Military Recruiting in the United States – a book by Pat Elder

A must read for those concerned with the increasingly heavy presence of military recruiters in our schools and at community events. This should be particularly interesting to parents of school-age youth, who are offered minimal information on how much the military is targeting their students.

Military recruiting is sure to become more aggressive, for two reasons:

• President Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to increase the number of people in uniform, and
• The economy is improving slowly, which means more civilian job opportunities and fewer prospects for military recruiters.

An excerpt from the book website:

Military Recruiting in the United States, a new book by Pat Elder, provides a fearless and penetrating description of the deceptive practices of the U.S. military as it recruits American youth into the armed forces. The long-time antiwar activist exposes the underworld of American military recruiting in this explosive and consequential book. The book describes how recruiters manage to convince youth to enlist. It details a sophisticated psy-ops campaign directed at children.

A review of Elder’s book (by Bart Bolger of VFP Corvallis) at Amazon:

As a 24-year military veteran and member of Veterans For Peace, I found a calling to do counter recruiting work at local high schools. I have my own personal views on the application of military forces and the form of their existence. But my concern with military recruiting has always been the lack of information with which students and their parents are expected to make a life-changing decision, that of joining the military.
Potential enlistees need facts and they are not getting them from recruiters nor the PR campaign the Pentagon employs to sell its product.
Pat Elder explains why. He has done an amazing job of documenting the facts on the military recruiting system and applicable laws and federal policy. This book provides a wealth of resources and strategies for dealing with the well-oiled recruiting machine. Mr. Elder’s citations are well researched and very useful as a guide for even the most experienced counter recruiter. I learned a lot from this book and plan to put it to use as we reformulate our local approach to counter recruiting.
Parents of high schoolers need to know that the Pentagon consciously conspires to abridge student privacy (as a means of enriching the recruiter’s contact data), misleads the public and school administrators, and even risks public health (see the chapter on lead residue from shooting ranges) in order to obtain sufficient numbers of new recruits.
I also highly recommend this book for high school guidance counselors and school administrators.

See our Truth in Recruiting links in the menu bar above for more info and please contact us if you would like to help with our local Corvallis-Albany TiR project.