the Second World War will compare with this.
God help us.
Vote to boot Bush out. The involvement of dogs in the interrogations and the memos from the adminstration point to guilt at the highest levels of this Bush administration.
Posted by: Holly Berkowitz at August 23, 2004 05:12 PM
Michael Moore has a good clip about recruiting practices of the armed forces in Fahrenheit 9/11.
Posted by: Anthony Smith at August 24, 2004 12:15 AM