Softer than It Looks: Military's Participation in Soft Power through Recruitment Practices

Softer than It Looks:

The U.S. Military's Participation in Soft Power through Recruitment Practices

The word “military” brings to mind an image that is the epitome of hard power: guns, tanks, bombs, fighter planes, infantry, and so on and so forth.  However, I believe that this is only half of the picture in states where there is no conscription.  In these states (and for the rest of this paper, I will be talking about the U.S. military because it is the most familiar to me), the military functions not only to fight the state’s enemies, but also to draw individuals into its ranks.  The first function is only possible through hard power, while the second is not possible through hard power. Therefore, contrary to the stance in class that military is not a factor in soft power, I argue that, thanks to its recruitment practices, the military is a major utilizer of soft power.

We talked in class about how soft power is getting others to want what you want them to want as opposed to forcing them to do what you want them to do.  This translates directly into the job description of a military recruiter, which is to realize the military’s goal of filling the ranks by getting young people to want to voluntarily join up.  Military recruitment involves not only individual recruiters, but also a department that systematically employs soft power though the development of full-blown advertisement campaigns which are tailored to attract the youth of America. 

For example, across the center of the Army’s website runs the following banner: “Join the Team that Makes a Difference.”  This plays into many youths’ desire to belong and their ambitions to change the world.  When you click on the banner, you’re taken to a page that says: “Our team is made up of doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists and combat troops.”  This tells potential recruits that they can still be whatever they want to be.  This sends the reassuring message that you don’t have to give anything up when you join the military; this implication is likely to positively affect the target audience because it accommodates most young people’s reluctance to sacrifice anything that they have or want to have.  Furthermore, personal stories on the website call to attention all the things you will gain by joining the “team:” getting to work with cool gadgets and being part of a family-type team that has your back through everything.  By presenting all the things that the audience wants to see and hear, the military is using soft power tactics, striving to persuade potential recruits that they want to join.

I experienced being on the receiving end of those soft power strategies, and can attest to the talent with which the military gradually convinces you that what you want and what it wants from you is the same, and that is to join up.  It was evident to me that the recruitment efforts are not simply portrayals of fact when recruiters changed their narrative to make the military as attractive as possible to different audiences; at a military academy camp, weapons were talked up to the men who were interested in them while humanitarian action was emphasized to those not impressed by violence. This change of tone told me that the goal of military recruitment is not to present the entire reality and let the youths decide, but rather to manipulate their decision by changing the descriptions of reality to fit their desires. 

What is this manipulation of desire and decision if not the practice of soft power?  The significance of all this is that recruitment practices which successfully put people under the influence of soft power are dangerous; they put those people at risk of waking up one day and realizing that they were sold an image that does not necessarily reflect reality.  This contributes not only to the decline of the satisfaction and well-being of those individual soldiers, but also by extension to the decline of morale across the whole military system.  In this way, using soft power recruitment to strengthen the military may eventually have the opposite effect.