Jim Mannion, Washington / AFP
06/24/2005

The Pentagon has gathered information on some 30 million high school students and other military-age youths in a centralized database that is used to identify potential military recruits, defense officials said Thursday.

The effort drew fire from privacy advocates but a senior Pentagon official defended it as necessary to maintain the all-volunteer force, which has been struggling to make its recruiting goals.

"This is a recruited force," said David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel. "People have to be made aware that we're interested in them, that they are good candidates for military service."

The information gathered includes names, social security numbers, grade point averages, ethnicity, education level, high school name, telephone numbers, addresses, field of study, intent to go to college, interest in the military and scores on military aptitude tests, according to a public notice published May 23.

The purpose "is to provide a single central facility within the Department of Defense to compile, process and distribute files of individuals who meet age and minimum school requirements for military service," said the notice in the Federal Register.

"The information will be provided to the services to assist them in their direct marking recruiting efforts," the notice said.

Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the military services have been gathering such information on potential recruits for up to a decade, but it was centralized under the Pentagon's Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies (JAMRS) office in 2002.

The public notice was delayed until this May, initially because program officials were not informed until 2004 that it was required under US privacy laws, officials said. It then took a year for the public notice to gain approval.
A coalition of privacy advocate groups called on the Pentagon to scrap the database.

"This database represents an unprecedented foray of the government into direct marketing techniques previously only performed by the private sector," they said in a statement posted on the website of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"These techniques simply are not compatible with the Privacy Act, as direct marketing tactics increasingly call for massive amounts of personal information," it said. Chu, however, said the military was authorized under a 1982 law to gather such information for recruiting purposes.

"Contacting young Americans to make them aware of the opportunities of military service is critical to the success of the volunteer force," said Chu.
As the war in Iraq has dragged on, the army in particular has faced increasing difficulty in enlisting new recruits, falling short of its goal each month for the past four months by larger percentage.

"If you don't want conscription, you have to give the Department of Defense an avenue to contact people," he said.
The information was gathered from the Department of Motor Vehicles, Selective Service registrations, and commercial vendors.

Chu said social security numbers are kept in a scrambled form and used to eliminate duplicate files. He said the information has been used only for recruiting purposes, and has never been shared with other government agencies.
Mullen, an advertising firm that works for JAMRS, subcontracted a company in Wakefield, Massachusetts called BeNow to manage the database, he said.
The information helps recruiters "target their messages," Krenke said.

A component of the database known as the "high school master file," the one most heavily used by recruiters, has the names of some 4.5 million students aged 16 to 18, said Captain Maurice Brown of the JAMRS office.

Since 2002, files on some 30 million military age persons have been compiled in the database, although at any one time there are about 12 million names on file.
Besides high school students, the office gathers information on all college students and some graduate students.