The Army in the Marketplace: Recruiting an All-Volunteer Force

Abstract

For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see Teaching the JAH, http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching/. In mid-March 2003, as American military forces moved toward Baghdad, the U.S. Army replaced its “An Army of One” television recruiting ads with commercials evoking a tradition of heroism and sacrifice. Sepia-toned close-ups of soldiers' faces fill the screen in “Victors.” In “Creed,” army unit crests proclaim “Not for Ourselves Alone” and “Ducit Amor Patriae,” as elegiac music reminiscent of the soundtrack from Band of Brothers, an acclaimed tv miniseries about World War II, creates a powerful historical connection. Those commercials were light-years from the upbeat message of the recently retired recruiting jingle “Be All You Can Be,” or the grittier but slightly perplexing “An Army of One” campaign that had replaced it in 2001. The language of service and sacrifice, duty and honor, had been almost completely absent from army advertising since the beginning of America's all-volunteer force. For the past three decades, the (primarily) peacetime army had recruited with promises of individual opportunity: money for college, marketable skills, achievement, adventure, personal transformation. In the first moments of a controversial war, many of those promises sounded inappropriate, if not absurd.1