Military personnel

Military personnel are members of the state's armed forces. Their roles, pay, and obligations differ according to their military branch (army, navy, marines, air force, and sometimes coast guard), rank (officer, non-commissioned officer, or enlisted recruit), and their military task when deployed on operations and on exercise.'Our new model is about raising awareness, and that takes a ten-year span. It starts with a seven-year-old boy seeing a parachutist at an air show and thinking, 'That looks great.' From then the army is trying to build interest by drip, drip, drip.' Military personnel are members of the state's armed forces. Their roles, pay, and obligations differ according to their military branch (army, navy, marines, air force, and sometimes coast guard), rank (officer, non-commissioned officer, or enlisted recruit), and their military task when deployed on operations and on exercise. Those who serve in a typical large land force are soldiers, making up an army. Those who serve in seagoing forces are seamen or sailors, and their branch is a navy or coast guard. Marines serve in a marine corps. In the 20th century, the development of powered flight aircraft prompted the development of air forces, serviced by airmen and women. Designated leaders of military personnel are officers. These include commissioned officers, warrant officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs). For naval forces, non-commissioned officers are referred to as petty officers. Organizations other than state armed forces include military personnel, such as paramilitary organizations and non-state armed groups. Most personnel at the start of their military career are young adults. For example, in 2013 the average age of a United States Army soldier beginning initial training was 20.7 years. Historically, the use of children under the age of 18 for military purposes has been widespread – see Children in the military – but has been in decline in the 21st century. According to Child Soldiers International, as of 2017 approximately two-thirds of states worldwide had committed to restrict military recruitment to adults, while 50 states were still recruiting personnel aged 16 or 17, including most of the world's major military powers. Most personnel are male. The proportion of female personnel varies internationally; for example, it is approximately 3% in India, 10% in the UK, 13% in Sweden, 16% in the US, and 27% in South Africa. Many state armed forces that recruit women bar them from ground close combat roles (roles that would require them to kill at close quarters). Compared with male personnel and female civilians, female personnel face substantially higher risks of sexual harassment and sexual violence, according to British, Canadian, and US research. Personnel who join as officers tend to be upwardly-mobile young adults from age 18. Most enlisted personnel have a childhood background of relative socio-economic deprivation. For example, after the US suspended conscription in 1973, 'the military disproportionately attracted African American men, men from lower-status socioeconomic backgrounds, men who had been in nonacademic high school programs, and men whose high school grades tended to be low'. As an indication of the socio-economic background of British Army personnel, in 2015 three-quarters of its youngest recruits had the literacy skills normally expected of an 11-year-old or younger, and 7% had a reading age of 5–7. Military personnel may be conscripted (recruited by compulsion under the law) or recruited by attracting civilians to join the armed forces. In states that do not rely entirely on conscription, the process of attracting children and young people to military employment begins in their early years by means of, for example: