Mother Jones reported recently that in 2003 the military began building a database on Americans from age 15 up. The creation of Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies (JAMRS) was protested at its inception by peace advocates like AFSC and privacy groups like the ACLU, but nevertheless went on using your tax dollars to create 34 million names database run by Equifax, the friendly folks who provide data on your credit rating. JAMRS connected records from state motor vehicle departments and bureaus, from Selective Service, and from private data brokers who deal in records of consumer behavior.

The New York Civil Liberties Union brought a law suit against JAMRS in 2007, which resulted in a settlement and the Pentagon agreeing to stop collecting social security numbers and sharing them on anyone younger than age 17. According to Mother Jones author David Goodman, “Students may opt out of having their JAMRS database information sent to recruiters, but only 8,700 have invoked this obscure safeguard.”

I’ve written here in the past about the use of the ASVAB test given in high schools across the nation to collect data on students. Test takers can select Option 8 to opt out of that aspect of the test – but only if they know about it.

Preparing for the SAT might be a good way to get into college instead of into uniform, right? Not on the Army’s website March2Success.com. A stealth site run by the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox that collects data on about 17,000 new users each month, the web site offers “free” test taking advice that affluent kids get by paying Kaplan for it. A spokesperson for the Army described the site as  “a great service to schools that normally would cost them.”

A lack of education preparing you for critical thinking may be a prerequisite for failing to understand that $1.2 million spent on developing the March2Success website translates into budget cuts again this year for public schools across the nation.

What does this have to do with counter-recruiting? Everything. Is the real purpose of public schools in America education, or is it warehousing same-age potential recruits to deliver them as a conveniently assembled audience for recruiting messages?

Take the ASVAB — as 621,000 students did during the ’06-07 school year in 11,900 high schools. The Armed Services Vocation Aptitude Battery is given during school time, in buildings funded by local taxes, supervised by staff paid by citizens who thought they were hiring folks to educate their children, not recruit them.

Recruiters lie to high school students all the time when they claim that the ASVAB is a test to tell you which careers you would be suited for. In fact, the test as used by the Army focuses on these “careers”: Clerical, Combat Operations, Electronics, Field Artillery, General Maintenance, General Technical, Mechanical Maintenance, Operators and Food, Surveillance and Communications, Skilled Technical and Special Forces. And, unless you or your family know about selecting “Option 8″ when you take the ASVAB, it will deliver your contact data and your test scores to a recruiter near you.

Then there’s JROTC, the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, one of the best recruitment programs we could have. Educators and school boards around the U.S. have long opposed this militarization of high schools which allocates classroom space and other resources to teaching underage kids how to be recruits, not officers. Despite the acronym claiming it’s a junior version of ROTC, which offers tuition if you agree to enlist at the university level.

Counter-recruiting activists in San Francisco agitated for years and finally succeeded in 2006 in getting a San Francisco School Board vote to phase out JROTC from the district. The military countered by going around the school board and placing an initiative on the ballot last fall supporting JROTC.  The non-binding Proposition V passed by a slim margin, and the San Francisco school board voted 4-3 in May to keep the JROTC program three weeks before it was set to expire, but then laid off all the JROTC instructors. Budget cuts are a double-edged sword, apparently.

The four SF school board members who had voted in 2006 to remove JROTC were no longer on the board by May, 2009. Maybe time for you or a family member to think about running for your local school board?

Locals calculated JROTC cost San Francisco taxpayers nearly $1 million per year. A million that could be spent lowering class sizes from 40+ kindergarteners. But that might be dangerous.

If kids come up through schools which teach them, not what to think, but how to think, they may be a lot harder to recruit.

Military planners must have hoped that distancing the killers from the killed would help soldiers overcome the natural disinclination humans have for killing one another. Research after WWII indicated that, when the time came to pull the trigger, an astonishing number of soldiers just couldn’t bring themselves to do it. So much for “don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

However, it now emerges that technicians operating remote drones suffer from PTSD, too, because the video imagery of their human targets is high resolution, and they can clearly see the people they are bombing. Another problem is that the highly trained pilots who are assigned to the job saw themselves as potential “Top Guns” who would be swooping around in real aircraft enjoying the thrill that comes with that. Sitting hunched over a screen wasn’t what the recruiter promised them when they were enlisting.

And recruiters are suffering from work related stress of their own. The Army investigated a rash of suicides among recruiters, and the investigation led to a stand-down day where recruiters were ordered to take a break from their regular duties and attend training on stress reduction. The study showed a major factor was pressure on recruiters, many of them vets of Iraq and Afghanistan, to lie and cheat in order to meet their quotas.

Solution? Computer technology to the rescue again! The Army Experience Center (AEC) is a multi-million dollar video game arcade located in Franklin Mills Mall in Philadelphia, an area with plenty of low-income youth to recruit. According to its website the AEC offers “SIMULATORS: Volunteer for a mission and become part of the action…take part in an authentic battle scenario with equipment modeled after genuine Army vehicles, aircraft and weapons.” (Black Hawk, HMMWV & Apache are the models shown.) In addition, the gaming arena houses “79 gaming stations, including 19 brand new Xbox 360 consoles…or just enjoy an afternoon as a virtual Soldier.”

Gamers can capture a photo of their simulator experience, then retrieve the photo from the AEC website later, if they are at least age 13 and register with the AEC. Community groups can reserve the Tactical Operations Center for their meetings in order to utilize its high tech presentation and communication software. A community group of CODEPINK members and others shut down the AEC earlier this year and continues to work for its closure on the grounds that recruiting that targets children is wrong.

The Army says the AEC was designed to “…shatter outdated stereotypes and start new career conversations.” It also appears to be designed to capitalize on video game addicted American teenagers, many of whom have trouble earning high school diplomas. The AEC can help with that, too. Phase 4 Learning, billed as “a non- traditional approach to earning a high school diploma and preparing for the future,” shows teenagers in front of — guess what — computer monitors. Other photos of the center show teens milling around, with captions explaining that they are waiting to use the simulators.

Using computers to recruit is a way around problems identified by vet Danny White of Martinez, CA: “As a former Army recruiter, I can say that most servicepeople would prefer not to go to schools but are compelled to comply by their chain of command. Most recruiters would not be in recruiting at all if they had a choice. The majority are selected to serve and have no practical way to avoid the duty.”

International law forbids the recruitment of those under the age of 15, while the 1989 UN Child Convention defines a minor as under 18.

Into that gap fall a million advertisements delivered by mass media. Plus several thousand pencils, posters and textbook covers provided “free” of charge at school. Now add a high pressure salesman who has a teen’s cell number — because he bought her the phone.

A Marine recruiter in California was arrested in May on charges he used a 14 year-old girl to entice teenage male recruits.

Citizens in that state took it upon themselves last winter to impose controls at the municipal level. The towns of Arcata and Eureka passed ordinances limiting the ability of military recruiters to contact residents under age 18. But in December the U.S. Justice Deptarment took the towns to court, claiming illegal interference in the fed’s ability to hook kids into helping keep the world safe for democracy. No ruling as yet.

Citizens with elected school boards could impose similar controls, if they got riled up. “You will find that establishing trust and credibility with students, even seventh- and eighth-graders, can positively impact your high school and post-secondary school recruiting effort,” says the handbook for Army recruiters.

School board directors who argue that a weeks long Army National Guard program delivered during the school day by Guardsmen in combat fatigues is “not recruiting” obviously haven’t read the manual. They just love the “free” program, which was actually paid for twice: once as part of the $2+ billion annual military recruiting budget, and again as part of the school day, half funded by local property taxes, with a price tag of around $40,000. That’s the cost in a small rural school district in Maine i.e. one with a strong poverty draft pulling kids in already.

“I wonder what branch I’ll get sucked into.” That’s a younger brother talking.