Years of writing about public relations and propaganda has probably made me a bit jaded, but I was amazed nevertheless when I visited America’s Army, an online video game website sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). In its quest to find recruits, the military has literally turned war into entertainment.

“America’s Army” offers a range of games that kids can download or play online. Although the games are violent, with plenty of opportunities to shoot and blow things up, they avoid graphic images of death or other ugliness of war, offering instead a sanitized, Tom Clancy version of fantasy combat, such as in the one called Overmatch, promising “certain victory” (more or less the same overconfident message that helped lead us into Iraq).

Ubisoft, the company contracted to develop the DoD’s games, also sponsors the “Frag Dolls,” a real-world group of attractive, young women gamers who are paid to promote Ubisoft products. At a computer gaming conference earlier this year, the Frag Dolls were deployed as booth babes at the America’s Army demo, where they played the games and posed for photos and video (now available on the America’s Army website).

Non-virtual Realities
The babes-and-bullets fantasy world contrasts markedly with the experiences real soldiers face in Iraq. A report by the Pentagon’s own Mental Health Advisory Team, completed in January for the military, admitted that “there is a reduced propensity to join the military among today’s youth; ... older advisers to young Americans whose views on military service were shaped by the Vietnam War have become a chief obstacle to military recruiters.’’ In recent testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, U.S. Undersecretary for Defense David Chu, who is in charge of personnel recruitment for the military, lamented the failure of the media to report all the “positive successes” of the military along with the news of bombings and growing insurgency.

In reality, as Editor and Publisher magazine reported the day before Chu gave his testimony, the news media has actually been failing to report the horrors of war, as “few graphic images from Iraq make it to U.S. papers.” And as Newsweek war correspondent Joe Cochrane observed just three days before Chu’s testimony, one reason for the lack of positive news from Iraq is that reporters no longer dare venture out from Baghdad’s barricaded Green Zone And even inside the Green Zone, the situation is scarcely better: Cochrane says he has “always been something of an optimist” but reached his “breaking point” during his recent visit to Iraq, noting that “prior to April 2003, there were no suicide bombers in Baghdad, there was 24-hour electricity and people went out at night. Now, if you drive into town from the airport, there is a legitimate possibility you will get killed.”

School Monitors
Military officials have developed an elaborate PR strategy for outreach to schools. The following are samples from the army’s guidebook for high school recruiters, published in fall, 2004: “Be so helpful and so much a part of the school scene that you are in constant demand,” “Know your student influencers, ... class officers, newspaper and yearbook editors, and athletes,” “Coordinate with school officials to eat lunch in the school cafeteria several times each month,” “Deliver donuts and coffee for the faculty once a month,” “Get involved with the local Boy Scouts,” “Order personal presentation items (pens, bags, mousepads, mugs),” “Attend as many school holiday functions or assemblies as possible,” “Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday is in January. Black History Month is February. Wear your dress blues.”

Grand Theft Privacy
The Pentagon’s recruitment effort also entails massive information-gathering efforts aimed at both students and their parents. Under a little-publicized aspect of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” education program, the military has gained what the Chicago Tribune described as “unprecedented access to all high school directories of upperclassmen, a mother lode of information used for mass-mailing recruiting appeals and telephone solicitations. According to the Washington Post, these phone calls have been “angering some parents and school districts around the country.”

In addition, the Washington Post reported in June that the Pentagon contracted with BeNOW, a private marketing company, to “create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help identify potential recruits,” the largest repository of 16-to-25-year-old youth data in the country, containing roughly 30 million records, including ethnicity, email address, telephone, graduation date, and grade-point average.

Privacy rights groups have been sharply critical of the database. According to a joint statement by a coalition of eight privacy groups, it violates the Privacy Act, a law intended to reduce government collection of personal data on Americans. The database plan, they wrote, “proposes to ignore the law and its own regulations by collecting personal information from commercial data brokers and state registries rather than directly from individuals.”

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, one of the signers of the joint statement, noted that “The main commercial vendors that sell students’ data: American Student List and Student Marketing Group were both pursued recently by consumer protection authorities for setting up front groups that tricked students into revealing their personal information.”

You can help contribute to further research about the topics discussed in this story by contributing to SourceWatch <http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SourceWatch>, our wiki-based encylopedia about the people, issues and groups shaping the public agenda.


Sheldon Rampton works with the Center for Media and Democracy, http://www.prwatch.org, and is co-author of Banana Republicans, Weapons of Mass Deception, Trust Us, We’re Experts, Mad Cow USA and Toxic Sludge Is Good For You. Reprinted with permission from Counterpunch.


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