football games in particular. By debuting the ads on “Friends,” the Army hoped “to help
broaden its audience and also shake off its stodgy male-only image” (Dao, 2001).
John Leo of US News & World Report complained about the new campaign’s (and along
with it, the Army’s) de-emphasizing of masculinity. He criticized the decision to debut the ad on
“Friends” instead of during the Super Bowl:
The Super Bowl features macho males, while the Clinton administration has been
working for a gender-fair, androgynous Army that seems to downplay aggressiveness
and bravery as too macho. (Even weapons may carry a new stigma. So far, no soldier
has been shown carrying a gun in the “Army of One” ads.) (Leo, 2001)
Despite this criticism, the ads in the campaign don’t show much softness. The print ads use a
dark visual palette and are framed in the stark black and gold of the new star logo. One ad shows
the upper body of a soldier, identified in small print at the top of the page as Sgt. Joseph
Patterson, Enlisted Liaison Operational Forces Interface Group, encased in body armor, face
obscured by a helmet, holding a rifle. It’s an image of a faceless, impenetrable military machine.
While most of the ads picture soldiers without weapons, a few show soldiers with rifles, and one
features a Bradley fighting vehicle.
My sample includes 18 print ads from the “Army of One” campaign, and two of these
picture women. One pictures the face of an African-American woman, Specialist Robin Ingram,
a Transportation Management Coordinator. It reads “This uniform didn’t change me. Earning
the right to wear it did.” This exact same copy appears on another ad that features the face of a
white Infantryman, Specialist Marc DeCarli. Another ad shows the face of a young woman
identified as Specialist Tiffany Komarek of Military Intelligence. Small print along the side of
the page reads “Straight out of the Army language school, I joined a Tactical Analysis Team at
the American Embassy in Bolivia. There I was—my first year in—working with the DEA on a
National Security case reporting straight to the Pentagon.” The “Army of One” ads featuring
women use the same dark tones and overall aesthetic of the campaign as a whole. The women
aren’t overtly feminized, though they also aren’t shown with weapons, and the text mirrors that
of ads that picture men.
This most recent campaign follows the pattern set by the Army over the course of the AVF.
In any given advertising campaign, one or two print ads in a series are likely to show a woman
instead of a man, with basically the same message or theme, or ads might include a few women,
while the majority of soldiers shown would be men. While a few ads have directly addressed
women as women and made reference to their perceived potential concerns and desires, the
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Convention