The US military is embedded in the gaming world. Its target: teen recruits

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/14/us-military-recruiting-video-games-targeting-teenagers

by bookofjoe • 2 years ago

30 89 2 years ago

This is bad but not in the way most people consider. The US military has contributed to popular media since about the time I was born to get young people interested in military service, so nothing new there. What has changed most over the decades is lifestyle choice.

People exercise less and focus less. The result is artificially induced ADHD and more physically fragile people less capable of completing initial entry training without severe or catastrophic muscle/bone injuries. Initial entry training is never meant to be that physically challenging, it’s not special forces selection.

In the very near future only a tiny percentage of the American population will be capable of serving in the military due to fitness limitations mentally, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. That will become the new elite: something that money and late preparation cannot restore.

seanhunter2• 2 years ago

Do you have a reference for the notion that lifestyle choice is artificially inducing ADHD? I'm interested to learn more.

lukas0992• 2 years ago

Yeah, from my understanding ADHD is something you have from the moment you're born to the moment you die.

test65544• 2 years ago

I didn’t realize ADHD was like duckface…

micromacrofoot• 2 years ago

Eh it’s not like being a navy seal is some glamorous elite status so I find that hard to imagine, plus people who are unfit for the military already have an alternative that gives them more power for less effort: policing.

drakenot• 2 years ago

Is there real evidence of people becoming more fragile?

Tons of young people still play sports and are physically active. Maybe it is just the bubble I live in, but kids who are on even rec leagues from 5 years old on are engaged in organized sport activity multiple nights a week.

austin-cheney7• 2 years ago

Yes. This is something the military tracks.

badrabbit3• 2 years ago

Unpopular opinion: there should either be mandatory military service (or physically intensive alternatives for conscientous objectors) or a life long military tax for people who don't volunteer to join the military before 25. Not just the issues you described but a lot of social issues rooted in americans not being able to relate with each other or understand each other will be solved.

tdb7893• 2 years ago

Having met a lot of people who have been in the military (including my dad and grandpa and a few other people in my extended family) I don't think military people were any better at relating to or understanding people. For me that's been people I know who are teachers but that's likely because of the sort of people that go into that profession.

silverquiet8• 2 years ago

I've seen this sort of thing mentioned but I wonder, where does it leave people like me who had a childhood disability (Perthes disease - look it up, it's a disqualifying condition in the military's medical standards)? I get to be disabled for life and have to pay a tax for it?

batch122• 2 years ago

I think some kind of mandatory service to one's community could be worth discussing. I don't agree with a lifelong penalty for a onetime choice.

rightbyte3• 2 years ago

How about making people care about their fellow citizen and believing in the future of their society instead of scheming to fool people into the military?

What sane person would join the military after all these pointless, lost, immoral, BS wars?

Adress the root problem instead. And it is not the youth being lazy.

jowea7• 2 years ago

What's the advantage of doing this instead of just taxing everyone and paying a salary to soldiers?

delta_p_delta_x• 2 years ago

there should either be mandatory military service (or physically intensive alternatives for conscientous objectors) or a life long military tax for people who don't volunteer to join the military before 25

Served in a country with conscription. It is deeply unpopular here, at least amongst the men. Only men need serve which holds them back as women start university and their careers two years earlier. The pay sucks, and there are many less well-off men who have to moonlight, at risk of being court-martialled and set to military prison. The commitment doesn't end there: men can and will be called back annually for ten years after leaving full-time conscription for two to three weeks of reservist training, which disrupts their civilian work. There are negligible benefits for reservists, and conscripts don't get the respect that American veterans and servicemen seem to.

Conscript armies work very differently to volunteer armies; you should be wary of what you're asking for.

soared2• 2 years ago

I have a few friends who deeply regret their time in the military as it’s let to lifelong physical and mental health issues. I don’t think forcing people to potentially endure that is a good idea.

(One was on a nuclear sub, not sure the others)

maxglute2• 2 years ago

I think Americans are already paying for life long military tax. Maybe people who serve don't have to pay for defense portion of tax.

SamoyedFurFluff• 2 years ago

The struggle with getting people into the military has very little to do with anything you just talked about. Educational capacity of the public schooling system that feeds the army is also down(states are not investing in public education), single parents are forced to give up guardianship if their kids want to enter the army, you can’t do weed but you can drink, etc.

giantg23• 2 years ago

It does if you dig a little deeper. You have a pool of jobs that require some level of all the mentioned skills/attributes. That pool contains some for civilian positions and for the military. If the candidate pool is shrinking for both, you have increased competition. Civilian positions will pay more because they can, and they generally require less recruiting due to the better conditions. The military needs to ramp up recruiting, increase waivers, etc to meet the same force requirements.

It's all inter-related. The main cause is a lower eligible pool of candidates, due to many different issues.

mightyham2• 2 years ago

I hate to be the one who asks for sources, but you really do need to have some solid data to make claims like "In the very near future only a tiny percentage of the American population will be capable of serving". While my experience is anecdotal, your evaluation does not mesh with it at all, which is that people in the military, even officers, are pretty average or less than average in intelligence, and the PT requirements for the army are completely achievable for a normal person with a couple months of training.

If you've ever interacted with veterans, it's pretty laughable that they are going to "become the new elite". The elite in America has been and will continue to be people who go to ivy league schools for business, finance, or law and then find jobs in wall street, banks, media, and government.

jowea7• 2 years ago

Very quick search

A new study from the Pentagon shows that 77% of young Americans would not qualify for military service without a waiver due to being overweight, using drugs or having mental and physical health problems.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...

PaywallBuster• 2 years ago

obesity is an easy one, almost a 1/4 population would not qualify

The United States has the 12th highest obesity rate in the world at 36.2%

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-r...

jowea7• 2 years ago

So what you're saying is that the US military should advertise in games that you should stop gaming and go play outside?

test65544• 2 years ago

Or that the US military should stock up on that new (impossible to get) weight loss drug. Offer it as an incentive for joining up.

LinuxBender• 2 years ago

Adding to this the military was recognizing this issue prior to 2012 and I can't imagine the situation has improved outside of the military. [1] In my opinion the video is worth a watch even to those using a cellphone.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWN13pKVp9s [video][16m][ted talk with Lieutenant General Mark Hertling]

xethos2• 2 years ago

Concerningly, his data for obesity ends at 2009, and is followed by a prediction for 2030. Overlaid with this data is the tagline "By 2030 [...] the U.S. government projects 42 precent obesity nation wide".

The CDC shows an obesity prevalence of 41.9%... in 2017-2020 [0]. Meaning a concerning national security threat (per the video) that is accelerating. There are dozens of factors, but I'd be remiss not to put at least one foot on the soapbox and say that a car-centric culture only exacerbates the issue.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

giantg23• 2 years ago

You have to ramp up your recruiting if your recruiting pool has shrunk (birth rate drop, BMI issues, substance use increase, etc). That's been happening for decades.

sandworm101• 2 years ago

> fitness limitations mentally, physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

Maybe in the air force or army. I was unaware that the navy had intellectual limitations.

As for physical fitness, few in the military are the door-kicking navy seal types. Most jobs are sitting at computers or fixing equipment. The American military focus on physical fitness looks great on posters, but many other countries chuckle a little. The modern battlefield requires deep technical skills more than good abs. US soldiers are also very young, most leaving before even ten years of active service.

newsclues• 2 years ago

Like not every role is a door kicker, there are some navy jobs done by smart people and others done by less academics minded people, but the navy has some of the best electronics warfare specialists and lots of nuclear engineers.

The military knows just because you sit at a desk, physical fitness still matters for optimal performance, and many office jobs have secondary duties in emergency that are physically demanding, like fire fighting.

FirmwareBurner3• 2 years ago

People exercise less and focus less. The result is artificially induced ADHD and more physically fragile people less capable of completing initial entry training without severe or catastrophic muscle/bone injuries.

Young recruits are too physically unfit, have mental health issues, and take too many drugs, which is why WW3 with China will have to be held in Palworld.

petre2• 2 years ago

The alternative is remotely operated mechs, not necessarily the walking type, just like in the 1995 Screamers movie. China has quite enough people it can draft.

lupusreal2• 2 years ago

They were in high schools handing out free CDs for the America's Army computer game twenty years ago.

wildrhythms• 2 years ago

America's Army was wild. An online FPS PvP game where you only ever play as the 'good guys'. It swaps the enemy models to always appear as insurgents so you're never shooting at, or being shot at by, American soldiers.

giantg23• 2 years ago

A lot of games do this sort of thing now. Even in Halo you're always the blue team (as if blue/red teams were ever politically controversial).

Havoc• 2 years ago

Interesting - didn't play it long but never realised

yogorenapan• 2 years ago

This reminds me of the movie “The 5th Wave” (2016)

the military have used deception and technology to convince the rescued children that the humans outside the base have been possessed. They provide military training to the children, forming them into squads to go on kill missions outside the base. Meanwhile, the military was in fact run by the aliens

ryandrake• 2 years ago

It really was wild, and I think the fact that it didn't really have commercial goals allowed the developers to experiment with some pretty "out there" ideas[1] for FPS games. When I first heard of AA and imagined the US Government making a video game, I thought it was going to be kind of inauthentic, like "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?" But it actually didn't turn out to be too bad, when compared with FPS games of the time. Kind of an Operation Flashpoint but even more realistic. It was definitely not CounterStrike though and ultimately those kind of FPSs won.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/snp85x/comment/hw4mk...

rightbyte3• 2 years ago

Oh forgot about that one. "AA Online" or something.

As I remember it was a kinda boring and ugly game? Compared to say Counter Strike.

polynomial• 2 years ago

Orson Scott Card has entered the chat.

maroonblazer• 2 years ago

> If the military’s recruiting efforts are successful, these kids and teens will end up applying the skills they honed while playing games they love to warfare – piloting drones to kill from afar, for example.

If the people they kill are our enemies, who are also trying to kill us, then isn't this a good thing?

I never served in the military and lean pretty far left politically, but I'm always surprised by how some circles portray the military as a caricature of senseless killing.

If some actor decides they want to force their way of life on me and my fellow citizens by military force, then the best and only response to that is a strong military.

silverquiet8• 2 years ago

That seems reasonable, but my only real experience with someone depriving me of my livelihood is private equity companies that have come in and shipped my job off overseas. Certainly the military didn't help me there.

whythre• 2 years ago

What. That isn’t the role of the military. This is like complaining that the local police failed to prevent your company from downsizing.

Plenty to criticize about how or what the military is doing, but this ain’t it, chief.

soared2• 2 years ago

The idea is that no actor has ever tried to force their way of life on Americans. We’ve been attack on home soil a tiny number of times.

jowea7• 2 years ago

First, there are a lot of people who really are pacifist or pacifist leaning.

And even for the rest, for the large number of people living in countries that haven't been invaded in living memory, I don't think they think of the military like that. In the US case, I assume people will think of what the military has actually done in the last few decades, i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan, and maybe some smaller things like ISIS, Yemen, Libya etc.

By the way, what game teaches any sort of militarily applicable skill? There's no regenerating health in the real world and officers don't lead with right clicks.

maxglute2• 2 years ago

Maybe propagandize/recruit more women. 60% of university enrollment female, 25% STEM. If you want bodies for technical military roles, there's your recruitment bottleneck.

seanhunter2• 2 years ago

Military recruitment always makes me think of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--CmZEJl9bI

The US military is embedded in the gaming world. Its target: teen recruits

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