After two weeks of basic combat training, new BIB recruits will be expected to complete two weeks of intensive potty training.
Photo by Amit Roth
Over the past few months, the United States Army has begun partnering with schools across the country to open up its Army ROTC program to Americans of all ages. The first leg of initiative is a new subset of the ROTC program known as the Baby Infantry Brigade (BIB), a training course for toddlers enrolled in preschool and pre-K.
“For a long time we focused our outreach on teens,” said military recruiter Dick Watergate on the purpose of the program. “We’ve dropped billions of dollars to fund movies like Top Gun and video games like Call of Duty that make murder — ahem, I mean strategic armed conflict look cool, but despite all our efforts, Gen Z seem really disinterested. We have to make sure that this doesn’t happen with Gen Alpha by hooking them as early as possible with the BIB program.”
“Children are the future. And the future needs to learn some goddamn discipline,” said One-star General Warren Kraime on why the Army is investing so heavily into this program. “Parents and teachers are constantly complaining about rowdy and impossible children, and the only way to fix that is to break them. Emotionally. Physically too sometimes, but their young, supple bones can handle it.”
While the BIB program is still in its early stages, it has already been deployed at one elementary school in Washington, D.C. At this school, instead of learning how to tell the time, the 4- and 5-year-olds attending MLK Preschool must do rigorous physical drills while Army officers yell “punishingly encouraging” phrases. Already, one child has been injured attempting to cross the play structure in under two minutes, and another was injured playing barbed wire hopscotch.
Army officers claim these injuries are minor “casualties of the playground” and believe that BIB is already a success. Graduating from BIB requires passing a physical and written exam set by the Army. Preliminary drafts of these exams require enrolled children to “stand at attention for two hours” and complete 50 “baby burpees” in under three minutes. The oral portion requires children to recite from memory why every American war and special military operation “was and still is justified.”
While the Army is steamrolling ahead with BIB, the program has been met with general backlash. Some have called this program “indoctrination” and “a complete violation of the separation of school and military.”
“They turned the whole district into private schools,” said Rene Greenfellow, whose daughter goes to MLK Preschool. “Next year I’ll have to pay $30,000 if I want my daughter Renesmee to continue going there. That is, unless I enroll her in BIB. They said that if I enroll Renesmee in BIB for all of elementary and middle school, and then JROTC in high school, and then ROTC in college, and then serve for four years, she’ll have all of her school paid for.”
Despite the backlash, the Army stands by BIB. “This is just the first branch in a long project,” said General Kraime. “We know not all children are Army material. I mean, I love my son, but that little runt can’t survive five minutes on the spinny thing before stumbling off like a college liberal who can’t hold his liquor. But I’ve seen him running around with his arms out pretending to be an airplane, and that’s exploitable. Hopefully we will have launched the Air Force ROTC elementary school program by the time he hits first grade so that it’s not too late for him to learn what it really means to be an American.”
