The US military is embedded in the gaming world. Its target: teen recruits | Hacker News Reader

The US military is embedded in the gaming world. Its target: teen recruits

theguardian.com

30 pointsbookofjoe89 comments

This is bad but not in the way most people consider. The US military has contributed to popular media since about the time I was born to get young people interested in military service, so nothing new there. What has changed most over the decades is lifestyle choice.

People exercise less and focus less. The result is artificially induced ADHD and more physically fragile people less capable of completing initial entry training without severe or catastrophic muscle/bone injuries. Initial entry training is never meant to be that physically challenging, it’s not special forces selection.

In the very near future only a tiny percentage of the American population will be capable of serving in the military due to fitness limitations mentally, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. That will become the new elite: something that money and late preparation cannot restore.

Do you have a reference for the notion that lifestyle choice is artificially inducing ADHD? I'm interested to learn more.

Yeah, from my understanding ADHD is something you have from the moment you're born to the moment you die.

Normally, yes. Catastrophic brain injuries can also result in ADHD. People who develop identical symptoms to ADHD due to stimulus and conditioning do not actually have ADHD and cannot be treated with medications for ADHD treatment, but otherwise for all practical purposes the real world performance limitations are the same. I call that artificial ADHD.

ADHD, like many mental health diagnoses, is more of description of a cluster of symptoms than a concrete casual factor. So it makes some sense to use the term as a shorthand to refer to other causes of many of those same symptoms if you lack another easy way to do so.

> my understanding ADHD is something you have from the moment you're born to the moment you die

Plus ADHD symptoms are known to vary significantly with age so I wouldn't say this is an entirely accurate description either way.

I didn’t realize ADHD was like duckface…

Eh it’s not like being a navy seal is some glamorous elite status so I find that hard to imagine, plus people who are unfit for the military already have an alternative that gives them more power for less effort: policing.

Is there real evidence of people becoming more fragile?

Tons of young people still play sports and are physically active. Maybe it is just the bubble I live in, but kids who are on even rec leagues from 5 years old on are engaged in organized sport activity multiple nights a week.

Yes. This is something the military tracks.

the military tracks how people are becoming more fragile? how are they measuring this?

I guess they'd measure injury rates of new recruits.

Have they not considered extending basic training to give peoples bodies more time to get conditioned?

If you start out reasonably fit it takes less time. If you are heavier you need a longer runway.

Maybe a pre-bootcamp for large people where they introduce basic nutrition and basic exercise. That might actually be a big draw for obese people who want to turn their lives around.

How much more time? If the problem is lower bone density or fragile joints it’s already too late.

Why should it be too late? You increase bone density by training. If the military finds people have not enough bone density they need to add more fitness exercises (e.g. strength training) to initial training.

What young, obese people are suffering from permanently decreased bone-density? If anything their bones should be strong from moving around the extra weight all the time. These are young people, they should be able to adapt if given enough time.

What are you on about? It's well known that bone density and strength increases with load: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanostat

If you didn't learn this in grade school it might already be too late.

Already a thing https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/11/23/army-expandin...

Then you will have selection bias because new army recruits probably are a bad representation of “the youth”

The new recruits are actually a best-case scenario - going more than a decade back, ~75% of potential recruits that wanted to sign up were rejected for being clinically obese. Of the 25% left, a significant portion could not complete the first physical test. The test is one minute each of sit-ups, push-ups, and a one-mile run.

This [0] was linked up-thread and touches on increasing injury rates that the US army has worked to get down

[0] https://invid.xethos.net/watch?v=sWN13pKVp9s

Injuries during basic training, but especially bone related injuries that are very expensive to deal with.

Unpopular opinion: there should either be mandatory military service (or physically intensive alternatives for conscientous objectors) or a life long military tax for people who don't volunteer to join the military before 25. Not just the issues you described but a lot of social issues rooted in americans not being able to relate with each other or understand each other will be solved.

Having met a lot of people who have been in the military (including my dad and grandpa and a few other people in my extended family) I don't think military people were any better at relating to or understanding people. For me that's been people I know who are teachers but that's likely because of the sort of people that go into that profession.

I don't like his phrasing, but what I think he was referring to was how overcoming some sort of substantial adversity together often creates a strong bond among people, even from entirely different ideologies/backgrounds/etc. When everybody has to go through this it would create a common shared bond. Those in your family who were in the military might not be particularly able to relate to you, but are probably quite capable of relating to themselves or other vets. I am vehemently against hegemony, and how politicians use the military in modern times, but I'd also actually support compulsory military service.

Not only do I think the bonds and training would be exceptionally beneficial for society, but it might even help us get back on the right track in terms of this hegemony nonsense. So many people seem somewhere between apathetic and thrilled about endlessly escalating military conflicts around the globe, probably because they never envision themselves being affected by it. Same reason our old enfeebled politicians act like much bigger hard asses than it's like that even warrior kings of times past did. Because it's not like they'll suffer for these wars - the only "hard decision" they have to make is to send people that they couldn't care less about, off to kill and die. War's a lot different when you're not just 'spending' other peoples' lives.

This is an issue journalists have raised in the past. With military populations becoming smaller and more isolated over time they are slowly becoming population bubbles outside their local communities. Military populations tend to be a tiny bit more intelligent, better educated, and higher wage earners than the average non-military population in localized areas and amongst the average population of the country as a whole. If the military is selective about who joins and those people do not interface with communities outside the military they are forming isolated more elite populations. So far the difference is statistically negligible both in terms of performance differences and degree of isolation that the subject remains limited to magazine articles.

I've seen this sort of thing mentioned but I wonder, where does it leave people like me who had a childhood disability (Perthes disease - look it up, it's a disqualifying condition in the military's medical standards)? I get to be disabled for life and have to pay a tax for it?

In Switzerland this system exists right now, it's an extra 3 percent income tax for 11 years. Some people with disabilities are exempt from the tax, but it is common to be deemed unfit for military service due to a disability, and have to pay the tax. It doesn't seem fair to me, but it seems the Swiss voters accept it.

Yes, disability is quite a spectrum. My issue is quite easily imaged via x-ray and is written down in black and white on the standards. I can imagine that mental health and potentially soft-tissue issues could be a bit harder to pin down.

I don’t know the exact law, but my understanding is most people who can work, don’t get the exemption, no matter how clear-cut the disability.

Correct. Good friend of mine couldn't do service due to a physical disability and paid it. He wasn't unhappy with it. His reasoning is that defending the country is a good thing and if you cannot do it yourself - for whatever reason - it's okay if you instead help by paying.

That’s quite a magnanimous attitude. As an American with some disability, I feel the need to save all the money I can while I am able to work in order to meet my inevitable healthcare needs where the social safety net is very thin. Perhaps Switzerland is different? Also, I do not feel like most of our military spending has served to make us safer in quite a while. Perhaps it that effort was focused more locally, it would be easier to accept.

I think some kind of mandatory service to one's community could be worth discussing. I don't agree with a lifelong penalty for a onetime choice.

Criminals pay a lifelong penalty for a onetime choice.

I disagree with this, too. Once a debt is paid, that should be it.

How about making people care about their fellow citizen and believing in the future of their society instead of scheming to fool people into the military?

What sane person would join the military after all these pointless, lost, immoral, BS wars?

Adress the root problem instead. And it is not the youth being lazy.

>What sane person would join the military after all these pointless, lost, immoral, BS wars?

It's a bit of conundrum. Do you assume the rest of the world is moral, altruistic and peaceful? The entirety of human history is war, strong neighbours conquering the weaker. Sometimes that works out for the losers, but most often it doesn't.

So you hope for the best and plan for the worst (building a strong military). What other option is there?

What is the conundrum? If you don't support the elite and you feel they don't support you, don't take the low reward high risk task of fighting their wars?

I don't see where the theoreticcal need for protecting society by military force enters the picture. Especially since the last wars have been nothing about defending yourself. The next one will be righteus and unavoidable?

I am not arguing against having a community that people would be willing to defend. I argue that if the elite is bad enough you make things worse by fighting for them.

What's the advantage of doing this instead of just taxing everyone and paying a salary to soldiers?

> there should either be mandatory military service (or physically intensive alternatives for conscientous objectors) or a life long military tax for people who don't volunteer to join the military before 25

Served in a country with conscription. It is deeply unpopular here, at least amongst the men. Only men need serve which holds them back as women start university and their careers two years earlier. The pay sucks, and there are many less well-off men who have to moonlight, at risk of being court-martialled and set to military prison. The commitment doesn't end there: men can and will be called back annually for ten years after leaving full-time conscription for two to three weeks of reservist training, which disrupts their civilian work. There are negligible benefits for reservists, and conscripts don't get the respect that American veterans and servicemen seem to.

Conscript armies work very differently to volunteer armies; you should be wary of what you're asking for.

The respect that American veterans and servicemen receive is insanely shallow, in both public and institutional support.

I have a few friends who deeply regret their time in the military as it’s let to lifelong physical and mental health issues. I don’t think forcing people to potentially endure that is a good idea.

(One was on a nuclear sub, not sure the others)

If people who volunteered have mental issues, is that fine? The military isn't optional, everyone must do something to support it or find a country with a military they would prefer to join. But people who have a hard time coping in the military should get free help.

I think Americans are already paying for life long military tax. Maybe people who serve don't have to pay for defense portion of tax.

Yeah the idea is to have them pay more with that dedicated tax and pay less elsewhere.

The struggle with getting people into the military has very little to do with anything you just talked about. Educational capacity of the public schooling system that feeds the army is also down(states are not investing in public education), single parents are forced to give up guardianship if their kids want to enter the army, you can’t do weed but you can drink, etc.

It does if you dig a little deeper. You have a pool of jobs that require some level of all the mentioned skills/attributes. That pool contains some for civilian positions and for the military. If the candidate pool is shrinking for both, you have increased competition. Civilian positions will pay more because they can, and they generally require less recruiting due to the better conditions. The military needs to ramp up recruiting, increase waivers, etc to meet the same force requirements.

It's all inter-related. The main cause is a lower eligible pool of candidates, due to many different issues.

I hate to be the one who asks for sources, but you really do need to have some solid data to make claims like "In the very near future only a tiny percentage of the American population will be capable of serving". While my experience is anecdotal, your evaluation does not mesh with it at all, which is that people in the military, even officers, are pretty average or less than average in intelligence, and the PT requirements for the army are completely achievable for a normal person with a couple months of training.

If you've ever interacted with veterans, it's pretty laughable that they are going to "become the new elite". The elite in America has been and will continue to be people who go to ivy league schools for business, finance, or law and then find jobs in wall street, banks, media, and government.

Very quick search

> A new study from the Pentagon shows that 77% of young Americans would not qualify for military service without a waiver due to being overweight, using drugs or having mental and physical health problems.

> https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...

I mean having a bunch of overweight recruits doesn't sound like a big issue to me? Maybe you need to put them on a diet/exercise regime for a couple of months before they're physically fit enough but that doesn't sound like a huge issue if you're expecting them to serve for years or decades.

Obviously physical and mental health problems are a lot more significant but I would imagine that weight is by far the factor that impacts the most people here.

A lot more details here from page 5: https://dacowits.defense.gov/Portals/48/Documents/General%20...

Note that 44% of people are disqualified for multiple reasons. The big disqualifiers are :

Overweight 35%

Medical/Physical 33%

Drug Abuse 32%

Mental Health 25%

The reality is tons of military recruits enlisted and officers have done or are doing drugs, they just lied about it, and the military doesn't care to check

Army units are required to perform random drug testing 4 times a year.

obesity is an easy one, almost a 1/4 population would not qualify

> The United States has the 12th highest obesity rate in the world at 36.2%

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-r...

Obesity was always treatable via methods the military already had available (beating the shit out of people via PT), but they could even add on modern weigh-loss drugs now. Compared to the rest of the cost of the military-industrial complex, it would be a rounding error.

You cannot treat obesity that way unless you want young adult with destroyed joints and nerve damages. I was obese for 3 years (and overweight 5 years prior, following an injury) my ankles still prevent me from really running, and when I go on a hike, the first day (or rather, the first morning after waking up cold) is extremely painful.

Weight loss drug then exercise? That could be a good idea, i think it's easier to readapt/recover from bad joints before 25.

I'm not actually advocating for "beating the shit" out of them; I'm just repeating what a marine told me about his experience.

I was a fat kid with an actual joint disorder (that would never allow me to be in the military), but I lost a lot of weight via marching band in high school while eating double cheeseburgers heartily throughout; there was a lot of fast food nearby. I've also gained and lost weight several times in life but have to tailor my exercise to an extreme to accommodate my disability. That is to say, I can't imagine life with good joints, but I've still managed things somewhat.

If I was actually setting up a sort of pre-boot program, it would indeed feature low-impact exercise and carefully controlled diet for a few months. Weight loss drugs are still a bit new, but I could absolutely see them having a place in such a program.

Yes, absolutely. Different parts of the body heal at different rates. The heart, stomach, and liver adapt very quickly. Other muscles improve less quickly. Joints improve and adapt over weeks. Bone density and flexibility is almost impossible to regain once it’s lost even for young people.

That is why slowly building up slow running speed for long distances, such as 6 miles or more, is vital for improving physical health. It’s not about just the cardio. It’s about strengthening the entire body.

Cheating that and immediately pushing for speed gets people injured.

As an aside, the top ten seems to be mostly island states in the Pacific. Why is that? Smaller populations? They seem to be paradise places yet people are obese.

Or is it a cultural thing? Obesity doesn't need to have the same cultural stigma seen globally.

Historically being fat was a signifier of wealth, as it implies that you can afford a lot of food. Some cultures also see it as a sign of fertility. This was also the case in the Western world until recently.

Another well known historical signifier for wealth was fair skin. As you wouldn’t get a tan if you didn’t have to labour out in the sun.

It's probably due to genetics, their body assimilate food better than Caucasian, due to their diet for 5000 years being really light of fat and sugar, so when they follow the Caucasian diet (2300 cal a day high carbs high fat) it does not work.

Also, they are poor countries who can't produce the food they need for multiple reason (sometime it's population, but often it's mining/industrial pollution related) and they have to import the cheapest food available, ie leftover from US (and recently China) food processing.

So what you're saying is that the US military should advertise in games that you should stop gaming and go play outside?

Or that the US military should stock up on that new (impossible to get) weight loss drug. Offer it as an incentive for joining up.

They're already doing something like that: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/11/23/army-expandin...

What this is reminding me of is the British panic around the 1900s about the health of potential military recruits which may have been linked to urbanization.

Adding to this the military was recognizing this issue prior to 2012 and I can't imagine the situation has improved outside of the military. [1] In my opinion the video is worth a watch even to those using a cellphone.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWN13pKVp9s [video][16m][ted talk with Lieutenant General Mark Hertling]

Concerningly, his data for obesity ends at 2009, and is followed by a prediction for 2030. Overlaid with this data is the tagline "By 2030 [...] the U.S. government projects 42 precent obesity nation wide".

The CDC shows an obesity prevalence of 41.9%... in 2017-2020 [0]. Meaning a concerning national security threat (per the video) that is accelerating. There are dozens of factors, but I'd be remiss not to put at least one foot on the soapbox and say that a car-centric culture only exacerbates the issue.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

You have to ramp up your recruiting if your recruiting pool has shrunk (birth rate drop, BMI issues, substance use increase, etc). That's been happening for decades.

>> fitness limitations mentally, physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

Maybe in the air force or army. I was unaware that the navy had intellectual limitations.

As for physical fitness, few in the military are the door-kicking navy seal types. Most jobs are sitting at computers or fixing equipment. The American military focus on physical fitness looks great on posters, but many other countries chuckle a little. The modern battlefield requires deep technical skills more than good abs. US soldiers are also very young, most leaving before even ten years of active service.

Like not every role is a door kicker, there are some navy jobs done by smart people and others done by less academics minded people, but the navy has some of the best electronics warfare specialists and lots of nuclear engineers.

The military knows just because you sit at a desk, physical fitness still matters for optimal performance, and many office jobs have secondary duties in emergency that are physically demanding, like fire fighting.

>People exercise less and focus less. The result is artificially induced ADHD and more physically fragile people less capable of completing initial entry training without severe or catastrophic muscle/bone injuries.

Young recruits are too physically unfit, have mental health issues, and take too many drugs, which is why WW3 with China will have to be held in Palworld.

The alternative is remotely operated mechs, not necessarily the walking type, just like in the 1995 Screamers movie. China has quite enough people it can draft.

>just like in the 1995 Screamers movie

Thanks for reminding me to go re-watch it.

Seriously, if you don't know it, watch it, it's an underrated sci-fi with the actor from the original RoboCop.

It's made after the Second Variety Phillip K Dick story, which is set during a war between the UN and the USSR.

Thanks, I had no idea. Gonna added to my reading list.

>> If the military’s recruiting efforts are successful, these kids and teens will end up applying the skills they honed while playing games they love to warfare – piloting drones to kill from afar, for example.

If the people they kill are our enemies, who are also trying to kill us, then isn't this a good thing?

I never served in the military and lean pretty far left politically, but I'm always surprised by how some circles portray the military as a caricature of senseless killing.

If some actor decides they want to force their way of life on me and my fellow citizens by military force, then the best and only response to that is a strong military.

That seems reasonable, but my only real experience with someone depriving me of my livelihood is private equity companies that have come in and shipped my job off overseas. Certainly the military didn't help me there.

What. That isn’t the role of the military. This is like complaining that the local police failed to prevent your company from downsizing.

Plenty to criticize about how or what the military is doing, but this ain’t it, chief.

I agree completely. What I'm saying is that I find the military nearly irrelevant to promoting the general welfare of the US. I'm not particularly worried about Canada or Mexico getting any big ideas about starting anything with us in the foreseeable future.

The idea is that no actor has ever tried to force their way of life on Americans. We’ve been attack on home soil a tiny number of times.

First, there are a lot of people who really are pacifist or pacifist leaning.

And even for the rest, for the large number of people living in countries that haven't been invaded in living memory, I don't think they think of the military like that. In the US case, I assume people will think of what the military has actually done in the last few decades, i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan, and maybe some smaller things like ISIS, Yemen, Libya etc.

By the way, what game teaches any sort of militarily applicable skill? There's no regenerating health in the real world and officers don't lead with right clicks.

They were in high schools handing out free CDs for the America's Army computer game twenty years ago.

America's Army was wild. An online FPS PvP game where you only ever play as the 'good guys'. It swaps the enemy models to always appear as insurgents so you're never shooting at, or being shot at by, American soldiers.

A lot of games do this sort of thing now. Even in Halo you're always the blue team (as if blue/red teams were ever politically controversial).

Interesting - didn't play it long but never realised

This reminds me of the movie “The 5th Wave” (2016)

> the military have used deception and technology to convince the rescued children that the humans outside the base have been possessed. They provide military training to the children, forming them into squads to go on kill missions outside the base. Meanwhile, the military was in fact run by the aliens

Sometimes it feels like most modern YA fiction is just endlessly remixing Ender's Game and Battle Royal.

It really was wild, and I think the fact that it didn't really have commercial goals allowed the developers to experiment with some pretty "out there" ideas[1] for FPS games. When I first heard of AA and imagined the US Government making a video game, I thought it was going to be kind of inauthentic, like "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?" But it actually didn't turn out to be too bad, when compared with FPS games of the time. Kind of an Operation Flashpoint but even more realistic. It was definitely not CounterStrike though and ultimately those kind of FPSs won.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/snp85x/comment/hw4mk...

Oh forgot about that one. "AA Online" or something.

As I remember it was a kinda boring and ugly game? Compared to say Counter Strike.

Military recruitment always makes me think of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--CmZEJl9bI

Maybe propagandize/recruit more women. 60% of university enrollment female, 25% STEM. If you want bodies for technical military roles, there's your recruitment bottleneck.

Orson Scott Card has entered the chat.

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