the benefits, including college money or an enlistment bonus. While the announcer speaks, the
viewer sees shots of tanks rolling, parachutists jumping out of a plane, helicopters, and soldiers
climbing a net, paddling a small boat, and creeping along in combat gear, as well as of a young
white woman and a young black man in uniform. This ad carries through the themes begun in
the earlier advertisements, in terms of mentioning intangibles along with the tangible benefits of
service, with somewhat more emphasis on development and improvement of the self, as fit the
new slogan. A young white man is the main face of the Army in this representation, but an
African-American man and a white woman are also visually present.
The Army changed strategies with its print campaign as well. The Army had new
educational benefits to advertise, like the Army College Fund, the New Army College Fund and
the New GI Bill Plus, but it also returned to an emphasis on job training. Unlike the campaign of
the early AVF, however, this time the Army was specifically marketing interesting, exciting job
skills (as opposed to just a good trade) and advanced technology. These job opportunities
included “96 Bravo,” also known as intelligence, “one of the biggest mental challenges the Army
offers,” as well as “98 Golf” or signal intelligence, which is a soldier who “translates and
analyzes foreign radio communications.” The soldiers in these ads are all smiling young men in
battle dress uniforms (camouflage), pictured with or using military equipment.
The 1980s, however, didn’t just begin with a new slogan for the Army. The decade also
began with an attempt by the Army and the Air Force to scale back the number of women
recruited until their impact on readiness, which had already been the subject of study in the
1970s, could be further studied. Even before the conclusion of the Women in the Army Study,
the Army barred women from 23 military occupational specialties that had previously been open
to them because of potential proximity to combat operations in wartime (Holm, 1992:402).
Holm attributes the attempt to limit the recruitment of women to both resistance to female
incursions into previously male areas and to a desire to undermine the AVF and convince the
incoming Reagan administration to return to a draft (ibid.:395). The Pentagon was not
considering conscription, and didn’t support new restrictions on women’s roles. In fact, later in
the decade, the Pentagon studied ways to address various issues faced by women in the services
and to achieve some consistency among the services in their application of combat restrictions.
The result was the Department of Defense’s 1988 “Risk Rule,” which established uniform
criteria for closing non-combat positions to women, based on the risk that they would be exposed
6
While the Army tended to picture white women more frequently than non-white women, it’s representations of
women did regularly include African-American women.
10
Convention