Army recruiters are having a challenging time convincing Americans born between 1995 and 2005 to sign up and serve. The situation is so dire that Army Recruiting Command has turned to e-Sports video game tournaments.
“It is incredible, the amount of coverage that you get and the amount of the Z Gens that are watching these games,” Gen. Frank Muth, the head of Army Recruiting Command, told NPR.
Sponsoring video game tournaments is an effort to boost recruitment after the Army fell short of its 76,500 recruitment goal by 6,500 people last year.
“Calling the Z generation on the phone doesn’t work anymore,” Gen. Muth told NPR. “We’re really giving the power back to our recruiters to go on Twitter, to go on Twitch, to go on Instagram, and use that as a venue to start a dialogue with the Z generation.”
NPR noted that a recent e-Sports tournament featured an Army recruiter as an announcer and went viral with more than 2 million views, adding that "Half [the views] were from people aged 17 to 24."
To further implement the strategy, the Army is now screening more than 4,000 applications from soldiers who want to play video games.
Army Recruiting Command will select 30 of the service's top gamers to be on the new Army e-Sports Team to compete in national gaming tournaments.
Generation Z soldiers are part of this subculture, according to Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Jones, a noncommissioned officer overseeing the Army e-sports Team.
archive.ph
zerohedge.com