Jajuna

 As reported by the New York Times today, the U.S. Army has unveiled one of its newest recruitment tools. Nestled within the rows of faltering corporate retail at a Philadelphia mall can be found the new Army Experience Center. These high-tech $13 million dollar video arcades come complete with mock-up Black hawk helicopters with M4 carbine assault riffles, armored humvees with mounted 50 caliber guns, and Apache warships. Set within over 14,000 square feet of retail space, the Experience Center delivers its pro-Army message through the digital realism of huge flat screen televisions and thundering sound systems. 

According to the Times article, the experience centers have been contracted in an attempt to bolster recruitment in urban areas where enlistment numbers have been particularly hard hit in the wake of the Iraq war. One officer stationed at the center described it as “a learning lab for the military, a way for us to interact with kids and find out what they’re interested in”. While he claims that the centers represent nothing less than an innocent site for the marketing of the Army, the fact that the experience center in Philadelphia represents the formal consolidation of all five area recruitment stations into one, belies its aggressive agenda. Clearly, the logic is that urban youth, enticed by the free video games, may stick around long enough to check out the enlistment literature and to hear a sales pitch or two from recruitment officers.

This represents a new low in the U.S. Army’s public relations and enlistment tactics in the post- 9/11 era. The experience centers are the newest in a series of recruitment strategies unveiled by the Army in recent years aimed directly at children. These include new marketing promotions like the “Army Strong” campaign, home and internet video games, and a more robust online presence complete with music videos and other interactive media. What these strategies all have in common is a highly stylized and technologically mediated attempt to capture the imaginations of children, preying upon their desires for adventure, responsibility, and educational and occupational opportunity.

In the process these recruitment strategies purposefully hide the harsh realities of war and U.S Army life behind the cheap thrills of graphic violence and the empty heroism of patriotic theme music. Lost is any reference to the human suffering inflicted by U.S. imperialism either historically or in the disastrous and destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lost is any sense of the realities facing veterans as they are forced to wage shameful bureaucratic struggles in order to make good on the educational and medical benefits promised them. The fact that the new recruitment arcades have been concocted specifically to hook urban youth makes this lack of transparency just that much more appalling. In light of decades of public disinvestment, racial marginalization, and shrinking employment opportunities low-income urban youth face an especially challenging present-future. The dishonest and unethical recruitment practices embodied by the Army’s experience center add yet another unfortunate layer of social contempt these youth must negotiate.