In July, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) proposed two amendments to the House Appropriations Bill to restrict the military’s ability to target children and teenagers for recruitment. With these proposals, Ocasio-Cortez joins a growing network of counter-recruitment organizers who have identified the military’s focus on young people as an intolerable intrusion into their lives, especially at school.

The military’s youth recruiting strategy was built up over decades, hardened during the War on Terror, and is now fueled by the Pentagon’s paranoid projections of a future “great power conflict” with Russia or China. The military’s ravenous recruitment machinery will not be easily rolled back. But proposals like Ocasio-Cortez’s may signal the beginning of a shift, however small, away from the sycophantic deference that has long characterized elected leaders’ attitudes towards military planners — even (and perhaps especially) as those planners consistently push against the boundaries of legality and decency to meet their recruitment quotas.

The first of AOC’s proposed amendments, which failed its House vote on July 30, would have barred the military from using the online gaming platform Twitch to identify and develop prospective recruits. Speaking before the vote, Ocasio-Cortez argued that recruitment on Twitch, an online platform “largely populated by children well under the age of military recruitment,” inappropriately targets young people and dangerously blurs the distinction between game play and real-world conflict.