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Kids now are ‘alien force’ to Navy

Today’s civilian pool of potential sailors is made up of “narcissistic praise junkies” and constitutes an “alien life force” to older Navy recruiters, according to a presentation on selling the Navy to the so-called “millennial” generation — people born in the mid- and late 1980s now in their late teens and early 20s.

The presentation was part of the Annual Navy Workforce Research and Analysis Conference at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., which addressed a wide array of recruitment and retention matters.

The PowerPoint slides from the presentation, available online, appeared on popular blogs Friday and sparked broad discussion on the Internet; Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog called the presentation “unintentionally hilarious.”

In the slides a Navy presenter described the patois of the young, a mishmash of acronyms and nonwords used in text messages and social networking sites; in one sample exchange a hypothetical young person asks “wat up dude” and another responds “nmu (Translation: Not much. You?).”

Potential Navy recruits are “coddled” and “unrealistically impatient,” the presentation says, and would “expect an open and transparent environment” if they enlisted. It also advises commanders to expect young people linked together by the Web and cell phones to “share their Navy experiences” and that “some of them may not be worth bragging about.”

In another set of slides, the Navy reports the effect that the Iraq war has had on recruitment: Survey results from 2003 juxtaposed with 2007 indicate a spike in young people who call themselves “less patriotic” and “less likely to join the military.” The vast majority of youths in the Navy’s target recruiting range — almost 90 percent — say they want to go to college, not join the military.

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Potential recruits an “alien force”