With 6 percent of its land occupied by military bases, Hawai‘i is our most densely militarized state. But young activists are rejecting recruiting efforts and military influence.

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April 17, 2024 / Saliha Bayrak / The Nation - Pete Doktor was lost. Living in Southern California, with the end of high school approaching, he wanted to be a musician, but had no idea how he would pay for music school. His father, a World War II veteran with a wealth of stories on fighting fascism, told him the military was offering money for college.

Doktor had no intention of joining right away, but decided to take a qualification exam. The recruiters started pressuring him, asking if he was too “scared” to enlist and telling him that experience as an army medic would help him later find work. The idea of being able to find such stability and fulfill his “kūleana”—the Hawaiian word for responsibility—was eventually enough to persuade him.

But when Doktor left three years later and started searching for jobs, employers told him the basic first aid training he received was not nearly enough to find work in medicine. He felt misled. “[The military] has an arsenal of things to use to trap people wherever they’re most vulnerable or desperate,” he said.

Motivated by this dissolution, he instead sought to reconnect with his mother’s side and teach English in Okinawa, once a sovereign kingdom in the Pacific that became a military colony of Japan. His next move was to Hawai‘i, where he would learn demilitarization from the Kānaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiians, and “fight the global military empire.” For over 10 years, he worked to ensure that the most vulnerable of his students did not become prey to military recruiters as he once was.

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April 30, 2025 /  Rebecca Kheel and Steve Beynon / Military.com - High school students whose campuses do not have a Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program would be able to join units at another school under a bill being introduced in Congress.

The expansion of the JROTC program is part of a broader bill being introduced by Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, intended to build on recent momentum in recruiting by expanding the military's access to high schools.

"For me, choosing to serve our country opened the door for the American dream, allowed me to afford college, and paved the way for a life committed to service," Ernst, who served in the Iowa National Guard, said in a statement. "By increasing avenues to the benefits and pathways of a career in the military, we can unlock even more opportunities and brighter futures for our next generation."

The bill, dubbed the Service Enlistment and Recruitment of Valuable Engagement, or SERVE, Act, would specifically direct the Pentagon to create a policy that allows high schools to have "cross-town" affiliations with schools that host JROTC units so students can "enroll in the JROTC program of the host unit and participate in activities at both campuses without dedicated staff," according to bill text obtained exclusively by Military.com.

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April 23, 2025 / Edward Hasbrouck / Edward Hasbrouck's Blog - The Selective Service System has confirmed that, as of this week, personnel from the so-called Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have arrived at the SSS and have been given access to the SSS database of men registered for a possible military draft.

Today an SSS spokesperson provided me with this official response to my questions about DOGE and SSS records:

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A DOGE representative visited our Agency this week. We’ve established a great working relationship. They asked us about our data and requested access, which we gave in compliance with the President’s Executive Order on Establishing and Implementing the Department of Government Efficiency.

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The SSS spokesperson also told me that no new computer matching programs involving SSS registration records have been carried out (yet) by DOGE. But it’s not clear whether the SSS would even know what DOGE has done with SSS data, once DOGE has gotten access to it and possibly exfiltrated it. DOGE and the SSS have operated computer matching programs that appear to violate the Computer Matching Act, so there’s little reason to expect that either would provide the required advance notice of new uses of SSS data.

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23 April 2025 / Fabiola Cardozo Ponte / NNOMY - Comenzó desde muy pequeña, al nacer y crecer en un entorno de precariedad y dificultades económicas sentí la hostilidad del mundo. La violencia estructural reduce tus oportunidades de superación y hace de tu vida un sinfín de retos cotidianos. Vivir en un hogar pobre donde la violencia y sus distintas manifestaciones estaban presentes, me hizo entender que no era adecuado, ni justo para mí o cualquier otro ser humano. Con el tiempo crecí rechazando toda expresión de violencia, pero al mismo tiempo fortaleciendo mi rebelde, mi pensamiento crítico y mi insaciable necesidad de investigar otras formas de relacionarnos. Desde pequeña tuve la certeza de que la educación era mi única alternativa para superar mi situación de pobreza extrema y me refugié en libros. Tenía una sensibilidad especial ante las injusticias, los desaires y la marginalización de la era víctima, y aunque mi destino parecía ya estar determinado por mi clase social y mi género, seguí como buena rebelde empeñada en lo que tanto anhelaba… A mis 16 años tenía una clara percepción de los postulados de Gandhi, de su resistencia pacífica, de su Satyagraha y de rechazar cualquier imposición social injusta. Las dificultades económicas continuaron y aunque pase por distintas universidades publicas fue en 2018 cuando finalmente alcance graduarme de la Universidad Central de Venezuela como Socióloga, y en 2021 de la Universidad Latinoamericana y del Caribe como Especialista en Derecho Internacional Humanitario.

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4/04/2025 / Scott Harding & Seth Kershner / Jacobin - For the past three years, the US military has suffered through its worst recruiting crisis since the end of the draft in 1973. The Army Reserve has not met its annual quota of new recruits for nearly ten years. In fiscal year 2023, the Navy and Air Force failed to meet their recruiting goals — the first time this happened in twenty-four years for the Air Force, despite being traditionally viewed as the most desirable branch of service. And since 2013, male enlistments in the Navy have dropped more than one-third. With a shared sense of alarm, current and former military officials, members of Congress, think tanks, and others warn that these personnel shortages undermine US military readiness and its ability to fight future wars across the globe.