The US Army’s latest attempt to point the youth of America towards a career in the Armed Forces involves starting its very own eSports team.
The new team will be used as part of a marketing initiative to make the Army seem more relatable, sending them to tournaments where they can let people know what the army does, and how you can get involved.
The Army invited veterans, reservists, and active members alike to sign up to be involved with this new initiative via a Reddit AMA last week, though any members of actual eSports team itself needs to be an active army, as it’s essentially “an All-Army team”.
Those who aren’t active members of The Army – such as veterans – who still want to be involved are being offered opportunities to beta testing army apps, and be a part of training and simulation software.
An Army eSports Twitter was also set up, but it looks like it was suspended. Presumably, whenever they get that back up and running they’ll need someone to maintain it, so it’s looking like this initiative will have a variety of jobs for everyone.
The eSports team itself won’t consist of recruiters, but US Army will be sending such people to esports tournaments along with the team.
It was announced earlier in the year, when the Army was 6,500 soldiers short of its target for the year ending in September, so this recruitment drive makes sense – even if I’m not entirely convinced gamers will sign up in droves just because the Army played a few rounds of CS:GO with them.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.