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The revolution in military recruitment advertising to people of color and women played an essential role in making the US military one of the most diverse institutions in the United States. Starting at the dawn of the all-volunteer era, Jeremiah Favara illuminates the challenges at the heart of military inclusion by analyzing recruitment ads published in three commercial magazines: Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, and Ebony. Favara draws on Black feminism, critical race theory, and queer of color critique to reveal how the military and advertisers affected change by deploying a set of strategies and practices called tactical inclusion. As Favara shows, tactical inclusion used representations of servicemembers in the new military to connect with people susceptible to recruiting efforts and rendered these new audiences vulnerable to, valuable to, and subject to state violence. Compelling and eye-opening, Tactical Inclusion combines original analysis with personal experience to chart advertising's role in building the all-volunteer military.

The revolution in military recruitment advertising to people of color and women played an essential role in making the US military one of the most diverse institutions in the United States.

The revolution in military recruitment advertising to people of color and women played an essential role in making the US military one of the most diverse institutions in the United States. Starting at the dawn of the all-volunteer era, Jeremiah Favara illuminates the challenges at the heart of military inclusion by analyzing recruitment ads published in three commercial magazines: Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, and Ebony. Favara draws on Black feminism, critical race theory, and queer of color critique to reveal how the military and advertisers affected change by deploying a set of strategies and practices called tactical inclusion. As Favara shows, tactical inclusion used representations of servicemembers in the new military to connect with people susceptible to recruiting efforts and rendered these new audiences vulnerable to, valuable to, and subject to state violence. Compelling and eye-opening, Tactical Inclusion combines original analysis with personal experience to chart advertising’s role in building the all-volunteer military.

This chapter reflects on the stakes and consequences of tactical inclusion. Under the Trump administration and Trumpism, fetishism of militarism and violence has been key to White nationalist, xenophobic, misogynist, and antiqueer politics. In contrast to vehemently exclusionary policies and rhetoric, the military has been held up as an institution committed to diversity and inclusion. Focusing on three select events taking place in the summer of 2020—the role the military played in state responses to Black Lives Matter protests, a statement calling for an antiracist military academy issued by graduates of West Point, and the murder of Vanessa Guillen—the conclusion grapples with the resonances of tactical inclusion and the consequences of a decades-long project to sell military inclusion as the realized promise of equality.

This chapter explores efforts between 1992 and 2000 to portray a multicultural military. In response to the Persian Gulf War, policy changes related to gender and sexuality, and an industrial and cultural emphasis on multiculturalism, advertisers created ads focusing on narratives of transformation. Based on an embrace of combat and a push to portray the military as racially diverse, recruiting ads promised Black men and Latinx men a transformative experience, in which they could fulfill expectations of racialized citizenship by becoming warrior patriots and embodiments of state authority. In contrast, ads touting new positions for women emphasized how the military would not transform women but, rather, required them to remain recognizable as women within gender normativity and narratives of hetero-romance.

This chapter focuses on recruiting strategies and representations from 1980 through 1991. Framed as a corrective to perceptions of the increasingly racially and gender diverse military as low quality, recruitment advertisements emphasized remasculinization in an exceptional military. Advertisements represented the military as an institution where young Americans deserved and earned benefits of military service by virtue of hard work and commitments to high-tech militarism, capitalism, and racialized heteronormativity. Represented in alignment with Reagan-era narratives of the supremacy of promilitary and profamily capitalism, figures including high-tech soldiers, martial capitalists, and proud military families were constructed to make room for women, Black Americans, and people of color within visions of an exceptional military that remained invested in manliness, Whiteness, and heteronormativity.

My first memories of military recruiting slogans and advertisements date back to when I was in elementary school. The phrase “Be all you can be” was a cultural fixture throughout my youth, a meme that circulated through school hallways and sports fields. I have clear memories of seeing knights on television fighting their way through living chessboards and of young men braving labyrinths and gauntlets filled with fire and mythical monsters. When these knights and men reached their destination, a lightning strike magically transformed them into U.S. Marines. “Be all you can be” entered the pop-culture lexicon when the U.S. Army first used it as their recruiting slogan in 1981 and the marine corps ads I remember were featured in magazines and on television throughout the 1990s. While I can’t pinpoint my first encounter with military recruitment advertising, it made enough of an impression that I can easily recall specific slogans and ads more than thirty years later. As I grew older, my relationship to military recruiting began to take a more concrete shape...

Focusing on the years between 2000 and 2008, this chapter interrogates how advertisers sought to provide military service with a set of compelling meanings prior to and during the war on terror. Recruitment ads emphasized what the military did for the world through multicultural benevolence, a gendered and racialized formation in which representations of the military were framed as evidence of the military’s moral superiority, guided by dual commitments to inclusion and humanitarianism. Through images and narratives of racial inclusion, nostalgic exceptionalism, and racialized martial maternity, recruiting ads revealed the paradox of tactical inclusion, in which new martial figures including Black women, heteropatriotic families, and exceptional Black service members became visible as violence and death in war and were increasingly a defining aspect of military service.

This chapter explores the culmination of tactical inclusion in the years between 2008 and 2016. Guided by a broader sense of social progress associated with Barack Obama’s election, often cast as postracial and postfeminist, military violence was melded with an official commitment to diversity, a configuration of militarized diversity. Influenced by the end of policies banning women in combat and prohibiting openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender service members, recruitment efforts constructed narratives of postgender militarism and homomartial pride, both of which revealed how militarized diversity was crafted through investments in masculinist violence and the policing of a rigid gender binary. Militarized diversity exposed the operationalization of inclusion and diversity not as realizations of equality or liberation but as war-fighting imperatives.

This chapter focuses on marketization, a process of defining military service in relation to the labor market in recruitment advertising, during the early years of the AVF between 1973 and 1980. Recruiting ads represented the military as a recuperative institution aiding in the production of successful economic citizens. Three figures—soldier laborers, martial feminists, and good Black soldiers—were constructed to portray the newly voluntary military as a solution to problems of economic stagnation, sexism, and racism and delineated the normative parameters of gender, sexuality, and race through which new recruits were included in the military.