Peace Pundit

A recent report, excerpted below, documents that the U.S. military is using a video game — “America’s Army” — to recruit school-aged kids. The shoot-em-up game glorifies combat, while hiding the grisly and sad truths of war. The ACLU claims that recruiting minors violates international laws that the U.S. ratified.

Note to Game Developers: Someone should develop a video game that realistically depicts U.S. military service. For example:

• being thrown into combat in foreign countries with no training in local languages or customs
• having to scrounge armor panels from wrecked vehicles and duct-taping them to the sides of your humvee
• invading people’s homes at 2 am, shouting at people who are screaming in their own language that they don’t understand you while pleading with you not to shoot them
• having to decide in a fraction of a second if that person approaching you is a civilian or an insurgent, and realizing you just shot an unarmed woman and her child
• losing limbs, suffering brain injuries and hearing losses
• returning to the U.S. with physical handicaps and PTSD, finding that the military provides poor support for your multiple disabilities
• losing your job and having your family withdraw from you, then losing your apartment, living out of a shopping cart, sleeping on a steam grate, digging food out of trash cans

US Military Recruits Children: “America’s Army” Video Game Violates International Law

Michael B. Reagan, t r u t h o u t
Wednesday 23 July 2008

In … 2002, the United States Army invaded E3, the annual video game convention held in Los Angeles. At the city’s Convention Center, young game enthusiasts mixed with camouflaged soldiers, Humvees and a small tank parked near the entrance. Thundering helicopter sound effects drew the curious to the Army’s interactive display, where a giant video screen flashed the words “Empower yourself. Defend America … You will be a soldier.”

The Army was unveiling its latest recruitment tool, the “America’s Army” video game, free to download online or pick up at a recruiting station, and now available … on the Xbox, PlayStation, cell phones and Gameboy game consoles. Since its release, the “game” has gone on to attain enormous popularity with over 30,000 players everyday, more than nine million registered users, and version 3.0 set for launch in September. … The game allows players to “see what a soldier sees” in real combat situations – peek around corners, take fine aim, chose weapons that replicate those actually used by the US Army.

… programmers were shipped to military training facilities in Wyoming, where they ran boot camp obstacle courses, fired weapons at the shooting range and got whisked around on helicopters. … Army weapons specialists worked with developers to ensure aim, fire, sound and reload functions for all of the game’s weapons were as close to the real thing as possible. … Several of the game’s missions are based on actual combat experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. … Ubisoft, the … publisher of the console version of the game, wrote that “America’s Army” is the “deepest and most realistic military game ever to hit consoles,” …

… The Army spent $6 million to develop the game at the Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation Institute (MOVES) before handing it over to private companies for adaptation to the console formats in 2004. …

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… Far from providing realism, “America’s Army” offers a sanitized version of war to propagandize youth on the benefits of an Army career and prepare them for the battlefield. In the game, soldiers are not massacred in bloody fire typical of most video games, or for that matter, real combat. When hit, bullet wounds resemble puffs of red smoke, and players can take up to four hits before being killed. … Optional controls … sanitize the violence even more – shots produce no blood whatsoever and dead soldiers just sit down. This presentation of war contrasts to the much more grisly reality unfolding every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, like a June suicide attack on the Fallujah City Council in which three Marines, two interpreters and 20 Iraqis, including young children, were killed. Photos by American photojournalist Zoriah depict a horror scene in a small courtyard, … Zoriah writes of the scene, “There are dying people strewn around like limp dolls along with lifeless bodies of all ages. People are screaming and crying and running … people are literally frantic removing the dead, as if their pace may bring some of them back.” It is this violent, realistic quality of combat that has been excised from the game.

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… At a minimum, the Army hopes “America’s Army” will act as “strategic communication” to expose “kids who are college bound and technologically savvy” to positive messaging about the Army. Phase one of the propaganda effort is to expose children to “Army values” and make service look as attractive as possible. The next phase is direct recruiting. According to Colonel Wardynski, who originally thought up selling the Army to children through video games, “a well executed game would put the Army within the immediate decision-making environment of young Americans. It would thereby increase the likelihood that these Americans would include Soldiering in their set of career alternatives.” To make the connection between the game and recruitment explicit, the “America’s Army” web site links directly to the Army’s recruitment page. … Local recruiters also use the game to draw in high school children for recruitment opportunities. Recruiters stage area tournaments with free pizza and sodas; winners receive Xbox game consoles, free copies of “America’s Army” and iPods. Game centers are also set up at state fairs and public festivals …

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has found that Army use of the game, and its recruiting practice in general, violate international law. In May, the ACLU published a report that found the armed services “regularly target children under 17 for military recruitment. Department of Defense instruction to recruiters, the US military’s collection of information of hundreds of thousands of 16-year-olds, and military training corps for children as young as 11 reveal that students are targeted for recruitment as early as possible. By exposing children under 17 to military recruitment, the United States military violates the Optional Protocol.” The Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, ratified by the Senate in December 2002, protects the rights of children under 16 from military recruitment and deployment to war. The US subsequently entered a binding declaration that raised the minimum age to 17, meaning any recruitment activity targeted at those under 17 years old is not allowed in the United States. …

Four years after the game was introduced at the 2002 Los Angles E3, and half way around the world in Mosul, Iraq, “America’s Army” was having an effect. … Pvt. Doug Stanbro told The Christian Science Monitor in a 2006 interview that he “never really thought about the military at all before I started playing this game.” An informal Army study of the same year showed that 4 out of 100 new recruits in Ft. Benning, Georgia, credit “America’s Army” as the primary factor in convincing them to join the military. Sixty percent of those recruits surveyed said they played the game more than five times a week. …

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