Until recently, on any random evening you could watch members of the US Navy’s Goats & Glory esports team streaming on Twitch. The streaming sailors play Apex Legends, Spellbreak, Among Us, and—of course—Call of Duty: Warzone. They’re not alone. The National Guard, Army, and Air Force all have their own Twitch channels, where they stream video games and talk with the public. It hasn’t been going well.
After gamers first learned of the Pentagon’s push into the gaming space, they spammed chat rooms with messages about US military atrocities. When the Army and Navy banned gamer and progressive activist Jordan Uhl for asking about recruiting and war crimes on Twitch, he threatened a First Amendment lawsuit. Both branches then stopped banning people from their streams.
“For younger gamers, it speaks to how disillusioned they’ve become with the American experiment,” Uhl says. After the controversies, New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to pass a measure banning the Pentagon from recruiting on Twitch. It failed, but had the support of more than 100 other lawmakers.
The Navy has taken a step back from streaming on Twitch after a spate of recent controversies. On September 13, Personnel Specialist Brandon Chandler streamed on the U.S. Navy’s twitch channel and played with “personal friends” who used screen names that referenced the U.S. Bombing of Nagasaki and a racial slur. In a similar incident the same week, a member of the U.S. National Guard streaming team repeated a white nationalist meme on Twitch.
The Navy kicked Chandler off the Goats & Glory team and hasn’t returned to Twitch since. The National Guard also said it would take a break from streaming.
But they’ll be back. The US military needs recruits, and it has to meet people where they live. Increasingly, those potential recruits live online in places like Twitch.
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Sign up for our Games newsletter and never miss our latest gaming tips, reviews, and features.The American military as a whole is facing a recruitment crisis. The US Army has struggled to meet its recruiting goals since 2018, and only met its 2019 goal after cutting expectations and assigning 700 more recruiters. In part, that’s because the Pentagon’s needs are changing. “The US military no longer primarily recruits individuals from the most disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds,” reads recent research in The Journal of Strategic Studies. “Technological, tactical, operational and doctrinal changes have led to a change in the demand for personnel.” More simply put: The military needs highly skilled and technically savvy youth, but it’s having trouble finding them.
To fill its recruitment gap, the Pentagon is looking to gamers. “Gamers utilize skills every day while they compete, sometimes without even realizing it,” reads a Navy recruiting “Guide for Streamers.” “Detail-oriented and working toward long-term goals, problem solvers under time pressures, perseverance in the face of frustration and roadblocks. These are the same skill sets used in the fields in nuclear engineering, aviation, special warfare, cryptology, and counter-intelligence.”
