What if you were scrolling through job listings, and you found one that said “Assassin/Assassination Assistants”?
You’d think it was a sick joke.
“Organization with rich and powerful history, but deeply in debt and facing decline with few prospects of improvement, seeks paid assassin willing to unquestioningly injure, maim and/or kill anyone and everyone as directed, including men, women and children. Must be willing to live anywhere on earth (or outer space), perform any task indirectly or directly related to killing, for a minimum of 4-6 years (may be extended indefinitely by employer). You assume risk that some men, women and children may injure, maim or kill you (instead of you doing it to them). Base pay plus net benefits begins at approximately $50,000/year.”
Who would take a job like that?
There is a long-term trend toward lower propensity to serve—military jargon for willingness to enlist in a branch of the armed forces—from 16% of youth in 2003 to 10% in 2022. Nevertheless, 150,000 to 200,000 Americans enlist in the U.S. military annually.
They accept these crazy work conditions. Why?
Even when you consider the question from the perspective of coastal elites who conjure up an image of the typical recruit as poor, uneducated and desperate to escape the opioid-ravaged postindustrial hellscape of their hometowns in flyover land, it’s hard to see why so many people would trade away their freedom of movement, bodily autonomy and personal freedom for a relatively modest set of benefits—much less why they would sign a blank check over to any organization, much less one like the United States military.
Anyone who accepts a gig working for a private institution or a government entity other than the military knows that there’s always a risk that things might turn sour after they begin work. Salaries may freeze or stagnate, departments will merge, demotions happen in name or in fact, you might survive layoffs only to have your workload soar, benefits might vanish, an employer’s top management might make bad decisions that affect workers’ pay. A company may get acquired, or a new CEO could come on board; a good place to work could move to another state or transfer you to a less desirable office or otherwise deteriorate into 9-to-5 hell.
Whatever happens, though, you have an out. You can quit.
Military enlistment, on the other hand, is indentured servitude without the upfront loan or fixed expiration date. Once you’re under contract, you don’t freely determine if and when you can leave. After the initial term, you can reenlist or separate out, but the military controls the timing and conditions of your release. Then you’re in the reserves and can be called up for another four years. And there’s “stop loss,” which keeps you in whenever the president decides to declare an emergency.
If Apple hires you in Cupertino and transfers you to a data farm in Nevada, you have a choice. You can move or look for another job. Service members do not choose where they live. Your wife may have a job in Indiana; you wind up in Qatar. The military assigns duty stations based on what they deem to be their needs. You can request preferences, and some programs influence your location assignment, but it’s up to them.
If GM hires you for the C-suite and wants to move you to the assembly line, you can say no, and leave—hell, you can probably sue a private employer who messes with you for “constructive termination.” Recruits choose or are assigned a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) rating, or Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC) based on aptitude tests, medical exams and available slots. You can apply for retraining, special programs or career progression, but the boss decides where you work and what you do. You say: “yes, sir.”
Especially if you’re willing to move to a major metropolitan area where starting salaries are higher, military pay scales don’t cut it. Either way, after all, you’ll have to move—but not necessarily to the Middle East. As occupational safety goes, the Army is as bad as it can get.
You’ll be asked to hurt people who have done you no harm and bear you no ill will, victims who will be selected today by a president and a Pentagon team whose policies and priorities you may or may not approve of today. But what about tomorrow? Presidents change, politics change, and the wars that you might like now can easily be set aside in favor of conflicts that make no sense to you in the not-so-distant future. Are you willing to sign over a blank check, not just to today’s presidential administration, but those of the future?
Who knows what scoundrel/dirtbag/mental turnip may sit in the Oval Office?
Why die for someone who no one has yet heard of, yet may be elected Commander-in-Chief?
Young recruits, politicians tell us, are primarily motivated by a desire to protect their country. But it’s highly unlikely that anyone will ever be needed for that, given that the United States homeland has not been attacked by a nation-state in a military conflict since the War of 1812.
Others want to travel. But there are many ways to do that without killing people or working for a machine whose primary task is killing people: work exchange programs, the Peace Corps, applying to one of the many foreign colleges and universities that admit American students for very low tuition, backpacking while jumping from job to job.
Some young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, fall for the smooth-talking recruitment officer’s argument that they need the discipline and structure that only the military can provide. Here, too, there are alternatives: martial arts academies, engineering schools, trade apprenticeships, intentional communities.
Generations of soldiers and sailors have learned that military service is a sucker’s game. The Pentagon breaks beautiful young people and discards them like a filthy old snot rag when they are no longer of use to a system built for the benefit of the rich and powerful. From unpaid Revolutionary War veterans left with worthless scrip and doomed to poverty (officers got bounty land grants on soil stolen from Native Americans), to Civil War soldiers enduring years of pension delays, World War I “Bonus Army” marchers violently dispersed by federal troops in 1932 and Vietnam veterans long denied care for Agent Orange exposure and PTSD, American veterans have repeatedly faced neglect and abuse.
Antiwar activists want young men and women to reject the military on ethical grounds. While that would be best—no organization on the planet harms more people and degrades the national environment more than the United States military—we should also consider another tack. Strip away the patriotic propaganda surrounding military service, and what you have is just another job.
A lousy job.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
