Military Adding Star Power to Recruitment Messages

The U.S. military is turning to Hollywood stars like Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro and Julia Roberts to lure reluctant young Americans into the military, said Defense Secretary William Cohen Friday.

The idea came in part from the success of the 1986 film “Top Gun,” in which Cruise played a Navy fighter jet pilot in a fast-paced training squadron of F-14 jets, said Cohen and Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon.

Both the Navy and the Air Force saw recruiting take a quick leap after that film appeared in theaters, Bacon said.

The move, Cohen told reporters, is part of a drive by the armed forces, which are struggling for troops in a booming U.S. economy.

“I have talked to a number of people to encourage them to come out and speak to the troops, to express their appreciation and to do public service announcements for us,” the secretary said. “It’s all very positive.”

Cohen said in an interview that he and his wife, Janet, had traveled to Los Angeles to talk with film stars and directors about taping announcements for television and radio praising the voluntary military service in a democracy.

“I have talked to Tom Cruise about doing some PSA,” Cohen said, referring to public service announcements. “I’ve talked to Harrison Ford and Robert De Niro, a former Marine.”

“I talked to Steven Spielberg, who is now in the process of doing a documentary on the Marines going all the way from recruiting days to the end of their careers.

“I talked to Julia Roberts about the possibility of her doing something,” he said over coffee.

Roberts starred in “Pretty Woman,” and Oscar-winning director Spielberg has made a series of top hits including “E.T.” and the World War II epics “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindler’s List.”

Cohen said that he received tentative commitments to help but no concrete deals had been made.

“We are just looking at people who have that status in society saying positive things about the military,” said Cohen, who last August awarded Spielberg the U.S. military’s top civilian medal for sparking public support for the armed forces with “Saving Private Ryan.”

Cohen said he had talked to Fox television about its National Football League broadcasting team taping a pregame show aboard an aircraft carrier. He told reporters that one of the broadcasters, former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw, had enjoyed traveling with Cohen to visit U.S. troops in the Balkans over the Christmas holiday.

The U.S. military’s problems with recruiting have been widely publicized. The Air Force has had major headaches in retaining pilots, who are leaving to take higher-paying jobs as commercial pilots.

On top of that, Cohen said, there is now a shrinking pool of teenagers in America.

“It’s a much bigger challenge today” than in the past, he told reporters. “We have a smaller pool with a much more vigorous economy at a time when we don’t have a visible and identifiable enemy on the horizon in the form of the Soviet Union.”