Help From Top Guns

The Pentagon has enlisted some of Hollywood’s top stars to pitch military service to American youths and turn around declining recruitment, US Defence Secretary William Cohen said on Friday. Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Robert DeNiro, Julia Roberts and Will Smith have agreed to help out by doing public service television and radio advertisements promoting the military, he said.

“It’s a question of working out the time,” he told reporters in Washington. All the military services, except the Marine Corps, have fallen short of their recruitment goals, in part because the booming economy has given young people other job options. A Commission of outside experts recommended that the Pentagon shake-up its advertising strategy, and urged it to use `influencers’ like sports figures and Hollywood celebrities to appeal to young people.

Cohen mentioned a couple of film projects that he hopes will help. Director Steven Spielberg is talking to the Marine Corps about a documentary on the elite service, hesaid. The Pentagon is cooperating with making of a feature called Pearl Harbour with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who made Top Gun, the Tom Cruise film about Navy fighter pilots.