United States of America

How a writer on the world’s biggest shoot-’em-up has come to advise Washington on the future of warfare

Six months after Dave Anthony left his job as a writer and producer on the video game series Call of Duty, he received an unexpected phone-call from Washington DC.

That week, the caller, Steve Grundman, a former Pentagon official who served in a succession of appointments at the US Department of Defense during the 1990s, had been watching his son play Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. “Grundman told me that he’d been struck by the realism and authenticity in the game and in particular the story,” says Anthony. “So struck by it, in fact, that he’d been compelled to track me down.”

by Jerome R. Stockfisch / Tampa Tribune

TAMPA — Counter-recruiting. Demands that the university break ties with the military. A mass die-in.

It may not be the 1960s, but Students for a Democratic Society is dusting off the old playbook to launch an anti-war, anti-U.S. military campaign at the University of South Florida.

SDS, perhaps the largest and most influential radical student organization of the 1960s, is springing back to life in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. SDSers from USF have scheduled a news conference today to demand that the university sever memorandums of understanding it has entered into with U.S. Central Command based at  MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, and U.S. Southern Command based in Miami.

Jesus Mendez-Carbajal - In the past nine months as Project YANO’s 2013-2014 student intern, I have learned an immense amount of information about U.S. militarism, its far reach, and counter-recruitment. I have been directly impacted on multiple levels. I have grown mentally through the knowledge I have gained and also personally through the interactions and relationships I have built with youth, advisors, teachers, mentors, and Project YANO supporters, volunteers and board members. I have had the pleasure of working with students who look like me, engaging low-income youth of color who have stories and backgrounds similar to my own.

This study examines how the mass media’s portrayal of the military, including the war in Iraq, affects U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps recruiting. A telephone survey of households in Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas was conducted to measure parents and young adults’ exposure to information about the military in various media sources and how much attention they paid to those sources of information for information about the military.  This study was hampered by a small sample size (N=119) that limits the ability to claim significant findings for several hypotheses. However, the study did uncover a pattern that indicated that greater use of newspapers and entertainment television reduced chances of young adults joining the military, whereas use of movies depicting the military enhanced the likelihood of joining. Also, media use predicted people’s attitudes about the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq.