Stand with the people of the world! Refuse to join the military!

“This We’ll Defend.”

That’s the motto of the United States Army: a phrase used for nearly 250 years to justify the protection of US interests through global slaughter.

Across US history, the military has waged war after war beyond its borders. In Vietnam, it killed more than 3 million people with napalm, high explosives, and chemical weapons. In Libya, a US-led bombing campaign carried out under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton shattered an entire country, leaving it in ongoing civil war and even open-air slave markets. Recently in Iran, US and US-backed strikes have killed over 1,900 people, ripping through residential neighborhoods and collapsing apartment blocks, killing families and children. This list is not exhaustive. Even a brief record of US military violence would fill volumes.

None of this happens without people like you.

The US military calls itself a volunteer force, but it cannot function without constantly replacing those it uses up. As veterans are discarded, fresh meat must be found for the grinder. Recruiters are given access to your schools, your phone, your social media—even multiplayer video games. They study you and refine their pitch, not by leading with war, but by offering what you need: a paycheck, college tuition, job training, a way out, a future.

That future comes at a cost.

Even if you are not in a combat role, your function is to sustain a system that carries out mass violence across the world. It costs lives—bodies torn apart, people crushed, burned, disfigured, left to die without help. It costs the wounded who survive, and generations shaped by trauma, absence, and hunger.

If your future comes at the cost of the lives of people across the world, it is your lowest, most basic moral obligation to refuse it.

In February 2024, Aaron Bushnell—an active-duty US servicemember—refused to remain complicit. Before he set himself on fire, he said:

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

His message was clear: you must change your life. Denounce the empire, no matter the personal cost.

Do not build your future on the destruction of others. Stand with the people of the world instead.

Make a commitment: you will not enlist. You will not participate in this system. You will not allow your life to be used in the service of global violence.

A recruiter’s quota is often just two people a month—so your decision matters. Talk to your friends before they sign. Challenge recruiters in your school. Push back against the normalization of military recruitment wherever you see it.

And if you are ready to go further—if you want to organize with others who refuse this system—join Behind Enemy Lines, and stand with us against the US war machine.