Recruitment, counter-recruitment and critical military studies

Abstract

Despite constituting the formal mechanism by which states and militaries persuade and enrol their personnel, military recruitment is poorly understood in the social and political sciences. Tied either to a normative and partisan sociology which aims to provide applied solutions for recruitment and retention programmes, or subsumed under a broad banner, by critical scholars, of a global 'cultural condition' of militarisation, studies of recruitment lack the rigour they should be afforded. In exploring these issues, the paper offers a vision of critical military studies which takes seriously the efforts of counter-military recruiting activist and protest movements in the US and UK. Counter-recruitment activism is billed as the most practical way to resist policies of militarism and militarisation. In promoting locally situated, practical solutions to the effects of militarised cultures (often as part of activism in schools), it aims to expose the relationship between, and acts to correct, both local and global injustices. In reviewing the practical and conceptual basis for counter-recruiting strategies, and speaking to broader movements in feminist scholarship on militarisation, the paper demonstrates the importance of critical studies of military recruitment, and in so doing, argues for a critical military studies which is situated amidst the people and places militarism affects.

Protest

“…Matthew F. Rech (2014) challenges some of the sub-disciplinary engagements with protest. He seeks to broaden the frame of critical military studies by engaging with counter-recruitment as a counter-hegemonic political protest that contests the legitimacy of state-sanctioned and state-perpetrated violence in spheres of everyday life, the same terrain in which military recruitment strategies are being deployed.…”

Digital warfighting temporalities and drone discourse

“…This video-gamecentred trope is further formed and exacerbated through the actions and statements of military forces, with military personnel remarking upon the "similarity" and shared "skill set…between flying drones and playing video games" (Lieutenant Barnes in Akhter 2012: 1493). Further, military forces have also sought drone operator recruitment in gaming-locations (Schei 2014; The Guardian 2015b), used video games as recruitment tools in "civil spaces" (Rech 2014, Crogan 2011Merrin 2019;Power 2007;Stahl 2006), hosted video game drone simulators for civilians to play online (e.g. US Air Force game, see Download 2016), 3 and even re-fitted military drone simulators to "keep up with the technologies… familiar to the Xbox and Playstation generation" (Ministry of Defence in Rech et al 2015: 52;Crogan 2011).…”

The art of parachuting: Embodied geopolitics, aerial aesthetics and dance‐based combat training at Ringway Aerodrome, 1940–1946

“…From an early stage it was identified that a regular intake of handpicked soldiers would be required to meet the imperatives of war. The 1941 Report of the Medical Points in Selection specified how these men needed to be good soldiers, but also become competent in the necessary skills to land without injury and to carry out “the exceptional feats of endurance needed for operations.” Those endeavouring to gain their wings were subsequently required to be passed fit prior to embarking on their parachuting course (see Rech, ). Pre‐selection aimed to ensure that only “suitable” candidates, defined by their capacity to withstand the “hazards of an airborne operation,” be trained .…”