Why the Marines don't have a recruiting problem

Buried in the debate on how to get more young people into uniform is a nagging question: What if making the military more attractive is exactly the wrong approach?

Take a typical pitch from Army Secretary Louis Caldera: Military service "is a good option for someone who wants to serve their country, get good skills, and get an education." That basic soft sell of self-improvement bothers some military-watchers.

Rep. Stephen Buyer, R-Ind., a Gulf War veteran and chairman of the House Armed Services Military Personnel Subcommittee, doesn't like it, because it minimizes the sacrifices and the challenges that a few years in uniform can pose for young people.

"In the desert. . . . I heard a lot of bellyaching-bellyaching from pantywaists who said, 'The only reason I joined the military was to go to college, I didn't join the military to get shot at,'" Buyer said. Enticing enlistees with financial and educational benefits and images of sightseeing in exotic, faraway locales may not adequately prepare recruits for the inevitable and sometimes bloody downside, Buyer said.

But what is the alternative to saying, "Here's what's in it for you"?

Maybe the message should be "We dare you." That's the basic thrust of the Marine Corps advertising campaign. Corps commercials on TV are dramatic dungeons-and-dragons-style adventures as lavish with special effects as they are silent about college funds. Online, while every other service's recruiting Web site provides helpful data on careers, education, and benefits, the Marines' enlisted Web site (www.marines.com) takes interested high school graduates through a role-playing training exercise complete with comic-book-style illustrations, an interactive drill sergeant, and virtual push-ups for infractions.

"We decided to go 180 degrees out from what everybody else is doing," recently retired Corps Commandant Gen. Charles C. Krulak told National Journal in an interview. On his third day as commandant, Krulak met with a team of psychologists and psychiatrists who told him that what "Generation X and Generation Next" really wanted was a tough task that they could take pride in-in short, a challenge. So Krulak pulled all existing commercials off the air and replaced them with the current series, whose message, he said, is: "If you want to be challenged physically, mentally, and morally join the Marines. You will be changed, and the change will be forever."

It's definitely a draw. When new Marines are asked why they wanted to join, "what they chose about 95 percent of the time is the intangibles," said Marine Capt. Jeff Sammons of the Quantico, Va.-based Recruiting Command. "Education is not one that is chosen."

Outsiders argue that the corps, the smallest and in some ways the most well-defined service in the public mind, has an easy niche market to fill, because it looks mainly for "a few good men" to serve primarily as "trigger pullers" who don't require much beyond good basic infantryman training. But Krulak says that's "just a red herring." He notes that the corps recruits 40,000 young people a year, not that many fewer than the 50,000 required each year by the Navy, which is more than double the size. Marines consciously keep their turnover high and recruit so many each year because their leadership is much smaller than the other services' and their need for career members much lower.

But that policy in itself may not work for other services. The typical Marine is "a young tiger who wants to come in, serve two or three years, and go," explained Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., an Army veteran himself. "If you're the other services, you've got to go high-tech" and long-term, because Navy ships and Air Force planes require higher-level technical skills than the Marines do, and more years of training.

So could the other services fill their ranks with a "We dare you" recruiting strategy? Most doubt it-and no one in the other services is saying they're going to try it any time soon.