Malleable Cannon Fodder

The phenomenon of child soldiers is not new. Boys and very young men have been encouraged, welcomed, dragooned and press-ganged into armies and navies for a very long time, and mostly we have not thought much about it. Hollywood has brought us decades of Hornblower-type films in which boys serve as plucky midshipmen, while drummer boys serve as a frequent icon for artists seeking to portray bravery in 19th-century combat. I grew up on a diet of child soldiers on television: Rusty, the boy soldier on Rin Tin Tin; Cuffy, the boy soldier on Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion.

The reality, of course, is very different. Some estimates place the number of child soldiers in active combat today at 250,000. Few of them volunteer, although some, like Omar Khadr, are beguiled into a soldier’s life by an unprincipled parent. Most are kidnapped, however, and are converted without...