Military Recruiting Quotes

All our silver goes to luxury, to the military, to making lace and weapons when there are people dying of simple things these bars could fix. It’s not right that you recruit students from other countries to work your translation centre and that their motherlands receive nothing in return.

The reason for the shaved heads and plain olive drab uniforms when you are recruited into the military is to immediately begin training “you”, the individual, to think as “us” the team.

LADY REPORTER: Are you in favor of Motherhood, Lord Ragelle? DEFENSE MINISTER: I am sternly opposed to it, Madam. It exerts a malign influence on youth, particularly upon young recruits. The military services would have superior soldiers if our fighting men had not been corrupted by Motherhood.

It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than by ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military recruits rather than rounded citizens. There was formal pedagogy, in which children sat at rows of desks in front of standing teachers, rather than, say, walking around together in the ancient Greek fashion. There was the set school day, punctuated by the ringing of bells. There was a predetermined syllabus, rather than open-ended learning. There was the habit of doing several subjects in one day, rather than sticking to one subject for more than a day. These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.

In 1927 the Army had forbidden the recruitment of Nazis in the 100,000-man Reichswehr and even banned their employment as civilians in the arsenals and supply depots. But by the beginning of 1930 it became obvious that Nazi propaganda was making headway in the Army, especially among the younger officers, many of whom were attracted not only by Hitler’s fanatical nationalism but by the prospects he held out for an Army restored to its old glory and size in which there would be opportunities, now denied them in such a small military force, to advance to higher rank.

It is hard to determine what is most disturbing about this book—the devious and immoral tactics used by leaders and recruiters to get women to join the military, the terrible poverty and personal violence women were escaping that lead them to be vulnerable to such manipulation, the raping and harassing of women soldiers by their superiors and comrades once they got to Iraq, or the untreated homelessness, illnesses and madness that have haunted women since they came home. The Lonely Soldier is an important book, a crucial accounting of the shameful war on women who gave their bodies, lives and souls for their country.

TEAMWORK: Mr. Mason is a team player, capable of stepping up to leadership roles if required. High school sports: making life easier for military recruiters since 1914.

The Army's new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure... but don't worry, we're not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn't some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf.

The recruiters came and talked with us in school, and I remember it like yesterday. I wasn't interested. I told them I wanted to do something good. I told them I wanted to help people. I told them I couldn't do it, told them I wasn't interested. But they told me that there was no better way to do good and help people. They told me they helped people all the time. Doing good was what they were about. Plus they were going to pay me. Where else could I get paid for helping people? Plus they would pay for my college. Plus, in addition to helping people, and paying me, and paying for my college, they would teach me a skill. I would be helping people, and seeing the world, and earning money, and having college paid for, and learning a skill that I could use later to earn money and help people. In the end, it was a pretty easy decision.

Once, carefully, they rode around a company of marching pike men, recruits on their way to being exported to other lords’ wars. Like Drovo, Pen thought. He wondered how many would ever march home. Better it seemed to export cheese or cloth, but it was true that fortunes were made in the military trade. Though seldom by the soldiers, any more than by the cheeses.

The strategy of Fabius was not merely an evasion of battle to gain time, but calculated for its effect on the morale of the enemy-and, still more, for its effect on their potential allies. It was thus primarily a matter of war-policy, or grand strategy. Fabius recognized Hannibal's military superiority too well to risk a military decision. While seeking to avoid this, he aimed by military pin-pricks to wear down the invaders' endurance and, coincidentally, prevent their strength being recruited from the Italian cities or their Carthaginian base. The key condition of the strategy by which this grand strategy was carried out was that the Roman army should keep always to the hills, so as to nullify Hannibal's decisive superiority in cavalry. Thus this phase became a duel between the Hannibalic and the Fabian forms of the indirect approach.

I ain’t no hero. I never thought of being one. When I was young, I didn’t dream about being a police or fireman. I never considered joining the military, even after 9-11 when so many others my age flocked to the recruiter’s office.

And when I started at NYU and I met all those kids right out of undergrad, I thought, Hell, yeah, I’m a fucking Marine. Some of them, highly educated kids at a top five law school, didn’t even know what the Marine Corps did. (“It’s like a stronger Army, right?”) Few of them followed the wars at all, and most subscribed to a “It’s a terrible mess, so let’s not think about it too much” way of thinking. Then there were the political kids, who had definite opinions and were my least favorite to talk to. A lot of these overlapped with the insufferable public interest crowd, who hated the war, couldn’t see why anybody’d ever do corporate law, didn’t understand why anyone would ever join the military, didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to own a gun, let alone fire one, but who still paid lip service to the idea that I deserved some sort of respect and that I was, in an imprecise way that was clearly related to action movies and recruiting commercials, far more “hard-core” than your average civilian. So sure, I was a Marine. At the very least, I wasn’t them.

Under the protection of U.S. occupation authorities, the Police, courts, military, security agencies, and bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served the former fascist regimes or by their ideological recruits—as is true to this day. The perpetrators of the Holocaust murdered six million Jews, half a million Gypsies, thou-sands of homosexuals, several million Ukranians, Russians, Poles, and others, and got away with it—in good part because the very people who were supposed to investigate these crimes were them-selves complicit.

Adam Lashinsky explained how Amazon. com had gone on a “military hiring spree” because Jeff was impressed with veterans’ logistical know-how and bias for action.3 In fact, Amazon.com has a dedicated military recruiting website and a highly consistent hiring and retention record for ex-military personnel. This practice of hiring veterans isn’t about expressing gratitude for ex-soldiers’ service to our country. Veterans fit Jeff’s business model. As a result, Amazon.com has not bothered to launch a huge PR campaign about its military employment program. Jeff just realized it was good business.

Adopting and extending the existing system of mamluk recruitment, he purchased thousands of young male slaves, drawn from Kipchak Turkish and, later, Caucasian stock. These boys were trained and indoctrinated as mamluk troops, and then at the age of eighteen freed to serve their masters within the Mamluk sultanate. This approach created a constantly self-rejuvenating military force–what one modern historian has called a ‘one-generation nobility’–because children born of mamluks were not regarded as being part of the martial elite, although they were permitted to enrol in the army’s second-tier halqa reserves.

the Signal Corps recruited U.S. switchboard operators who were bilingual in English and French and loaded them into ships bound for Europe. Known as the “Hello Girls,” these were the first American women other than nurses to be sent by the U.S. military into harm’s way. The officers whose calls they connected often prefaced their conversations by saying, “Thank Heaven you’re here!

His description of the many arms which the Roman soldier was required to become expert in reminds one of the almost innumerable duties of the present day infantryman. Recruits were to be hardened so as to be able to march twenty miles in half a summer's day at ordinary step and twenty-four miles at quick step. It was the ancient regulation that practice marches of this distance must be made three times a month.

Far less well known is that more than ten thousand women traveled to Washington, D.C., to lend their minds and their hard-won educations to the war effort. The recruitment of these American women—and the fact that women were behind some of the most significant individual code-breaking triumphs of the war—was one of the best-kept secrets of the conflict. The military and strategic importance of their work was enormous.

The current demonization of Russia will be used, and is indeed being used"..."to justify unjust wars that destroy the lives of poor people abroad; to sacrifice the lives of our poor, who are largely recruited into the armed force for economic reasons; to deplete this country's rich resources on the continental build-up of our over-bloated military to the detriment of much-needed infrastructure and social spending; and to greatly increase our carbon foot print.

But even when the names of Black fighters did not survive, stories of their exploits did. Half a century later, José Antonio Aponte, a free Black carpenter and the grandson of one of the Black militiamen who defended Havana against the British, painted pictures precisely of scenes like this, of Black troops taking British men prisoner, of military encampments guarded by Black soldiers. Indeed, Aponte would use those pictures to recruit Black men to a major conspiracy against slavery.

On 20 March 1982, on the occasion of the Iranian new year, Khomeini announced that ‘as a special favour’ schoolboys between the ages of 12 and 18 years would be allowed to join the Basij and to fight for their country. Consequently scores of youths volunteered for action and were hastily recruited and provided with ‘Passports to Paradise’, as the admission forms were called. They were then given rudimentary military training, of a week or so, by the Pasdaran, and sent to the front where many of them ‘martyred’ themselves.

During the 1950s, American cold warriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained, and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support for the government; anything to make the commies look bad.

The Irish recruits who poured into the army in 1846 were already accustomed to the realities of antebellum American nativism. The country had been rocked by anti-Catholic riots even before the famine produced new waves of Irish immigrants; in Boston, Protestant mobs had burned a convent in 1834, and Philadelphia had seen mob attacks on Irishmen ten years later. So the recent immigrants who enlisted for war with Mexico weren’t surprised to encounter nativists in the army. They were very much surprised, though, by the intensity of the anti-Irish sentiment they faced from their officers—a social sentiment that was expressed through official discipline.

Hard military power will remain crucial, but if its use is perceived as unjust, such as at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, then hard power undercuts the soft power needed to win the minds of mainstream Muslims and creates more new terrorists than are destroyed. For example, a leading terrorism expert concludes that anti-Americanism was exacerbated by the war in Iraq and the U.S. failure to tailor strategies for key countries. International jihadist groups increased their membership and carried out twice as many attacks in the three years after 2001 as before it.38 Similarly, the former head of Britain’s MI5 intelligence service told the commission investigating the origins of the Iraq War that the war had increased, rather than decreased, terrorists’ success at recruitment.

While military life was demanding, my efforts paid off. Many people say that to do something difficult and worthwhile, they need to be “motivated.” Or that the reason they are not sticking to their goals is because they “lack motivation.” But the military taught me that people don’t need motivation; they need self-discipline. Motivation is just a feeling. Self-discipline is: “I’m going to do this regardless of how I feel.” Seldom do people relish doing something hard. Often, what divides successful from unsuccessful people is doing what you don’t feel motivated to do. Back in basic training, our instructor announced that there are only two reasons new recruits don’t fulfill their duties: “Either you don’t know what’s expected of you, or you don’t care to do it. That’s it.

Hispanics are half as likely to enlist in the military as either whites or blacks. The recruit-to-population ratio for whites is 1.06. For blacks it is 1.08. For Hispanics, it’s only 0.65. The media not only neglect to highlight this particular underrepresentation, they lie about it. An article published by the Population Reference Bureau—subsidized by taxpayers—is titled: “Latinos Claim Larger Share of U.S. Military Personnel.” To the untrained eye, this would seem to be saying that Latinos claim a larger share of U.S. military personnel. In fact, however, by “larger share,” the headline means “larger” compared with the past—not compared with other groups. The actual article admits that Hispanics constitute less than 12 percent of all enlistees, compared with 16 percent of the civilian workforce. Moreover, despite their machismo culture, a majority of Hispanic troops are women.15

BEACH BALLS AND LONG SHOTS I WAS WATCHING FROM THE ROOF ONE AFTERNOON WHEN A group of roughly sixteen fully armed insurgents emerged from cover. They were wearing full body armor and were heavily geared. (We found out later that they were Tunisians, apparently recruited by one of the militant groups to fight against Americans in Iraq.) Not unusual at all, except for the fact that they were also carrying four very large and colorful beach balls. I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing—they split up into groups and got into the water, four men per beach ball. Then, using the beach balls to keep them afloat, they began paddling across. It was my job not to let that happen, but that didn’t necessarily mean I had to shoot each one of them. Hell, I had to conserve ammo for future engagements. I shot the first beach ball. The four men began flailing for the other three balls. Snap. I shot beach ball number two. It was kind of fun.

In the nineteenth century, scientists described brains and minds as if they were steam engines. Why steam engines? Because that was the leading technology of the day, which powered trains, ships and factories, so when humans tried to explain life, they assumed it must work according to analogous principles. Mind and body are made of pipes, cylinders, valves and pistons that build and release pressure, thereby producing movements and actions. Such thinking had a deep influence even on Freudian psychology, which is why much of our psychological jargon is still replete with concepts borrowed from mechanical engineering. Consider, for example, the following Freudian argument: ‘Armies harness the sex drive to fuel military aggression. The army recruits young men just when their sexual drive is at its peak. The army limits the soldiers’ opportunities of actually having sex and releasing all that pressure, which consequently accumulates inside them. The army then redirects this pent-up pressure and allows it to be released in the form of military aggression.’ This is exactly how a steam engine works.

As people turned away, Kestrel saw a clear path to Irex, tall and black-clad in the center of the space marked for the duel. He smiled at her, and Kestrel was so thrown out of herself that she didn’t know her father had arrived until she felt his hand on her shoulder. He was dusty and smelled of horse. “Father,” she said, and would have tucked herself into his arms. He checked her. “This isn’t the time.” She flushed. “General Trajan,” Ronan said cheerfully. “So glad you could come. Benix, do I see the Raul twins over there, in the front, closest to the dueling ground? No, you blind bat. There, right next to Lady Faris. Why don’t we watch the match with them? You, too, Jess. We need your feminine presence so we can pretend that we’re only interested in the twins because you’d like to chat about feathered hats.” Jess squeezed Kestrel’s hand, and the three of them would have left immediately had the general not stopped them. “Thank you,” he said. Kestrel’s friends dropped their merry act, which Jess wasn’t performing well anyway. The general focused on Ronan, sizing him up like he would a new recruit. Then he did something rare. He gave a nod of approval. The corner of Ronan’s mouth lifted in a small, worried smile as he led the others away. Kestrel’s father faced her squarely. When she bit her lip, he said, “Now is not the time to show any weakness.” “I know.” He checked the straps on her forearms, at her hips, and against her calves, tugging the leather that secured six small knives to her body. “Keep your distance from Irex,” he said, his voice low, though the people nearest to them had withdrawn to give some privacy--a deference to the general. “Your best bet is to keep this to a contest of thrown knives. You can dodge his, throw your own, and might even get first blood. Make him empty his sheaths. If you both lose all six Needles, the duel is a draw.” He straightened her jacket. “Don’t let this turn into hand-to-hand combat.” The general had sat next to her at the spring tournament. He had seen Irex fight and directly afterward had tried to enlist him in the military. “I want you to be at the front of the crowd,” Kestrel said. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else.” A small crease appeared between her father’s brows. “Don’t let him get close.” Kestrel nodded, though she had no intention of taking his advice. She walked through the throngs of people to meet Irex.

[Wilford] Woodruff met with three members of the Young family: Elder [Brigham] Young [Jr.]; his brother, Major Willard Young; and their nephew, Captain Richard W. Young. . . . 'The apostle was chastised for speaking without authorization and was told not to oppose the enlistment of Mormon volunteers.' . . . That same day, the First Presidency sent out several other letters that explained the Church's stance on members enlisting in the armed services. First, a letter was sent to Governor Heber M. Wells. In that letter, the presidency explained that the Church was against war and that its responsibility was to proclaim peace. Yet in the current circumstances they also felt it their duty to support the war effort. Next, President George Q. Cannon wrote a letter to all of the stake presidents of the Church. President Cannon instructed these leaders not to impede the work of recruitment among their members. Conversely, they were to encourage the enlistment of Latter-day Saint soldiers for the conflict. By sending their message out on several fronts, Church members no longer had to guess at the Church's position on the war. . . . Once the Church had put forward its stance on the war, members of the Church joined the army in great numbers. . . . The Church demonstrated in a remarkable way that service in the military during wartime was in the veins of its people. To all fair observers, it was clear that Latter-day Saints could be counted on to stand by their nation. Since then, the Church has never looked back.

Jamie used the time away from me to do some soul-searching. She finally also did something she’d thought about for a long time. She walked into an Army recruitment office in Nashville and joined the military. She didn’t discuss it with me beforehand. Instead she called and said, “I’m joining the Army. It’s active duty and I’m going to be a truck driver with an airborne contract.” Shocked, I blurted out, “You’re going to do what? No you’re not.” “What do you mean? I’m gonna be a truck driver in a convoy.” I knew she was referring to a seventies country song she likes. Only this wasn’t a country song, this was real life. “Are you crazy? This is not a game. You will hate being a truck driver. You don’t even know if you’ll like being in the military. Go National Guard or Reserves and see if you like it.” “They said I’m already in. Basic is not for another few months but I’m in and I can’t change it.” “Yes you can. You are not in yet. You are not in the military. That was just a recruiter telling you that. Why aren’t you going in as an officer? You have a degree. You can make more money.” She seemed annoyed that I was raining on her parade, but I think it was also dawning on her that maybe I was right and she hadn’t done the research. “They told me that it’s not really that much more.” I explained to her, “They are lying to you. It is a lot more.” I had no problem with her joining the military. If that’s what she wanted to do, I supported it. But I was going to make sure she made the smartest moves she could make if that was in fact what she wanted to do with her life. I certainly wasn’t going to let her be talked into a lower-paid, higher-risk job.

All of us sit here at this conference and feel secure in our belief that we live in an era beyond this kind of…authoritarian regime change; but what sort of political climate do you think could potentially break apart our current stasis and deliver us back in time, so to speak? Thank you, I am gratified there has been so much interest in our little project. Gilead Studies languished for many years, I suppose those who had lived through those times did not want them resurrected for various reasons including what might have been done to them and what they themselves might have done. But at this distance, we can allow ourselves some perspective. It’s fortunate that is the last question as my voice is giving out. As to your question, in times of peace and plenty, it is hard to remember the conditions that have led to authoritarian regime changes in the past. And it is even harder to suppose that we ourselves would ever make such choices or allow them to be made. But when there is a perfect storm and collapse of the established order is in the works precipitated by environmental stresses that lead to food shortages, economic factors such as unrest due to unemployment, a social structure that is top heavy with too much wealth being concentrated among too few, then scapegoats are sought and blamed, fear is rampant, and there is pressure to trade what we think of as liberty for what we think of as safety. And, when the birth rate of any society is low enough to create an aging shrinking population, then commercial and military authorities will become alarmed. Their customer base and their recruitment base will be in jeopardy and there will be extreme pressure on women of childbearing age to make up the population deficit, thus our handmaid and her tale.

In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members." A number of these scientists were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death. The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.

On my next weekend without the kids I went to Nashville to visit her. We had a great weekend. On Monday morning she kissed me goodbye and left for work. I would drive home while she was at work. Only I didn’t go straight home. I went and paid her recruiting officer a little visit. I walked in wearing shorts and a T-shirt so my injuries were fully visible. The two recruiters couldn’t hide the surprise on their faces. I clearly looked like an injured veteran. Not their typical visitor. “I’m here about Jamie Boyd,” I said. One of the recruiters stood up and said, “Yes, I’m working with Jamie Boyd. How can I help you?” I walked to the center of the room between him and the female recruiter who was still seated at her desk and said, “Jamie Boyd is not going to be active duty. She is not going to be a truck driver. She wants to change her MOS and you’re not going to treat her like some high school student. She has a degree. She is a young professional and you will treat her as such.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir. We hold ourselves to a higher standard. We’ll do better. I’m sorry,” he stammered. “You convinced her she can’t change anything. That’s a lie. It’s paperwork. Make it happen.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir.” That afternoon Jamie had an appointment at the recruitment center anyway for more paperwork. Afterward, she called me, and as soon as I answered, without even a hello, she said, “What have you done?” “How were they acting?” I asked, sounding really pleased with myself. “Like I can have whatever I want,” she answered. “You’re welcome. Find a better job.” She wasn’t mad about it. She just laughed and said, “You’re crazy.” “I will always protect you. You were getting screwed over. And I’m sorry you didn’t know about it, but you wouldn’t have let me go if I had told you ahead of time.” “You’re right, but I’m glad you did.” Jamie ended up choosing MP, military police, as her MOS because they offered her a huge signing bonus. We made our reunion official and she quit her job in Nashville to move back to Birmingham. She had a while before basic training, so she moved back in with me. We were both very happy, and as it turned out, some very big changes were about to happen beyond basic training.

Although some scientists questioned the validity of these studies, others went along willingly. People from a wide range of disciplines were recruited, including psychics, physicists, and computer scientists, to investigate a variety of unorthodox projects: experimenting with mind-altering drugs such as LSD, asking psychics to locate the position of Soviet submarines patrolling the deep oceans, etc. In one sad incident, a U.S. Army scientist was secretly given LSD. According to some reports, he became so violently disoriented that he committed suicide by jumping out a window. Most of these experiments were justified on the grounds that the Soviets were already ahead of us in terms of mind control. The U.S. Senate was briefed in another secret report that the Soviets were experimenting with beaming microwave radiation directly into the brains of test subjects. Rather than denouncing the act, the United States saw “great potential for development into a system for disorienting or disrupting the behavior pattern of military or diplomatic personnel.” The U.S. Army even claimed that it might be able to beam entire words and speeches into the minds of the enemy: “One decoy and deception concept … is to remotely create noise in the heads of personnel by exposing them to low power, pulsed microwaves.… By proper choice of pulse characteristics, intelligible speech may be created.… Thus, it may be possible to ‘talk’ to selected adversaries in a fashion that would be most disturbing to them,” the report said. Unfortunately, none of these experiments was peer-reviewed, so millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on projects like this one, which most likely violated the laws of physics, since the human brain cannot receive microwave radiation and, more important, does not have the ability to decode microwave messages. Dr. Steve Rose, a biologist at the Open University, has called this far-fetched scheme a “neuro-scientific impossibility.” But for all the millions of dollars spent on these “black projects,” apparently not a single piece of reliable science emerged. The use of mind-altering drugs did, in fact, create disorientation and even panic among the subjects who were tested, but the Pentagon failed to accomplish the key goal: control of the conscious mind of another person. Also, according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, brainwashing by the communists had little long-term effect. Most of the American troops who denounced the United States during the Korean War reverted back to their normal personalities soon after being released. In addition, studies done on people who have been brainwashed by certain cults also show that they revert back to their normal personality after leaving the cult. So it seems that, in the long run, one’s basic personality is not affected by brainwashing.

told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

The best way not to have to use your military power is to make sure that power is visible. When people know that we will use force if necessary and that we really mean it, we’ll be treated differently. With respect. Right now, no one believes us because we’ve been so weak with our approach to military policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. Building up our military is cheap when you consider the alternative. We’re buying peace and we’re locking in our national security. Right now we are in bad shape militarily. We’re decreasing the size of our forces and we’re not giving them the best equipment. Recruiting the best people has fallen off, and we can’t get the people we have trained to the level they need to be. There are a lot of questions about the state of our nuclear weapons. When I read reports of what is going on, I’m shocked. It’s no wonder nobody respects us. It’s no surprise that we never win. Spending money on our military is also smart business. Who do people think build our airplanes and ships, and all the equipment that our troops should have? American workers, that’s who. So building up our military also makes economic sense because it allows us to put real money into the system and put thousands of people back to work. There is another way to pay to modernize our military forces. If other countries are depending on us to protect them, shouldn’t they be willing to make sure we have the capability to do it? Shouldn’t they be willing to pay for the servicemen and servicewomen and the equipment we’re providing? Depending on the price of oil, Saudi Arabia earns somewhere between half a billion and a billion dollars every day. They wouldn’t exist, let alone have that wealth, without our protection. We get nothing from them. Nothing. We defend Germany. We defend Japan. We defend South Korea. These are powerful and wealthy countries. We get nothing from them. It’s time to change all that. It’s time to win again. We’ve got 28,500 wonderful American soldiers on South Korea’s border with North Korea. They’re in harm’s way every single day. They’re the only thing that is protecting South Korea. And what do we get from South Korea for it? They sell us products—at a nice profit. They compete with us. We spent two trillion dollars doing whatever we did in Iraq. I still don’t know why we did it, but we did. Iraq is sitting on an ocean of oil. Is it out of line to suggest that they should contribute to their own future? And after the blood and the money we spent trying to bring some semblance of stability to the Iraqi people, maybe they should be willing to make sure we can rebuild the army that fought for them. When Kuwait was attacked by Saddam Hussein, all the wealthy Kuwaitis ran to Paris. They didn’t just rent suites—they took up whole buildings, entire hotels. They lived like kings while their country was occupied. Who did they turn to for help? Who else? Uncle Sucker. That’s us. We

Every man, by refusing to take part personally in military service, either as a recruit or as a payer of taxes to the government, which uses these taxes for military matters, by this refusal in the most efficacious manner does a great service to God and men.

In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members." A number of these scientist were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death. The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.

68. Cheerfulness In Adversity The Royal Marine Commandos, with whom I worked a lot in my military days, have the phrase ‘Cheerfulness in Adversity’ as one of their founding principles - and it is a great one to live by. It is easy to be cheerful when everything is going like a song, but the real time to be cheerful is when everything is going dead wrong! I remember in the North African desert once, when we were training with the French Foreign Legionnaires, that we had a particularly unpleasant night. The corporals took shifts to ensure that we were woken up every 15 minutes until down. They would burst in and throw our kit all around and out of the windows, turn the beds upside down, empty the lockers into the desert sand, only to do it all over again as soon as we had tidied up. It was a real ball-breaker of a night. But I will never forget one of the recruits, Bobby. At 4:30 a.m., during our darkest, most exhausting hour, when the corporals were in full swing and we had been up all night in the face of this mindless, sleep-defying beasting, Bobby looked at us, smiled and said: ‘Breakfast is comin’!’ There was something about the way he said it, with a wry grin as he set about retrieving his pile of kit from the rafters of the barrack block, that lifted all our spirits like nothing you could imagine. From then on, whenever something has got really tough, I say to myself: ‘Don’t worry- breakfast is comin’!’ And it always makes me smile. You see, Bobby knew that when it gets hard we all have two responses to choose from: to moan, or to put our heads down, smile and get on with it.

People are innately prepared to act as members of tribes, but culture tells us how to recognize who belongs to our tribes, what schedules of aid, praise, and punishment are due to tribal fellows, and how the tribe is to deal with other tribes — allies, enemies, and clients. […] Contemporary human societies differ drastically from the societies in which our social instincts evolved. Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies were likely comparatively small, egalitarian, and lacking in powerful institutionalized leadership. […] To evolve largescale, complex social systems, cultural evolutionary processes, driven by cultural group selection, takes advantage of whatever support these instincts offer. […] cultural evolution must cope with a psychology evolved for life in quite different sorts of societies. Appropriate larger scale institutions must regulate the constant pressure from smaller-groups (coalitions, cabals, cliques), to subvert the large-group favoring rules. To do this cultural evolution often makes use of “work arounds” — mobilizing tribal instincts for new purposes. For example, large national and international (e.g. great religions) institutions develop ideologies of symbolically marked inclusion that often fairly successfully engage the tribal instincts on a much larger scale. Military and religious organizations (e.g., Catholic Church), for example, dress recruits in identical clothing (and haircuts) loaded with symbolic markings, and then subdivide them into small groups with whom they eat and engage in long-term repeated interaction. Such work-arounds are often awkward compromises […] Complex societies are, in effect, grand natural social-psychological experiments that stringently test the limits of our innate dispositions to cooperate.

All along the path into the village we encountered rebel militiamen – barefooted, wearing ragged uniforms, carrying rifles and bandoliers. They were obviously locals recruited from surrounding villages. This was rebel territory, and men like these, who seemed to flit in and out of the bush like shadows, dispersing at will, were the very foundation of the revolution. It was this shadowy existence that allowed them to survive incursions by the military. The women were no different: they milled around us, full of curiosity, babies in one arm and a rifle on the other. Their needs were simple. They were men and women who had spent their lives surviving in the forest and who knew that environment better than anyone else. They needed very little to flourish there, and could subsist on berries and whatever small creatures the forest floor offered. Because families like these endured incessant harassment and even bombardment from military forces, they were able to cope with extreme hardship. They owned nothing, except what they could roll into a small bundle and carry with them. [265]

In retirement, Adams mused that if Burr had become a brigadier general in 1798, it might have tethered him to the Federalists and assured his own reelection in 1800. Indeed, Adams was right in one respect: Washington blundered by recruiting only Federalists to top military positions, while Adams had wished to include two Republicans—Burr and Frederick Muhlenberg—as brigadiers. Had the army taken on a more bipartisan complexion, it might well have been more popular.

Max had been actively recruited by the CIA for years before she was even eighteen, but Charlie had put the kibosh on that. Unsure of what her big sister had done to discourage that interest—the CIA was not an organization that was usually put off by an easily stressed eighteen-year-old who loathed her father and had been fired from Dairy Queen once because she’d put a mouthy patron in a headlock—Max came to realize that organizations like the CIA, the FBI, or the military weren’t for her. They were too regimented. Too cautious. You had to take orders. Max hated taking orders from anyone but Charlie.

Page 178-179: It was not only unnecessary but imprudent to recruit Burmese [during the time Burma was part of the British Empire]. There could be little reliance on troops raised from among a people with no divisions of caste but united in religion, race and national sentiment … Obviously security required that the Burmese should be disarmed and debarred from military service. The Karens and other minor tribes, however, might be expected to side with the British, and these have been recruited, even when an initial reluctance had to be dispelled, but it has always been easy to find reasons for withholding military training, even as volunteer cadets, from the great mass of the people.

Free blacks and white abolitionists in the Union hailed the actions of Frémont and Hunter as gains for human freedom and brilliant strokes of military strategy. So did many of the Union’s substantial contingent of German-born troops. For them the American Civil War was an extension of a larger, international struggle against oppressive social and political institutions, a war that some of them had already fought (and lost) in Europe during the failed democratic revolutions of 1848. In their eyes, Frémont’s militant policy represented the right way to pursue the fight for freedom.24 Kindred sentiments were common among Union soldiers recruited in Kansas. Many of them were veterans of the already years-long guerrilla war there. Now serving in Tennessee, they continued to advise slaves to flee from their masters, and they welcomed into their camps those who did.25

Prannoy Roy was appointing sons, daughters, in-laws, nephews and nieces of top officials and politicians in NDTV as journalists.  This show of nepotism in journalism changed the style of journalism as access to corridors of power became easy for media houses. Not only bureaucrats, several kith and kin and siblings of top police and military officials too became journalists in NDTV, as and when the organization needed largesse from the system.  This unholy recruitment of journalists completely changed the character of India’s journalism. In those days the joke in Delhi was that all siblings of the powerful, not-so-good-in-academics can become journalists through NDTV. Still, when you look at the family details of many journalists in NDTV, you can see their links with IAS, IPS, IRS, Military top brass uncles, fathers, and in- laws.

Apart from glory, the advantage to be gained by success was as much economic as political. For in antiquity there was no clear distinction between military and economic activity. How could there be? Part of the point of warfare and conquest was enslavement of the enemy. War was also the recruitment of labour. Little wonder, therefore, that labour was seen as dishonourable. It was associated with defeat and permanent social inferiority. Inevitably, such

he also had been trained in the ultimate military sense: You trained a recruit to train a weapon, to aim the weapon correctly.

Generation Z wants their calling to be unique to them. Stanford Researcher Roberta Katz analyzed millions of snippets of Gen Z online speech in a project called iGen Corpus. One of her main discoveries is that Gen Z emphasizes finding unique identities.

The following day, I went to see Ho-chol. I’d decided to take him back home with me to Hamhung City. I told him how I’d tried to get him signed up at the recruitment center, but to no avail. His best chance would be to get away for a while and lie low until they forgot about him. Some young men wearing military uniforms stood in front of the station as we waited to board the train. They were new recruits, smiling and holding hands with their parents, looking very content with themselves. Some of them were taking souvenir photographs. I could picture the inscription, THE DAY OUR SON JOINED THE MILITARY. A happy memory. My son began to weep, but not tears of joy. The sight of him brought tears to my eyes as well. “Father! Please don’t cry too! You’ve done so much for me ever since I was born. I know that, and people in the village have told me as well. You’ve made it through so many hard times; I know you did everything you could.” At that, I broke down completely. I hugged him and started sobbing loudly, even though the station was full of people. The new recruits started walking proudly onto the platform. Suddenly, I had an idea. I told my son to get on the same train. I thought that maybe he could get swept along with them and end up in training with them. It also struck me that I might never see him again. I wanted to take a photograph with him, but of course that was impossible. I gave him ten won. It was all I had. “Look after yourself. I think the police will forget about you after a while, so try to make the best of it until then,” I said.

Salah al-Din returned the government of Egypt to stability and prosperity. He brought Egyptians back to the orthodox Sunni Muslim faith and made Cairo an important centre of Arab and Islamic learning and culture. Perhaps his most important innovation was that, in reorganising the army, Salah al-Din combined military recruitment with a reform in the system of taxation.

If the military knew about vampires, and it knew about a few of the other less conventional brands of humanity, too, then what was the big plot? They obviously weren’t trying to recruit us, which was sort of a shame. I imagined a full unit of vampire soldiers and I got a little giddy, and distracted. Bad idea, maybe. But it’d be epic, wouldn’t it?

Such was the pattern employed by the Romans during their centuries of conquest: first, recruit the ablest soldiers from recently pacified local populations overawed by the legionaries’ size, military prowess, technology, and literacy; second, teach the new troops not only to fight but also to read and write Latin (or, in the East, Greek); and last, employ these intellectually and physically impressive specimens to conquer, pacify, overawe, and recruit adjoining peoples.

Baron Steuben, well schooled in the iron régime of Frederick the Great, came over from Prussia, joined Washington at Valley Forge, and day after day drilled and manœuvered the men, laughing and cursing as he turned raw countrymen into regular soldiers. From France came young Lafayette and the stern De Kalb, from Poland came Pulaski and Kosciusko;—all acquainted with the arts of war as waged in Europe and fitted for leadership as well as teaching. Lafayette came early, in 1776, in a ship of his own, accompanied by several officers of wide experience, and remained loyally throughout the war sharing the hardships of American army life. Pulaski fell at the siege of Savannah and De Kalb at Camden. Kosciusko survived the American war to defend in vain the independence of his native land. To these distinguished foreigners, who freely threw in their lot with American revolutionary fortunes, was due much of that spirit and discipline which fitted raw recruits and temperamental militiamen to cope with a military power of the first rank. The Soldiers.—As far as the British soldiers were concerned their annals are short and simple. The regulars from the standing army who were sent over at the opening of the contest, the recruits drummed up by special efforts at home, and the thousands of Hessians bought outright by King George presented few problems of management to the British officers. These common soldiers were far away from home and enlisted for the war. Nearly all of them were well disciplined and many of them experienced in actual campaigns. The armies of King George fought bravely, as

Jason Bourne was the name of someone in American military intelligence—a traitor who was shot dead for his crime. When the present Bourne was recruited into Treadstone he was given the name of the dead man.

Most of them [the soldiers—Warriors in New Pentagon Speak—of the all-volunteer military] come from small towns in the South or the rustbelt of the Midwest or the big city ghettoes. Many are following a family heritage of military service that has made veterans of past wars a relatively privileged class, enjoying special access to higher education, jobs, and a nationwide system of socialized medicine. But so many of them are so very young, enticed or strong-armed by smartly uniformed recruiters who work the corridors and classrooms of America's most impoverished and thoroughly militarized high schools. So many are badly educated, knowing nothing of the world and how it operates. So many are immigrants, risking their lives for a fast track to citizenship. So many are poor and short on promise. So many have such a slim chance of another job, another line of work [like the one who tells the author "where else can I get a job doing the stuff I love? . . . Shootin' people. Blowin' shit up. It's fuckin' fun. I fuckin' love it."], let alone a decent wage or a promotion. And because the Pentagon lowered standards to fill the ranks of the volunteer army, so many are high school dropouts, or gangbangers, or neo-Nazi white supremacists, or drug addicts, or convicted felons with violent crimes on their record. In just three years following the invasion of Iraq, the military issued free passes—so called "moral waivers"—to one of every five recruits, including more than 58,000 convicted drug users and 1,605 with "serious" felony convictions for offenses including rape, kidnapping, and murder. When the number of free passes rose in the fourth year, the Pentagon changed the label to "conduct waiver.

The military could get by with fewer recruits because more in the ranks reenlisted. The quality of the volunteers turned out to be good, because the services insisted on drug-free high-school graduates with clean criminal records, criteria that ruled out 70 percent of American youth. (There is an unfortunate message in that statistic.) Smarter, tougher, and willing, volunteers trained and worked to their limits.

Those who boast about honor shouldn't lack in it.

The fascist Falangist or clerical Carlist militia and other volunteers of the right could at any time have been disciplined by the military authorities that underwrote public order from the beginning. Not only did this not happen, but instead the military actively recruited thousands of civilian vigilantes to carry out a dirty war.11

Well, the KGB wanted to take down a few countries around the world, without a whole lot of military action. So, with my money, they recruited a bunch of men and women to bear children, who would eventually take down those countries. They’re all set to ascend to power at around the same time, which includes you, Gary. Before all of you ascend to power though, I will introduce economic problems to the various stock markets and banks around the world. I will make sure whichever ruling power that’s in control, will be blamed for the economic collapses. This will bring you, and the others, into power. All that we have aimed for, which is complete and total control over the world, will be accomplished.

Once upon a time, the job of the recruiter was to entice potential recruits into signing up for service by emphasizing the benefits and downplaying the drawbacks of military service, but that is no longer the case. Now they hardly talk about benefits at all. Everybody knows you’ll get fed and that there’s a real bank account and a certificate of service if you make it through your enlistment term. Now they try to discourage as many people as possible from signing up by describing all the drawbacks of service. I have no doubt that there’s a monthly quota for turning away people before they sign an application for enlistment.

Civil-military relations in modern America are characterized more by paradox than by consistency: ordinary Americans support the military more than ever but know less about it than ever. In Washington, senior government policymakers simultaneously overestimate the military’s capabilities and mistrust the military leadership. The US military is widely viewed as the strongest military in the history of the world, but military leaders view conventional military tools as less and less useful for dealing with the complex security threats we face today. Meanwhile, although the military itself is more professional than ever, its internal structures—from recruiting, training, and education to personnel policies—lag badly behind those in most civilian workplaces, making it difficult for the military to change from within. These paradoxes both reflect and contribute to an underlying conundrum. In today’s world, where security challenges increasingly stem from nonstate actors, the cyber domain, the diffuse effects of climate change, and similar nontraditional sources, it is growing ever more difficult to clearly define the US military’s role and mission. We no longer have a coherent basis for distinguishing between war and “not war,” or between military force and other forms of coercion and manipulation. In such a context, we no longer know what kind of military we need, or how to draw sensible lines between civilian and military tasks and roles.

Your eyes having a nervous breakdown? Do you not know what to do? Well-guess what!” He stomps to the left of the recruit, pushing the recruit’s head into his until their cheeks meld together. He points out in front of them both. “I don’t care if some monkey is rippin’ your eyeballs out with rusty nails! YOU STARE UP FRONT AT ATTENTION! RIGHT THERE! IS THAT CLEAR!

In China recruitment operations against foreign nationals include diplomats and government officials as targets as well as academics, journalists, and businesspersons. The MSS recruits these people to conduct espionage against their home government, to influence events overseas on behalf of the PRC, or to provide business intelligence and restricted technology. The MSS and China’s Military Intelligence Department (MID) invite foreign scholars to lecture or attend conferences in the PRC under the guise of research associations or universities. All expenses for the visiting lecturer and his or her family frequently are paid for by the intelligence services. The visiting specialist is subjected to a demanding itinerary of lectures, meetings, travel, and social engagements. The purpose of this rigorous schedule is to wear down the prospective recruit’s physical and mental stamina. The visitor is encouraged to partake of alcohol as much as circumstances permit. The subject is then more approachable concerning personal and confidential matters. 2

The moral panic about supposedly unpatriotic educators was driven by international war hysteria combined with agitation over the growing domestic political strength of teachers unions. In 1917 and 1918, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which sought to ban public speech and actions “disloyal” to the United States military and government, especially among socialists, communists, pacifists, immigrants, and other groups perceived as affiliated with European leftism. More than any other force, the American Legion, a veterans’ organization, pushed this ethos of unquestioning patriotism onto the nation’s public schools. The Legion was influential: 16 U.S. senators and 130 congressmen identified as members. It promoted the idea that the Communist Party in Moscow actively recruited American teachers in order to enlist them in brainwashing the nation’s youth. The Legion saw all left-of-center political activity as unacceptably anti-American.

Too often we label things “good” or “bad” when the right designation might merely be “different.” The Israeli military needed people who could analyze satellite images for threats. They needed soldiers who had amazing visual skills, wouldn’t get bored looking at the same place all day long, and could notice subtle changes. Not an easy task. But the IDF’s Visual Intelligence Division found the perfect recruits in the most unlikely of places. They began recruiting people with autism. While autistics may struggle with personal interaction, many excel at visual tasks, like puzzles. And they’ve proven themselves a great asset in their nation’s defense.

Book him, Danno,” Julie quipped.

Essentially those with an external locus think the outside world controls their destiny, and that they are almost powerless to change their fate. No Zer says outright, “I feel as though there is an external locus of control over my life.” Instead, the thinking develops on a much deeper level due to the struggles currently enveloping society. One small example of this is McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey, which shows generation Z’s financial trepidation. Nearly 23% of the ~25,000 respondents queried say they don’t expect ever to retire. Only 41% ever hope to own a home15

he

Remind me never, ever to get into an eating competition with a seven-foot weretiger again, she groaned.

God hurts when people are starving because of human greed enacted by political leaders. God hurts when people are scapegoated and “othered” by governments and then put into concentration camps, bombed into oblivion, or sanctioned into horrific poverty. God hurts when racism is at the core of lawmaking and law enforcement. God hurts when LGBTQIA people, all of whom are beautiful expressions of divine creativity, are targeted for harassment, violence, and being denied the same rights that heterosexual people are given. God hurts every time a new recruit signs up for the military, because the military is always used to kill other children of God. God hurts when God’s creation is destroyed and pillaged to generate profits with no regard to the sanctity of God’s creation and the life it contains. God hurts when his children forget to love their neighbors as themselves by putting profits over people instead of enacting laws that would protect humanity and foster human thriving, such as universal health care and universal basic income would. God hurts when people accumulate vast wealth, while billions of God’s children struggle to live without basic necessities. God hurts when people like Donald Trump blaspheme saying that only he can prevent Joe Biden from hurting God. God hurts when people of faith defend the actions of and offer support to a man like Donald Trump who brazenly admitted to being a sexual predator, has a multi-decades long history of racism, and whose utter narcissism and lack of empathy has fueled his many cruel policy decisions.

Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Page 178-179: It was not only unnecessary but imprudent to recruit Burmese [during the time Burma was part of the British Empire]. There could be little reliance on troops raised from among a people with no divisions of caste but united in religion, race and national sentiment … Obviously security required that the Burmese should be disarmed and debarred from military service. The Karens and other minor tribes, however, might be expected to side with the British, and these have been recruited, even when an initial reluctance had to be dispelled, but it has always been easy to find reasons for withholding military training, even as volunteer cadets, from the great mass of the people.

A document that is widely misunderstood, Lincoln’s proclamation was a military strategy with multiple aims. It prevented European countries from supporting the Confederacy by framing the war in moral terms and making it explicitly about slavery, something Lincoln had previously backed away from. As a result, France and Britain, which had contemplated supporting the Confederacy, ultimately refused to do so because of both countries’ anti-slavery positions. The proclamation allowed the Union Army to recruit Black soldiers (nearly two hundred thousand would fight for the Union Army by the war’s end), and it also threatened to disrupt the South’s social order, which depended on the work and caste position of enslaved people. The Emancipation Proclamation was not the sweeping, all-encompassing document that it is often remembered as. It applied only to the eleven Confederate states and did not include the border states that had remained loyal to the US, where it was still legal to own enslaved people. Despite the order of the proclamation, Texas was one of the Confederate states that ignored what it demanded. And even though many enslaved

Religions teach; that one does not question God. Military recruits are taught; not to reason or question orders Like slaves would be severely punished for disobeying their masters Depriving anyone of their free will is mad. Any system stripping one from having an opinion Is controlling one's minds through coercive Manipulation

Since the fall of Kiev in 1240, the western lands of Galicia and Volhynia had served as the stage for major developments in Ukrainian history. However, by the end of the i6th century, the focus of events shifted back to the east, to the lands of the Dnieper basin that had long been partially depopulated. In that vast frontier, which at that time was specifically referred to as Ukraina - the land on the periphery of the civilized world - the age-old struggle of the sedentary population against the nomads flared up with renewed intensity, fueled by the bitter confrontation between Christianity and Islam. The oppressive conditions that obtained in the settled western areas provided numerous recruits who preferred the dangers of frontier life to serfdom. As a result, a new class of Cossack-frontiersmen emerged. Initially, the Cossacks concentrated on pushing back the Tatars, thereby opening up the frontier to colonization. But as they honed their military and organizational skills and won ever more impressive victories against the Tatars and their Ottoman Turkish over lords, Ukrainian society came to perceive the Cossacks not only as champions against the Muslim threat, but also as defenders against the religion, national and socioeconomic oppression of the Polish szlachta. Gradually, moving to the forefront of Ukrainian society, the Cossacks became heavily involved in the resolution of these central issues in Ukrainian life and, for the next several centuries, provided Ukrainian society with the leadership it had lost as a result of the Polonization of the Ukrainian nobility.

A review of China-linked espionage cases of all kinds in the US between 2000 and early 2019, carried out by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tallied 137 reported instances. It found that 57 per cent of actors were ‘Chinese military or government employees’, 36 per cent were ‘private Chinese citizens’, and 7 per cent were ‘non-Chinese actors (usually US persons)’.29 (A study of all cases of economic espionage in the US between 2009 and 2015 found that 52 per cent of those charged were of Chinese heritage, a tripling of the percentage for the period 1997 to 2009.30) It’s possible that the high proportion of Chinese-heritage spies is due to racial bias in the FBI and Department of Justice. But rather than a sharp rise of anti-Chinese racism in federal agencies, a more plausible explanation is that Beijing has stepped up its program of industrial espionage in the US and has recruited Chinese visitors to America, and Chinese-Americans, to commit the crimes.31 Even so, the number of people of non-Chinese heritage induced to spy for China appears to be rising.

The khateeb reiterates that his role is vital and positions himself as the spiritual teacher of the recruits. This position is belied somewhat by my earlier description of my encounter with him and his superiors, an impression strengthened by my conversation with other senior army officers. A retired infantry general shared with me how he had confronted the khateeb’s influence in the barracks while he was in services. A particular khateeb under his command during the Kargil war was asked to go to a post nearer the combat zone to motivate the troops. The cleric refused on the grounds that certain requirements of jihad29 had not been fulfilled, so he could not support the effort. “I summoned him and told him, ‘You talk of jihad; God will decide what is jihad. This is a war zone, and I am ordering a district court martial of you, and I will ensure that you are put before a firing squad right over here in front of my office.’” He then had him posted out of the area with immediate effect. The khateeb is told here that he is in no position to adjudicate what jihad is, the implication being that the military, in this case the commanding officer, has the right to adjudicate this over and above religious authority, whose only role is to motivate troops in the name of jihad as and when ordered by the military officer. The khateeb is a spiritual guide, then, with no real official authority, an army person but not regular army personnel. He is a “harmless” person yet one who must be monitored, as evidenced by the colonel’s initial reluctance to let me talk to him. As another retired infantry general jokingly put it, “He [the khateeb] is uneducated but very motivating.” Much like his soldier-class contemporaries, he is regarded by the officer class as somewhat uncouth but nonetheless essential for the training center. He has the specific task of motivating troops and acting as a religious mascot to lend credence to the militarism project. 265/378

The black American missionary George Washington Williams, visiting in 1890, noted “the most revolting crimes” committed by the natives: “Human hands and feet and limbs, smoked and dried, are offered and exposed for sale in many of the native village markets. From the mouth of the Lomami-River to Stanley-Falls there are thirteen armed Arab camps; and in them I have seen many skulls of murdered slaves pendant from poles and over these camps floating their blood-red flag.” Oddly, Hochschild quotes Williams’ testimony against native practices to criticize the EIC for being insufficiently vigorous in its attempts to govern the territory. Heads I win, tails you lose. As this logical slip implies, a justifiably proportionate response to the scourge of the slave trade required keen efforts by the EIC to recruit and feed soldiers, clear villages in areas prone to slave raids, establish military and governance posts, and pursue slave armies to the death. “Accommodating the Arab slave traders would be a crime,” wrote the EIC captain, and later WWI hero, Jules Jacques de Dixmude in 1892.

Topnut, DOD Sonnet Take a fancy celebrity, put them in military uniform, suddenly everybody is a patriot. That's how primitive this world is, everybody yells about world peace, while living in militarist gutter. The best propaganda is one that, does not feel like propaganda; Best way to legally recruit terrorists, is to portray terrorism as valor. Best way to sustain the revenues of war, is to showcase war as peace-intervention. Till you grow up and denounce all militarism, don't you dare call yourself a civilized human! We scientists, doctors, nurses and teachers, forget self-preservation for life-preservation, while primitive civilians of a primitive planet, throw all that away, hypnotized by patriotism.

This kind of IDF information war strategy is now routinely copied by the US military. The CIA launched a social media campaign, Humans of CIA, in 2021 that aimed to recruit from more diverse communities into its ranks. It felt deeply inspired by the IDF’s woke posturing. One of the most discussed (and mocked) campaigns, considering the CIA’s role in destabilizing and overthrowing governments since World War II, was the video of a Latina intelligence officer declaring: “I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at 36 I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.

To try to make sure gunmen do hit their targets, cartels have developed training camps. The first such camps were discovered in northeast Mexico and linked to the Zetas, but they have since been found all across the country and even over the border in Guatemala. Most are built on ranches and farmlands, such as one discovered in the community of Camargo just south of the Texas border. They are equipped with shooting ranges and makeshift assault courses and have been found storing arsenals of heavy weaponry, including boxes of grenades. Arrested gangsters have described courses as lasting two months and involving the use of grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns. A training video captured by police in 2011 shows recruits running across a field, taking cover on the grass, and firing assault rifles. Sometimes training can be deadly. One recruit drowned during an exercise that required him to swim carrying his backpack and rifle. The discovery of these camps has sparked the obvious comparison to Al Qaeda training grounds in Afghanistan. But however much schooling they give, cartels still love gunslingers with real military experience. In the first decade of democracy, up until 2010, one hundred thousand soldiers had deserted from the Mexican military. There is a startling implication: country and ghetto boys sign up for the army, get the government to pay for their training, then make real money with the mob.

He recruited the 22-year-old Marcus Cicero, who happily abandoned his studies and accepted a military command.

The newer tactic of scattering bodies on city streets, as happened when Joaquín Guzmán’s goons pushed thirty-five bloody corpses (twelve of them women) off two trucks on Manuel Ávila Camacho Boulevard, near a shopping mall in the prettier part of the port city of Veracruz one day in September 2011, to terrorize their adversaries... Guzmán, known as El Chapo (Shorty) for his small stature, ran the largest airborne opera- tion in Mexico; he owned more aircraft than Aeromexico, the national air- line. Between 2006 and 2015, Mexican authorities seized 599 aircraft — 586 planes and 13 helicopters—from the Sinaloa cartel; by comparison, Aeromexico had a piddling fleet of 127 planes.... One Zeta atrocity I knew nothing about took place in 2010, in the small town of San Fernando, south of Reynosa. A roaming band of Zetas stopped two buses of migrants—men, women, and children from Central and South America, who were fleeing the violence in their countries. The Zetas demanded money. The migrants had no money. The Zetas demanded that the migrants work for them, as assassins or operatives or drug mules. The migrants refused. So they were taken to a building in the village of El Huizachal, blindfolded, their hands and legs bound, and each one was shot in the head. Seventy-two of them died. One man (from Ecuador) played dead, escaped, and raised the alarm... The gory details of this massacre became known when one of the perpetrators was arrested, Édgar Huerta Montiel, an army deserter known as El Wache, or Fat Ass. He admitted killing eleven of the migrants person- ally, in the belief (so he said) that they were working for a gang hostile to his own. A year later, near the same town, police found 47 mass graves containing 193 corpses — mostly migrants or passengers in buses hijacked and robbed while passing through this area of Tamaulipas state, about eighty miles south of the US border... But in the early 2000s headless bodies began to appear, tossed by the roadside, while human heads were displayed in public, at intersections, and randomly on the roofs of cars. This butchery was believed to be inspired by a tactic of the Guatemalan military’s elite commandos, known as Kaibiles. A man I was to meet in Matamoros, on my traverse of the border, explained how the Kaibiles were toughened by their officers. The officers encouraged recruits to raise a dog from a puppy, then, at a certain point in their training, the recruit was ordered to kill the dog and eat it.... When the Kaibiles became mercenaries in the Mexican cartels, the first beheadings occurred, the earliest known taking place in 2006: a gang in Michoacán kicked open the doors of a bar and tossed five human heads on the dance floor. Decapitations are now, according to one authority on the business, “a staple in the lexicon of violence” for Mexican cartels....

Which is a long way of saying that it didn't matter if my body couldn't bounce back like theirs. Or that I had to eat cleaner food, stretch in the morning and at night, and prioritize recovery. It didn't matter if I had to sleep less because there are only so many hours in any fucked-up day. If that's what it took, I was a willing warrior. Willing warriors don't reach for excuses. While it's human nature to try and talk yourself out of doing the hard or inconvenient thing, we know that it's non-negotiable. There are a lot of people out there who are willing to sign up for the military or police force, apply for a job, or enroll in college or graduate school because they expect some tangible and timely return on their investment. Warriors aren't in it for cash or benefits. That's all gravy. Even though I was broke, I would have found a way to pay the U.S. Navy to be a SEAL. Nobody recruited me to Fort St. John, and I lost money by taking the job. But willing warriors seek out our own missions and pay any and all tolls required. I wanted to do this fucking job, period. p283

In our case, we live in a National Security State that is committed to perpetual war, in a consumerism that reduces everything and everyone to a commodity. As a consequence, children become statistics for sales reports, military recruitment, prison population, and debt. It is, among us, all about subordinating the future of children to the success of market ideology wherein the money and power flow to the top of the pyramid while increasing numbers of children are left behind.

But instead of recruitment efforts being concentrated on the military for those who had the drive and the self-discipline to become top-of-the-line firefighters and eventually officers who would lead the department, or looking at potential personnel from higher education institutions such as the local community colleges, the recruiting focused on shopping malls and high schools.

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The British Chiefs of Staff advanced a proposition which, in spite of its inspired lunacy, has remained to this day at the heart of much of what passes for military thinking in this country . . . We are, in other words, here because we’re here because we’re here. Those who subscribe to the theory that armed forces should be designed to implement the nation’s chosen external policies should therefore rid their minds of such childish delusions; it is the size and shape of the armed forces, their recruiting rate, their equipment and their conditions of service which matter, and those charged with the formulation of foreign and defence policy had better order their affairs accordingly.1 In the period between the wars the shape and the equipment, if not the size, of the armed forces were partly determined by a number of curious military attitudes.

A memoir in which the author shares his impressive journey of emigrating to the United States to escape a difficult life in an impoverished Nigerian village. Born into an extremely poor family in Nigeria, ‘Deji Ayoade had early memories of wanting to come to America to do better for himself. For years, he dreamed about having a bright future in the United States. At seven, he promised his mother that one day he would be a doctor in America and take her and his siblings away from their dangerous and impoverished existence. By the age of thirty-three, ‘Deji had been in the United States for five years and was living his dream. He had earned a master’s degree, married and had a child, been recruited into the Navy, and become a US citizen. He makes good on the promise to his mother and brings her, his sister, and his sister’s baby to the United States. UNDERGROUND: A Memoir of Hope, Faith, and the American Dream is a well-structured, compelling memoir written by a determined man with big dreams, ambitious goals, and the strength to never lose sight of where he is headed. Commitment, intelligence, and drive contribute to his fulfilling what he deems to be his purpose in life. His accomplishments in the armed services are nothing short of admirable. Ayoade draws readers into the 1980s culture of the poorer regions of Nigeria with vivid descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of areas in which they lived. His credible recreation of scenes reveals insight into the civilization that had considerable influence on him. Family dynamics also play a significant role in Ayoade’s life. His recollection of his father’s contradictory behaviors both confuse and enlighten him. His fond memories of his grandmother—the family member he trusted the most—are heartfelt and touching. While coming to the United States offers many positive experiences for Ayoade, it doesn’t come without problems, and one that the author talks about with deep emotion and candidness is racism. Thoughtful in the way he acknowledges possible differences of perspectives, he describes how it feels to be looked at differently. One scene in particular demonstrates just how prejudiced and insensitive people can be when it comes to racial biases. Ayoade writes from the heart with emotion and honesty that demonstrate his passion for what he does in life. His ability to weave together a cohesive story from so many disparate fragments is remarkable. His religious faith and commitment to never-ending improvement for himself are inspiring and a basis for being a role model for others. UNDERGROUND: A Memoir of Hope, Faith, and the American Dream–author ‘Deji Ayoade’s reflections on overcoming enormous obstacles and emigrating from Nigeria to the United States–is candid, heartwarming, and inspirational.

Alexis reformed the Russian Army, recruiting large numbers of military advisors from western Europe

After signing on the dotted line, I spent the next six months working out and doing my best not to get into trouble until I finally boarded a bus for the trip to the Military Entry Processing Station (MEPS) facility in southern Virginia. MEPS is the weigh station for all new military recruits. There, I found myself part of an interesting blend of Americana, one that included all shapes, sizes, colors, and temperaments of young men and women who were leaving the civilian world and getting their first taste of the United States military.

Inclusion of women creates a segment of the military that is physically weaker, more prone to injury (both physical and psychological), less physically aggressive, able to withstand less pain, less willing to take physical risks, less motivated to kill, less likely to be available to deploy when ordered to, more expensive to recruit, and less likely to remain in the service even for the length of their initial contracts. Women are placed in units with men who do not trust them with their lives and who do not bond with them the way that they do with other men. The groups into which they are introduced become less disciplined and more subject to conflict related to sexual jealousy and sexual frustration, and men receive less rigorous training because of their presence. Officers and NCOs must divert attention from their central missions to cope with the “drama” that sexual integration brings, and they must reassign physical tasks (or do them themselves) because women cannot get them done fast enough, if at all. Men who have traditionally been drawn to the military because of its appeal to their masculinity now find that the military tries to cure them of it to make the environment more comfortable for women.

Military recruiters took who they could get. In those days, with roughly 50 percent of the population under sixteen and most of the men over twenty already supporting families, teenagers constituted a disproportionate share of the available males.

The Union army's southward march-especially in the Mississippi Valley-stretched supply lines, brought thousands of defenseless ex-slaves under Union protection, and exposed large expanses of occupied territory to Confederate raiders, further multiplying the army's demand for soldiers. On the home front, these new demands sparked violent opposition to federal manpower policies. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 allowed wealthy conscripts to buy their way out of military service by either paying a $300 commutation fee or employing a substitute. Others received hardship exemptions as specified in the act, though political influence rather than genuine need too often determined an applicant's success. Those without money or political influence found the draft especially burdensome. In July, hundreds of New Yorkers, many of the Irish immigrants, angered by the inequities of the draft, lashed out at the most visible and vulnerable symbols of the war: their black neighbors. The riot raised serious questions about the enrollment system and sent Northern politicians scurrying for an alternative to conscription. To even the most politically naive Northerners, the enlistment of black men provided a means to defuse draft resistance at a time when the federal army's need for soldiers was increasing. At the same time, well-publicized battle achievements by black regiments at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, and at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, eased popular fears that black men could not fight, mitigated white opposition within army ranks, and stoked the enthusiasm of both recruiters and black volunteers.

the dominance of state or empire over personal relationships; child-rearing and educational practices characterized by hard physical training and harsh discipline; the extraordinary role of military symbols in songs, rituals, and art; a cult of masculinity; and absorption of the family unit into the warfare state. It is worth considering the degree to which militarization has shaped our own society ...

Angolans who fought for Portugal significantly outnumbered those who fought for their nation’s independence. The three Angolan nationalist movements may, at most, have recruited some 10,000 to 15,000 combatants by the early 1970s. Portugal deployed over 60,000 troops in Angola, at least half of which were Africans.

An Army raised without proper regard to the choice of its recruits was never yet made good by length of time; and we are now convinced by fatal experience that this is the source of all our misfortunes. Flavius Vegetius Renatus, in his military manual De Re Militari, fifth century, as the decline of the Roman Empire began in earnest

Ursula had been able to follow the progress of the Tool missions through the information passed on to Henschke by Gould. The Hammer spies had survived, though several of the other recruits had perished. She had made a vital contribution to the liberation of her home city from the curse of Nazism. And, most important of all, she had coordinated a mission to steer a brand-new item of American military technology into Soviet hands. She was helping Russia to build the bomb; she also helped them build the walkie-talkie. Even Len did not know what she had done. Hers was a secret, private celebration.