May-June 2005:
Building Counter-Recruitment
Raytheon, Merchant of Death
Caterpillar in Palestine
Argentina’s Recovered Factories
Elmer Maas, War Resister
Letters

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

Building a Vibrant Counter-Recruitment Movement

By Sally Heron

rmed Forces recruiters are desperate. Since February they have failed to meet their monthly quotas. The troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan are spread thin. The Army is extending the contracts of thousands of soldiers, forcing them to serve for longer than they thought they were committed to. The Pentagon needs ever-increasing numbers to fight the so-called War on Terror, and recruiters are scrambling to keep up.

Predictably, they are stepping up their efforts to target high school and college students. As the government redirects funds from public schools to the war, recruiters scurry to lure students, especially those who are falling through the cracks. They seduce youth with gadgets and games, lies and false promises. On May 3rd, The New York Times reported that nearly one in five U.S. Army recruiters was under investigation for committing “recruitment improprieties … offenses [varying] from threats and coercion to false promises that applicants would not be sent to Iraq.”

With each step the recruiters take, they are met with resistance.

“The counter-recruitment movement is growing by leaps and bounds,” says Joanne Sheehan of WRL’s New England office, “[as] people’s attitudes about the war are shifting.” That shift has brought a renewed relevance to the counter-recruitment movement as a powerful counterweight to the military’s invasion of high school and college campuses. Drawing on the strength of previous antiwar movements, counter-recruitment activists are finding original ways of fighting both military recruiting practices and old problems within the movement itself.

Roots of Counter-Recruitment
While the counter-recruitment movement is relatively young, it has deep roots in an antiwar tradition that stretches back at least a century. The conscientious objectors of the early 20th century and the anti-draft activists from the Vietnam War era helped lay the foundation for today’s counter-recruitment. Longtime WRL activist Matt Meyer points to the late 1970s as a critical time in the shifting of attitudes within the antiwar community.

“After the Vietnam War, activists refocused their attention,” he says. “We realized that soldiers are not our enemies. The war machine is our enemy.”

In the early 1980s, organizers for GI and veterans’ rights linked with draft resisters and conscientious objectors. This new antiwar alliance provided fresh insights into the functioning of the military machine. Notably, activists gained clarity from seeing how the army specifically targeted marginalized communities. “Counter-recruitment transformed the way the antiwar movement viewed the racist and classist nature of militarism—the way it targets some but not all youth,” Meyer says. Activists began talking about the “poverty draft” that results in poor and working-class people disproportionally enlisting in the Armed Forces. At the same time, youth of color and working-class youth demanded that their voices be heard within the movement. As those most affected by recruiting practices took a more central role, organizers shifted not just the priorities of the movement, but the way in which the organizing work occurred.

Resisting Recruiters
Spurred by falling enlistment, the Armed Forces are busy creating new methods for seducing prospective recruits. Armed with an annual budget of more than $3 billion, military recruiters are a formidable opponent of peace activists. But what the counter-recruitment movement lacks in money, it makes up for in creativity and effort. Students and their allies create diverse tactics of resistance that successfully compete with those of the military. Resistance is taking place everywhere: in high schools, on college campuses, in every community, all across the country.

“All youth issues are related to counter-recruitment,” says Sayde Tyson of the Youth Activists-Youth Allies Network, known as the YaYa Network. “It’s just a matter of making those connections.” As with most anti-recruitment organizations, the YaYa Network sees cooperating with other groups, both inside and outside the counter-recruitment movement, as a critical way to achieve its goals. In the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region, the network holds workshops in which students are encouraged to develop skills to start their own high school-based counter-recruitment clubs.

Sheehan, whose New England WRL office organized one of the region’s longest-running high school antiwar/counter- recruitment group, agrees that student clubs are an effective method of combating recruiters on campus. “This model works well,” she says. “These clubs can simultaneously educate students by debunking myths that recruiters tell, while giving students alternatives to enlisting with the military.” With parental and community support, the clubs build young people’s capacity for organizing and give them skills they can carry with them beyond high school. Local youth-led initiatives such as these are an invaluable part of building a sustainable, accountable counter-recruitment movement.

State-funded colleges are especially likely to be targeted by recruiters. For those students whose educations depend on state and federal funding, resisting the militarization of their campuses means risking access to affordable education. Despite these high stakes, students at public universities across the country are uniting to kick recruiters off their campuses. In March, police arrested students for demonstrating against recruiters at a career fair on the City College of New York campus. Students at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of California at Berkeley organized campaigns to evict military recruiter from their schools. In May, University of Hawai’i students occupied administrative buildings to protest the construction of an on-campus military center that would allow the army constant access to students. The recent national media coverage of these actions shows the successes of student-organized action against military recruiters.

WRL’s Youth and Counter-Militarism Program is working to link these local efforts on a national level. The program is involved in a number of national coalitions, organizations and projects. Many of the projects focus on providing high school and college students with the materials and resources needed for counter-recruitment organizing. These projects are central to strengthening the movement by denying the military access to students. Through the “Adopt-Your-High-School Project,” Iraq veterans return to their former high schools to give students a chance to hear the truth about recruitment, the military and war. “This project will provide soldiers returning from Iraq with a concrete opportunity to speak out against the war,” says program coordinator Steve Theberge. “At the same time it provides high school students with the opportunity to interact with young veterans from their communities.”

The Youth and Counter-Militarism Program’s Counter-Recruitment Organizing Manual, set to be released this fall, will provide youth activists with the tools they need to run an effective counter-military campaign on their high school or college campus. In addition to workshop curriculums, it will include sections on political and counter-recruitment education. Both the Adopt-Your-High-School Project and the Organizing Manual will be incorporated into the program’s new website, which will serve as a comprehensive resource for youth activists. The website will be a place for finding and sharing materials, for networking and for increasing youth involvement in the counter-recruitment movement.

Where To Now?
As the counter-recruitment movement works to stop the militarization of youth, its challenge is to resist military recruiters while keeping an eye on the future. How can it make this movement a sustainable one?

Counter-recruiters need allies. “Making new connections requires consistency,” says Sheehan. “It’s the key to real outreach.” Because most sustainable organizing happens on the grassroots level, counter-recruitment activists need to evaluate their untapped community resources. The threat of official draft reinstatement and policies such as the No Child Left Behind Act (which requires that public schools give recruiters students’ home addresses and telephone numbers) are generating anger among parents, as well as students. Activists can use this as an opportunity to increase awareness about counter-recruitment organizing.

Counter-recruitment activists need to continue strengthening national networks. Through cooperation, activists can share resources, ideas and successful counter-recruitment strategies. WRL’s upcoming Youth and Counter-Militarism Program web site will help to reach this goal. Coalition building will not only make counter-recruitment strategies more effective, but it will infuse new energy into the movement.

Finally, the counter-recruitment movement needs to resolve to fight inequality internally. Building an anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-ageist movement is one of the largest challenges facing counter-recruiters today. The June 2004 National Network for Opposing the Militarization of Youth conference in Philadelphia (see NVA, July-August 2004) was a critical step in this process. The Youth Caucus took control of the floor and demanded that the network be more accountable to youth, people of color, and queer folks. The network agreed. “By the end of the conference, many of the groups that could have members on the steering committee were asking young people in the group if they wanted to be a representative,” wrote Angie Hart, the WRL representative at the conference. “It was a victory for young people in the counter-military recruitment movement.”

It was an internal victory that has helped give the movement the strength it needs to achieve its goals. It achieves those goals every time a prospective recruit decides not to enlist, every time students organize to kick recruiters off their campus. As the counter-recruitment movement strengthens, it will continue to mount new challenges to the war machine.

Sally Heron is the Spring 2005 Freeman Intern at WRL.