Selling the service: veterans’ reflections on their past experience of the military recruitment process

ABSTRACT

Every year 180,000 young people are recruited to join the US military. The 1973 shift from the draft to an all-volunteer recruitment model, recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq employing the use of reserve troops, wavering public support of military deployments, and stories of recruiter indiscretion have led to a renewed examination of military recruitment. Despite abundant research into motivations for military enlistment, little qualitative research has explored the interaction of prospective service members and their recruiters. Further, despite emotionally charged accusations of recruiter deception, scant research exists related to the honesty of military recruiters. As a result, two questions remain relatively unexplored related to military recruitment: (1) how do veterans describe their past experience of the enlistment process, and (2) how do veterans describe the honesty of the recruiters who helped them enlist, and in many cases convinced them to enlist? The article analyses military recruiter training manuals and 45 interviews with recent military veterans to illuminate the military recruitment process. This paper reveals that the US military has enthusiastically embraced corporate marketing and sales techniques, and, in contrast to Defense Department reports, most veterans perceive that recruiters either lied or significantly stretched the truth in an effort to secure their enlistment.

KEYWORDS:

• military recruitment
• militarism
• military veterans
• military recruiters

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Interviewers sought to build rapport with interviewees in part through non-judgmental, sympathetic responses while encouraging elaboration and eliciting relevant personal narratives and insights.

2. The ASVAB has been criticized as a pseudo-scientific recruiting tool used to narrow the parameters of a potential enlistee’s vision of their future and shoehorn enlistees into a particular occupational specialty, while making it appear to be an inevitable choice given their existing knowledge and skills (Friesen 2014).

3. Marketers in the entertainment and fashion industries have two uses for conspicuously cool youth; each provides powerful leverage for their goals: (1) cool youth are studied ethnographically to gain insight into their generation’s ethos and style (market research/product development stage: ‘knowing your audience’/knowing ‘what kids [today] really want’, or it could be termed the corporate colonization of independent youth culture); and (2) cool youth help marketers tap into the ‘magic of peer-to-peer distribution’ as they become ‘walking infomercials’ for the brand: this occurs through hiring cool youth or showering cool youth with free product/‘promotional material’ which increases sales since they are trendsetters for their peers (Goodman 2001; Klein 2002, 80).

4. Of course, some interviewees required little persuasion, but they often considered multiple branches of the military and had to be persuaded by recruiters to settle on a particular branch and often to accept a particular occupational specialty.