Where Have All the Recruits Gone?
It might not seem like the best idea for a Navy recruiter to use the phrase "narcissistic praise junkies" to refer to potential sailors. But it turned up in a presentation at the Annual Navy Workforce Research and Analysis Conference to describe the qualities of so-called "millennial" kids, the ones they're trying to get to join the Navy now. Here's a link to the whole presentation. (Warning: It's a PowerPoint document.)
But along with the amusing pieces in the presentation (favorite line: "This is not just a generation gap, but dealing with a somewhat alien life force." And a translation of l33t speak: Navy! FTW!), there is something that shows what we've been hearing all along: that the kids today just aren't all that interested in heading over to Iraq. Check out the slide below, showing the negative effect of the Iraq war on kids' patriotism and their likelihood to join the military.
Total sidenote: In the slide of the presentation that talks about the millennials' trademarks (never seen a film camera, always been online, etc.), there is one odd lapse for a military document. It says, "WW1 started nearly a century before he was born (For Boomers, Civil War started a century before birth)." Now, check me on this, but World War I started in 1914 (1917 if you're dating it to when America entered the war), which is 60-70 years before the millennials start being born (depending on when you count the beginning of the millennial generation). And the Civil War started in 1861, and assuming we're counting the boomers as being born after World War II but before the Vietnam War, that's about 80-some-odd years later. Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but don't they teach bloody dates at Annapolis anymore?
(Thanks to Danger Room.)
- JJ Sutherland
A slide from a presentation about recruiting members of the millennial generation at the Annual Navy Workforce Research and Analysis Conference.
Conference Web site4:58 PM ET | 09-28-2007 | permalink
