America’s Army and the Military recruitment and management of ‘Talent’: An interview with Colonel Casey Wardynski

America’s Army, the official and free downloadable US Army video game franchise, has been continually updated with new versions for the past twelve years. Formerly managed out of the Office for Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA) at West Point, it has been an immersive, interactive advertisement for the Army, resting its rationale within in a military desire to recruit in a cost-effective way a new kind of ‘talented’ soldier. This reflects a military desire to, in the words of an OEMA publication, ‘move the Army beyond personnel management to talent management’. Drawing on a 2009 interview with OEMA director Colonel Casey Wardynski (retired), I argue that America’s Army has been primarily oriented towards recruiting the labour of a new kind of post-Fordist soldier – one who is part of the growing mass of immaterial labourers who can be identified as ‘the cognitariat’.