Category: Terrorism, Security, and Defense Reform
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Only five years after its launch, the Army is retiring their recruitment slogan "An Army of One".
In its battle to win the hearts and minds of recruiting-age Americans, the Army is replacing its main ad slogan - "An Army of One" - with one it hopes will pack more punch: "Army Strong."
I'm not sure about "Army Strong" but it sure beats the hell out of "An Army of One", which always seemed misguided to me. The Army as a bastion of individualism? Their whole training program is designed to get you to stop thinking like an individual and start thinking as part of a unit. I bet there wasn't a whole lot of love for "An Army of One" at Fort Benning.
An analyst quoted in the story makes the same point, but more tartly:
Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute research group, said the previous slogan seemed to promote the notion that you could join the Army and preserve your individuality.
"If you want to be an 'Army of One' you probably want to join the Hell's Angels, not the U.S. Army," he said.
Gee. Ya think?
UPDATE (7PM): I can't believe this didn't occur to me until now. Does anyone else see in "Army Strong" a pretty blatant attempt to copy the Lance Armstrong Foundation's phenomenally successful "LiveSTRONG" slogan?
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If you think anything I write here represents the opinions of anybody but myself, you need more help than I can give you. The opinions are all mine, folks. Nobody else's.
If that's too hard to understand... well, I'm sorry. There's only so much I can do. I'm not a therapist, and I'm not a miracle worker. I wish I could help you work through your delusional belief that I'm speaking for anyone else but myself. Honestly, I do. But in the end, that's a monkey you'll have to get off your back on your own. Sorry.
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Fire BAAAD
Army STROONG
GRRR
Brian: "You are all individuals!"
Crowd: "We are all individuals!"
Individual: "I'm not!"
Brian: "You are all individuals!"
Crowd: "We are all individuals!"
Individual: "I'm not!"
MT gave me an error the first time--not my fault.
So, the Army wants you to use performance-encancing drugs?
Why not? The Air Force does:
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,57434,00.html
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0301/02/lol.02.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=95390943&dopt=Citation
"be all that you can be" worked, which shows you should not change something just for change's sake
Well, in fairness, given how swimmingly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going they could probably change the slogan to "Free Beer and Blow Jobs" and they'd still have trouble hitting the recruitment targets...