Military Demographics

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

The following is an excerpt from a long article.  What do you think
of today's military demographics?  Implications?  Tasks for research
and organizing?

*****   New York Times  March 30, 2003

Military Mirrors Working-Class America
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and STEVEN A. HOLMES

...As the United States engages in its first major land war in a
decade, the soldiers, sailors, pilots and others who are risking, and
now giving, their lives in Iraq represent a slice of a broad swath of
American society - but by no means all of it.

Of the 28 servicemen killed so far, 20 were white, 5 black, 3
Hispanic - proportions that neatly mirror those of the military as a
whole. But just one was from a well-to-do family, and with the
exception of a Naval Academy alumnus, just one had graduated from an
elite college or university.

A survey of the American military's endlessly compiled and analyzed
demographics paints a picture of a fighting force that is anything
but a cross section of America. With minorities overrepresented and
the wealthy and the underclass essentially absent, with political
conservatism ascendant in the officer corps and Northeasterners
fading from the ranks, America's 1.4 million-strong military seems to
resemble the makeup of a two-year commuter or trade school outside
Birmingham or Biloxi far more than that of a ghetto or barrio or
four-year university in Boston.

Today's servicemen and women may not be Ivy Leaguers, but in fact
they are better educated than the population at large: reading scores
are a full grade higher for enlisted personnel than for their
civilian counterparts of the same age. While whites account for three
of five soldiers, the military has become a powerful magnet for
blacks, and black women in particular, who now outnumber white women
in the Army.

But if the military has become the most successfully integrated
institution in society, there is also a kind of voluntary
segregation: while whites and blacks seek out careers in
communications, intelligence, the medical corps and other specialties
in roughly equal numbers, blacks are two and a half times as likely
to fill support or administrative roles, while whites are 50 percent
more likely to serve in the infantry, gun crews or their naval
equivalent....

Confronted by images of the hardships of overseas deployment and by
the stark reality of casualties in Iraq, some have raised questions
about the composition of the fighting force and about requiring what
is, in essence, a working-class military to fight and die for an
affluent America.

"It's just not fair that the people that we ask to fight our wars are
people who join the military because of economic conditions, because
they have fewer options," said Representative Charles B. Rangel, a
Democrat from Manhattan and a Korean War veteran who is calling for
restorating the draft.

Some scholars have noted that since the draft was abolished in 1973,
the country has begun developing what could be called a warrior class
or caste, often perpetuating itself from father or uncle to son or
niece, whose political and cultural attitudes do not reflect the
diversity found in civilian society - potentially foreshadowing a
social schism between those who fight and those who ask them to....

The Way It Was
The Vietnam War and the Draft's End

The Vietnam War looms large as the defining epoch in the creation of
what has become today's professional, blue-collar military.

It led to the creation of an all-volunteer force, when the Nixon
administration, in an attempt to reduce opposition to the war,
abolished the draft in 1973.

Because the draft provided deferment to college students, the burden
of being sent to Vietnam fell heavily on the less well educated and
less affluent. And because of the unpopularity of the war, military
service was disdained by many members of the nation's elite, leading
their children to lose the propensity to serve that had characterized
earlier generations of America's privileged.

As a result, the Americans who fought in the Vietnam War looked very
different from the professional corps now fighting in Iraq and
stationed around the globe.

The 2,594,000 troops who served in Vietnam between 1965 and 1972 were
younger, much less likely to be married and almost entirely male,
according to a study of Defense Department data by Richard K. Kolb,
the editor and publisher of VFW magazine.

The average soldier in a combat unit in Vietnam was 19 or 20 years
old and unmarried, Mr. Kolb said. Of the 58,000 Americans killed in
Vietnam, 61 percent were 21 or younger; of the enlisted men killed,
only about 25 percent were married....

By contrast, the average age of the 28 men killed in the war with
Iraq so far is 26, and 8 of the 22 enlisted men who died, or 36
percent, were married.

In the Army, about 25 percent of enlisted men were married in 1973.
Today that figure has almost doubled.

Another major difference, of course, is that few women served in
Vietnam, and women were not allowed in combat units. Only 7,494 women
served in Vietnam, of whom 6,250 were nurses, according to the
Defense Department. Of the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam, only
eight were women, all of them nurses, and only one is officially
listed as killed in action.

There were no female prisoners of war in Vietnam. By contrast, one
female soldier has already been captured in Iraq and two others are
listed as missing in action. Women are enlisting in far greater
numbers today, especially since the Pentagon lifted many of the
restrictions on women serving in combat. Fifteen percent of all
officers and enlisted personnel are women.

The existence of the draft during the Vietnam War, and the war's
growing unpopularity as the years passed without victory, also
created fundamental differences in the makeup of the armed forces.
Soldiers tended to enlist for single tours of duty and then go back
quickly to civilian life, making for a higher turnover rate and less
professionalism than the Pentagon boasts of now. Today, the average
enlistee stays about seven years, up from less than two years in 1973.

But Mr. Kolb and other experts say the widespread idea that the Army
in Vietnam was made up mostly of draftees is incorrect. In fact, only
25 percent of all American forces in Vietnam were draftees, compared
with 66 percent in World War II....

Among the many myths of Vietnam that persist today, experts say, is
that it was a war fought by poor and black Americans, who died in
greater proportions than whites.

Although that was true in the early stages of the American ground
war, in 1965 and 1966, when there were large numbers of blacks in
frontline combat units, Army and Marine Corps commanders later took
steps to reassign black servicemen to other jobs to equalize deaths,
according to Col. Harry G. Summers Jr. in "Vietnam War Almanac."

By the end of the war, African-Americans had suffered 12.5 percent of
the total deaths in Vietnam, 1 percentage point less than their
proportion in the overall population, Colonel Summers wrote.

Servicemen from states in the South had the highest rate of
battlefield deaths, 31 per 100,000 of the region's population, Mr.
Kolb found. Soldiers from states in the Northeast had the lowest
rates, 23.5 deaths per 100,000.

Since the end of the draft, that geographic skew on the battlefield
has extended to the services as a whole. The percentages of people
from the Northeast and Midwest have dropped, while the proportion
from the West has climbed and from the South has skyrocketed - even
after accounting for southward and westward population shifts in
society at large. For the year ending Sept. 30, 2000, 42 percent of
all recruits came from the South.

Over all, Mr. Kolb said, 76 percent of the soldiers in Vietnam were
from working-class or lower-income families, while only 23 percent
had fathers in professional, managerial or technical occupations.

The disparity created by the Vietnam draft can be seen on the walls
of Memorial Hall and Memorial Church at Harvard University, where the
names of Harvard students and alumni who died for their country are
inscribed. There were 200 Harvard students killed in the Civil War
and 697 in World War II, but only 22 in Vietnam....

Signing Up
Recruiting Office as Melting Pot...

Compared to their contemporaries in civilian life, the armed forces
have a greater percentage of minorities, a higher proportion of high
school graduates and better reading levels. As a group, about 60
percent of enlisted men and women are white; they tend to be married
and upwardly mobile, but to come from families without the resources
to send them to college.

While blacks make up about 12.7 per cent of the same-age civilian
population, they constitute about 22 per cent of enlisted personnel.
Perhaps most striking is the number of enlisted women who are black:
more than 35 percent, according to Pentagon figures, indicating not
only that black women enlist at higher rates, but that they stay in
the military longer. In the Army, in fact, half of all enlisted women
are black, outnumbering whites, who account for 38 percent....

The Race Issue
Equal Opportunity on the Battlefield

Though Hispanics are underrepresented in the military, their numbers
are growing rapidly. Even as the total number of military personnel
dropped 23 percent over the last decade, the number of Hispanics in
uniform grew to 118,000 from 90,600, a jump of about 30 percent.

While blacks tend to be more heavily represented in administrative
and support functions, a new study shows that Hispanics, like whites,
are much more likely to serve in combat operations. But those
Hispanics in combat jobs tend to be infantry grunts, particularly in
the Marine Corps, rather than fighter or bomber pilots.

"The Air Force is substantially more white, and the officer corps is
substantially more white than Latino," said Roberto Suro, director of
the Pew Hispanic Center, which issued a report last week on Hispanics
in the military. "So you won't see Latinos flying airplanes over
Iraq."...

What Lies Ahead
A New Draft or a Warrior Caste?...

Those who warn of a warrior class cite a study by the Triangle
Institute for Security Studies in North Carolina showing that between
1976 and 1996 the percentage of military officers who saw themselves
as nonpartisan or politically independent fell from more than 50
percent to less than 20 percent. The main beneficiary of this shift
has been the Republican Party.

"The officer corps has always been more conservative," said Richard
H. Kohn, a professor of military history at the University of North
Carolina. "But even so, the change there is dramatic."...

..."When the troops come back, many of them will get out; they'll
have some memories," said John Allen Williams, a retired Navy captain
who is a political science professor at Loyola University Chicago. "A
military that self-identified as different from, and possibly
superior to, the civilian society it served, with a distinct set of
values, and that might be willing to act on them opposed to civilian
leaders? The thought that we could have that in this country is just
inconceivable."...

Specialist Markita Scott, the reservist from Columbus, Ga., said she
thought a draft was unnecessary. "Already with callbacks you can see
the morale is down lower," she said. "They're like, `I had a job.'
Just think if you had a whole draft of people who didn't want to be
there. I think of that guy who threw the grenade - you wonder if
there would be a lot more like that."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/30/international/worldspecial/30DEMO.html>
*****
--
Yoshie

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