Military appeals to base materialism

Posted by Josh Friedlander | 3 Comments

One of the latest army rah rah commercials has some young polished pilot talking about how the most sophisticated piece of machinery he’d ever driven at home was a tractor and now, in the army, he’s piloting a multi-million-dollar plane.

These commercials imply that by entrusting these soldiers with expensive equipment, the army holds them in equal worth. “I drive a million-dollar tank/plane/whatever” so I must be worth millions.

Well, that’s certainly idiotic. Army machinery costs so much for a couple of reasons: reliability and greed. There was an episode of the West Wing in which a staffer questions the need of an army ash tray to cost hundreds of dollars. A colonel (guest star Kevin Bacon, I think) smashes the tray and it breaks into a few neat pieces instead of turning into dozens of shards. The point: that these items are made much better than typical retail items in order to save lives.

But in a military whose high-level procurement officers face a simple conflict of interest (the lure of lucrative post-military employment in private industry), it’s not hard to imagine that military equipment is routinely overpriced. That million dollar plane doesn’t mean anything.

Moreover, if one wants to be truly cynical, if you were a government supplier who would you want piloting your plane? A grizzled veteran or some farm boy? The more planes we lose, the more the army will need to replace…

If anybody handed me millions of dollars in hardware to “pilot” I’d be looking around the table to make sure I’m not the sucker. Maybe I’m wrong to find these commercials insulting to the intelligence of impressionable young Americans. I think there are several good reasons to join our armed forces, but the price of the hardware you’ll be using strikes me as an appeal to callow egos…not a good reason at all.

Comments