US Marines go for old heads as well as jarheads

The US Marine Corps is to start recruiting older men and women with other career skills instead of focusing only on the traditional method of persuading raw teenagers from high school to become “jarhead” warriors.(*) General David Berger, the corps commandant, wants people who can be multi-talented, capable of rapidly mastering surveillance drone missions and maintaining the most advanced weaponry for the new “big-power” threats posed by China and Russia. He is introducing his new campaign to recruit more experienced candidates who might stay a long time in the Marines. Out-of-school applicants tend to join up for only short periods and whatever skills they pick up on their way are then lost to the corps. However, will older recruits, perhaps in their early 30s without any previous military experience, be “rough and tough enough” to match the younger generation for fitness and fighting ferocity? In presenting his ideas for a changing corps, Berger rejected the idea that bringing in older people would reduce the lethality of the Marines. “We have to treat people like human beings instead of inventory [sic]. The physical, the toughness will be at least as demanding as it is today or has been in the past. I think it’ll actually be more so,” he said. The corps had to be smarter to compete with adversaries such as China, he said, and one way was to allow more mature recruits to join the Marines “laterally”, entering at a rank appropriate to their education, experience and previous career talents. Under the present recruiting system, applicants can enlist at 17, with parental consent, up to 28. The maximum enlistment age is 35 but older applicants must have prior military experience. Turnover in the corps is exceptionally high. About 36,000 Marines every year – 75 per cent of the annual intake - decide not to reenlist after their first tour of duty of three years. The recruiting system is based on a set of conditions that existed in the 1980s and 1990s and it was no longer working, Berger said. He wanted to keep Marines for much longer periods and train them to be multi-tasking warriors able “to talk to Reaper drones and understand the satellite connection required to do that”, as well as fire machineguns. Berger has previously outlined one new mission for Marines: island-hopping in the Indo-Pacific armed with anti-ship missiles to meet the growing threat from China in the region. *Jarheads is the nickname for Marines arising from the uniform’s high collar, originally made of leather, which gave the impression of a head sticking out of a jar.