Military Recruiting

The economic downturn could make it easier to attract new recruits to the military, Defense officials said Friday as they announced that the Pentagon had met its 2008 recruiting goals. Economic uncertainty and a declining job market are likely to make potential recruits and their parents more receptive to a pitch from the military, said David Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness. "We do benefit when things look less positive in civil society," Chu said.

An American-born terrorist who carried out a deadly shooting in front of an Arkansas military recruiting station pleaded guilty to his crimes in an Arkansas courtroom Monday, earning a life sentence without parole and avoiding the death penalty. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, 26, a convert to Islam, had previously confessed to the 2009 crime, in which he drove to the recruiting office in Little Rock and fired numerous rounds, killing one Army soldier and wounding another. Police said he told them he did so to protest the U.S. military and "what they had done to Muslims in the past.

Harvard has reversed its policy of barring the Pentagon from using its law school's career services office for recruiting. Harvard contends that the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays violates the university's guidelines on nondiscrimination. The policy was reversed after the Pentagon warned it would enforce a law requiring campuses to offer recruiting access or risk losing federal grants.

A bankrupt janitor from Seattle who admired Osama bin Laden and a Los Angeles man who said he was going on jihad were accused of plotting to attack a military recruiting center as vengeance for violence committed against Afghan civilians, according to a federal complaint Thursday. "Imagine how fearful America will be, and they'll know they can't push the Muslims around," Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, 33, told an FBI informant, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

With the Arab world's mightiest army flexing its strength at the head of the Persian Gulf, about 500 young men of this little oil sheikdom answered a call Sunday for fresh recruits. Fifteen-year-old Ali Hassan arrived at the enrollment center with four of his friends. He was ready to sign up, he told a reporter, and boasted of his prowess at bagging bustards, a Middle Eastern scavenger bird.

New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's gay rights office has ordered the State University of New York at Buffalo to bar military recruiters from campus because the armed forces will not accept homosexuals, officials said. The ruling, which stems from a complaint filed in October by a lesbian law student, could eventually affect all 64 campuses in the nation's largest public university system, state officials said.

High school students are meeting unlikely celebrities at many campuses this year during their annual College Day fairs--spit-and-polish military recruiters. "Are we giving out $10 bills?" asked Army Staff Sgt. Tom Cromer, after students mobbed his table at a recent college information fair at Fillmore High School.

One by one, 60 members of the 82nd Airborne Division parachuted to the ground and secured their chutes. Then they fell into formation and went about their mission--singing in perfect unison: "We are all-American and proud to be, known as the soldiers of liberty . . . ." "The kids just loved it. They went bananas," said the Army recruiter who organized the event for a crowd of 300 at the Los Alamitos Armed Forces Reserve Center.

Col. Casey Wardynski was schmoozing with some friends at a Los Angeles cocktail party a few years back when the idea of the Game came to him. What better way, he mused, than a video game to give potential Army recruits a taste of the military -- everything from boot camp to hostage rescues? What better method to attract techno-savvy prospects than with a state-of-the-art electronic come-on?

The Supreme Court justices signaled Tuesday that they would uphold the military's right to recruit on college campuses and at law schools, despite its policy of excluding openly gay people from its ranks. The justices gave a thoroughly skeptical hearing to the position of some law faculties that they have a free-speech right to bar military recruiters, a claim that was upheld by a lower court. U.S. Solicitor General Paul D.

He called himself the "supreme commander. " From a storefront in Temple City decorated to look like a military recruiting center, David Deng raised an army of more than 100 Chinese nationals and claimed they were members of an elite U.S. special forces unit, authorities said. Together, they marched in local Chinese New Year parades and even received a special military tour in uniform at the USS Midway museum in San Diego. Chinese-language newspapers ran photos of the troops with prominent community leaders.

Local governments can't ban military recruitment of minors because that would interfere with legitimate and constitutionally protected activities of the U.S. government, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. The decision by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said ordinances adopted by the Northern California cities of Eureka and Arcata were unconstitutional because they sought to control federal government activities. "The states have no power to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress to carry into execution the powers vested in the general government," the judges said.

A 21-year-old Baltimore construction worker, who drew federal scrutiny after he boasted on Facebook about his devotion to violent jihad, was arrested Wednesday after he allegedly tried to blow up a U.S. military recruitment center with a dummy car bomb built by the FBI. The dramatic take-down is the second FBI sting since Thanksgiving against an alleged homegrown terrorist trying to detonate a powerful car bomb. It raised fresh concerns about how English-speaking extremists from Al Qaeda and its allies are increasingly able to recruit Americans willing to commit mass violence.

On a chilly Saturday morning this month, the future soldiers of the U.S. Army huffed and puffed through push-ups, sit-ups and stretches in Whittier Narrows Regional Park in South El Monte. There was the gangly white kid with the blond buzz cut and the buffed-out Latino dude, head draped in a black bandanna. And then there was Jennifer Ren, small, slight and bespectacled, an immigrant from China who gamely kept up with the guys and sees the Army as a ticket to U.S. citizenship and a job in accounting and finance.

For the first time in more than 35 years, the U.S. military has met all of its annual recruiting goals, with hundreds of thousands of young people enlisting despite the near-certainty that they will go to war. The Pentagon, which made the announcement Tuesday, said the economic downturn and rising joblessness, as well as bonuses and other factors, had led more qualified youths to enlist. The military has not seen such across-the-board success since the all-volunteer force was established in 1973.

Looking more like a student than a soldier, the young Indian in jeans and a T-shirt snapped his heels together and stood at attention in front of an American flag. He raised his right hand and pledged to defend the United States against all enemies. The enlistment ceremony earlier this month at a military center near Los Angeles International Airport took less than five minutes. With that, he became the 101st person in Los Angeles to join the Army under a program that significantly increases the number of immigrants eligible to serve.

The nation's armed services met or exceeded their recruitment goals for the first half of fiscal 1987, the Pentagon announced. Overall, the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps enlisted 152,000 men and women during the six months that ended in March, exceeding their combined goal of 150,900.

If you're looking for Michael March, he's probably in the basement, slogging on the treadmill. Or he may be doing push-ups in front of the TV. At 38, he wants to be prepared when he begins Army basic training later this week. "I know I'm going to get picked on as the old guy in boot camp," he said. "I don't want to be last." Traditionally the Army has attracted the young, many of them fresh out of high school. They join for the promise of adventure, the chance to be part of something bigger, and a free college education.

The man accused of killing a soldier and wounding another outside a military recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., pleaded not guilty Tuesday. Prosecutors charged Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a 23-year-old Muslim convert, with capital murder and 15 counts of engaging in a terrorist act in connection with Monday's shooting, which left Army Pvt. William Long, 23, dead, and Army Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, 18, injured. Muhammad was ordered held without bail.