Human security

Child Soldiers Pose a National Security Threat

The United States military is finding itself on the ground-conflict zones across the globe, including in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria. As the United States expands its footprint around the world, U.S. soldiers may increasingly come into contact with child soldiers. Although this is not a new challenge, governments continue to struggle to stop the use of child soldiers in some of the world’s most brutal conflicts, and to address the operational and long-term effects arising from engagement with children in armed conflict.

Tens of thousands of children continue to be used in conflicts around the world, with many used as child soldiers or in combat-support roles. Indeed, a brief snapshot of the numbers tells a grim story. In South Sudan, the United Nations estimates that more than nineteen thousand children have been used as child soldiers in the country’s civil war since 2013. More than two thousand children have been recruited by Boko Haram in Nigeria in 2016 alone and they have been increasingly used as “human bombs.” In Yemen, the UN has documented more than 1,700 children who have been recruited since March 2015 to fight in the ongoing civil war.