video games

Image: The Extreme Truck, a 15,700-pound mobile recruitment vehicle that roams the country dazzling prospective soldiers. Photo courtesy of the US Army

For decades, the US military has been using souped-up mobile exhibits to recruit prospective soldiers. In July of this year, the military deployed the latest addition to a fleet that roves the country hoping to win the hearts and minds of American youth. The new vehicle, known as the Extreme Truck, is equipped with two 32-inch gaming stations, a 60-inch flat-screen television, several smaller TVs, and pull-up and push-up platforms. It has its own Facebook page, which, at press time, has been liked 111 times.

There are a lot of young men who play Call of Duty on their Xbox consoles, so it makes sense that the government would use Xbox Live as a billboard for recruitment ads for the Canadian Forces.

In case you weren’t aware, Xbox consoles connected to Microsoft’s online service show paid advertisements on the system’s main menu screen. The Ottawa Citizen reports  the Department of National Defence and Canadian Armed Forces started paying for these ads between 2006-07. So much of the ads likely appeared on the Xbox 360.

Documents say the purpose of the ads was indeed to reach an audience of males between the ages of 18-24. The audience is described as “18-24-year-olds, male & female, looking for adventure & excitement and/or interested in helping others.”

A record number of Japanese flocked to a trade show for military paraphernalia and gaming that attracted recruiters for the country’s Self-Defense Forces, the latest sign Japan is shaking off its postwar pacifism.

About 4,000 people, including a growing number of women, attended the March 30 “Victory Show” and related “ASGK Festival” in Tokyo to shop for military uniforms and model weapons, take target practice with air guns and show off their prowess at the World of Tanks video game. That’s the largest crowd since the now-quarterly event started in 1981, when it drew about 80 people, organizers said.

“About 10 times more people come to our booth here than at ordinary venues,” said Nobuaki Sato, one of four SDF members from the northern prefecture of Iwate staffing the recruitment stall. “You can feel the interest.”

Corey Mead -

In its rush to find the next generation of cyberwarriors, the military has begun to infiltrate our high schools and even our middle schools, blurring the line between education and recruitment. The Air Force, for example, runs a “CyberPatriot” national high school cyberdefense competition, geared toward influencing students to pursue careers in cybersecurity. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has its own annual “Digital Forensics Challenge,” in which teams of players develop their own investigative tools. But no one is as innovative in his approach as Colonel Casey Wardynski (ret.)—for 16 years the Army’s top economist and now the superintendent of schools in Huntsville, Ala.