It might seem quite unusual but the latest trend for the US army recruiters is to actively participate in the video gaming fairs and looking for young gamers interested in joining the army. In this
YouTube video we are following how the Esport program started in the US army and how today the gaming world appears to offer many opportunities both for those who are looking for fresh recruits and also for boys and girls willing to join the military forces.
But hold on: don’t think that they are hiring full time gamers; in order to join the E-sports team, one first needs to go to a bootcamp and get into a usual training. Maybe he could also be deployed on a mission. Being part of the program you are a full time member of the army and according to the captains while playing video games they can find someone with the right skills, discipline, desire, the communication and problem solving ability.
Last year there were 6500 applicants for 16 spots in the team in Fort Knox, Kentucky where is the national recruit center. In the basement there is a state of the art gaming training center where soldiers play video games from 9 am to 10 pm everyday. Playing and meeting different people, they are showing the military lifestyle through the lenses of a gamer. It is very simple: while playing one can easily type in the chat window E-sports US army and if interested, you can find a real soldier to walk you through the whole career.
The program started in 2018 when the army didn’t meet their recruit goals for the first time in 13 years. So it was obvious that new ways of recruiting soldiers are needed. For the last year the goal was to enlist 66 000 new soldiers. And also with the growing number of people playing video games in the last year due to the pandemic, the pool of potential recruits is growing exponentially. After a short period of a break in July last year when the US representative Alexandra Cortez tried to introduce an amendment to prevent the military from using E-sports for recruiting, the amendment was defeated and the program continued to turn virtual fighters into real soldiers.
