We really want you in the Army. Not all citizen journalism happens in blogs, folks. A 15-year-old with a couple of cameras and a sister caught the Army willing to bend both laws and ethics in order to get him enlisted. (Military recruitment previously discussed here, as well as other places that I'm too lazy to search for).
posted by klangklangston on May 25, 2005 - 45 comments

The argument I make in my book is that what I describe as the new American militarism arises as an unintended consequence of the reaction to the Vietnam War and more broadly, to the sixties... If some people think that the sixties constituted a revolution, that revolution produced a counterrevolution, launched by a variety of groups that had one thing in common: they saw revival of American military power, institutions, and values as the antidote to everything that in their minds had gone wrong. None of these groups — the neoconservatives, large numbers of Protestant evangelicals, politicians like Ronald Reagan, the so-called defense intellectuals, and the officer corps — set out saying, “Militarism is a good idea.” But I argue that this is what we’ve ended up with: a sense of what military power can do, a sort of deference to the military, and an attribution of virtue to the men and women who serve in uniform. Together this constitutes such a pernicious and distorted attitude toward military affairs that it qualifies as militarism.
An interview with Andrew Bacevich, international relations professor and former Army colonel, and author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War--and here is a review. Recently by Bacevich: We Aren't Fighting to Win Anymore - U.S. troops in Iraq are only trying to buy time.
posted by y2karl on Feb 21, 2005 - 37 comments

America's Army wants you, Mac users. The recruitment tool game has been out for some time now, available only for Windows, but as of this week Mac users can get in on the action. Broadband and robust Mac horsepower required, but for $6 somebody hands you an M-16 and tells to go shoot stuff. Why not?
posted by emelenjr on Jul 17, 2003 - 26 comments

MS Chat and the US Army Although a very interesting article on the logistics behind networking an entire battlefield - this bit worried me slightly:- "What's funny about using Microsoft Chat," he adds with a sly smile, "is that everybody has to choosean icon to represent themselves. Some of these guys haven't bothered, so the program assigns them one. We'll be in the middle of a battle and a bunch of field artillery colonels will come online in the form of these big-breasted blondes. We've got a few space aliens, too."
posted by robzster1977 on May 21, 2003 - 17 comments