>especially in the upper classes where people do not need to serve
This is a often repeated myth. The upper class serves more per capita than the lower class.
This is a often repeated myth. The upper class serves more per capita than the lower class.
[0] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military
Unless you have sources that claim otherwise, my original claim stands.
[0]: On page 6: http://s3.amazonaws.com/thf_media/2008/pdf/cda08-05.pdf#page... [1]: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2007/demo/cps/hinc-06.htm...
"Military recruits mirror the U.S. population and are solidly middle class.
A recent report shows that more recruits come from middle-income families, with far fewer drawn from poorer families. Youth from upper-income families are represented at almost exactly their fair share."
Your source is inaccurate because it's for enlisted only. Upper class are far more likely to be officers or warrant officers.
My point stands: upper class serve more than lower class.
[0] https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/who-serves-the-us-mi...
[1] https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/whos-joining-mili...
While that may very well be true, it i worth highlighting that the reports you are citing as evidence is looking at the years 2003 and 2006-2007, and a lot has changed, economically and politically, since then.
Also their cut off for "high-income" seems to be significantly lower than what most people would consider "upper class".
Unless you have sources that claim otherwise, my original claim stands.
I'm sorry but no stretch of the imagination has upper class as a couple making 33k/yr each. That's absolutely absurd. That's $16.50 an hour with no overtime.
Looking at it, upper class typically is the top one or two percent of the population.
Yes, peak facts that don't care about your feelings. $65k is where the richest quantile for neighborhood median household income starts, by census tract [0]. The linked report was compiled by Dr. Shanea Watkins, a policy analyst specializing in empirical studies.
Unless you have sources that claim otherwise, my original claim stands.
There's also something a bit strange with this breakdown. The top 20 percent of households made more than $91,705 [0][1] in 2007. $65K appears to be the top 20 percent of census tracts. That doesn't seem right, though, because you wouldn't expect 20 percent of the population to come from 20 percent of the tracts, unless they're exactly the same size (which tracts are not), so maybe I made a mistake in interpretation.
[0] https://www.visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2006/11/05/2005-us...
[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...
Also that report seems to only consider ROTC and West Point Cadets, and I’d bet both are wealthier on average than the officer corps as a whole.
Immaterial. You're announcing to the world that you don't understand what "per capita" and "underrepresented" means.
>Also that report seems to only consider ROTC and West Point Cadets, and I’d bet both are wealthier on average than the officer corps as a whole.
No it doesn't. It specifically talks about enlistment. Of course officers are going to be from upper classes, a four year degree is a requirement.
The section of the report on officers starts at page 9, I’m looking at the graphs on pages 9, 10, and 11. If you see the data elsewhere, please share.
$65k is where the richest quantile for neighborhood median household income starts, by census tract [0]. The linked report was compiled by Dr. Shanea Watkins, a policy analyst specializing in empirical studies.
Unless you have sources that claim otherwise, my original claim stands.
Here's a report saying that 79% of US Army recruits come from families with service members. [0] IIRC, the military is overwhelmingly rural and does not recruit in major urban areas - which matches my experiece in major urban areas. [EDIT: 1] Also, the officer corps is overwhelmingly white people, afaik, in a country that is only about half white people in that age group. However, I realize I've only provided one [edit: 2!] good cite[s] myself!
[0] https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2022/03/about-face-army-ex...
[1] From 2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/us/army-recruiting-tech-i...
military.com is a news and information website that covers topics such as benefits to military members, veterans, their families and those with military affinity. Even if there are links to recruiting, this does nothing to refute the facts.
>Heritage's business is generating talking points and 'research' for conservative/Republican policy
Reality has a conservative bias apparently. The facts are here for all to see.
>Here's a report saying that 79% of US Army recruits come from families with service members.
Which is a meaningless statistic. This number could be the same across all income classes, or again, higher income classes could be overrepresented.
>the military is overwhelmingly rural and does not recruit in major urban areas
That is hilariously wrong. Your own sources shows Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Tampa, Atlanta, etc. all in the top counties for recruitment. "Blue cities" != "[all] major urban areas". Your anti-Southern bias is showing.
>Also, the officer corps is overwhelmingly white people, afaik, in a country that is only about half white people in that age group.
This is to be expected due to requiring a four year degree, among other things. Whites are slightly overrepresented in the officer corps. The US is 73% White (including Hispanic), and the officer corps is 75.8% White (including Hispanic). Asians are also ever so slightly overrepresented in the officer corps.
You can see the report that covers this here: http://s3.amazonaws.com/thf_media/2008/pdf/cda08-05.pdf
I can easily attack your source(s) as fake news outlets (New York Times especially), but I'm not going to use fallacies like you have here. Your sources simply do not back up your claims.
The richest quantile is overrepresented. The aforementioned report was compiled by Dr. Shanea Watkins, a policy analyst specializing in empirical studies.
Unless you have sources that claim otherwise, my original claim stands.
QED.
QED.
I'm not shutting anything down, you're just throwing in the towel because...
>I have so many things to do in my day, why would I read that comment?
You won't, because you know you've been proven wrong.
This is why whites were overrepresented as a percentage of troops killed in Vietnam, because so many young officers were killed leading platoons in the jungle.
That's shocking. Where is this rule? Have you seen it happen? I didn't know wealth defined fitness for service.
Isn't "money for college and healthcare" kinda obvious about it? Like there's almost a wink and a nudge at the end of it.
It's super blatant that having very few economic options and no healthcare chooses fitness for service for you.
"Their median family income is more than $73,000, compared with $66,000 for civilians, and recruits are most likely to come from families in the middle of the wealth distribution, with median wealth of $87,000, almost $10,000 more than civilians."
This is for enlisted members. It's probably safe to have some intuition that officers will skew wealthier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cheshire_Yeomanry_off...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Grosvenor,_6th_Duke_of_...
It's still very common for upper class people to join the Army in the UK.
(Former 11A here)
This kind of glosses over a lot of cultural reasons for why you find "rural poor" in combat branches. For a lot of the folks in my platoon, it was a family affair. Many were from e.g. Texas or Georgia, and had a brother/cousin/uncle/whatever who were also an 11B/13B etc. There isn't really a "preference" that the Army or Marine Corps has for poor people, but there is a cultural reason why people who like combat tend to be rural poor. This is of course my experience, and precise demographic data is hard to come by without a FOIA request.
Just wanted to throw my two cents out there. The guys in my platoon weren't the "dumb hicks" a lot of people seem to think populate the infantry.
Yes, this is anecdata, and yes, there are many reasons why people serve, but I know some smart people (from college and in my career) who've served (in infantry) because they saw it as their only way to get money for college. I think that says less about military recruiting tactics than the government overall, because there really should be more options presented to someone looking to get an education to move up the socioeconomic ladder.
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2022/03/about-face-army-ex...
As far as the rural, the military focuses their recruiting in rural areas and barely touches major cities - an odd choice given where the population centers are and the efficiency of sales in high-density population. In a quick search, I found this from 2019:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/us/army-recruiting-tech-i...
> The guys in my platoon weren't the "dumb hicks" a lot of people seem to think populate the infantry.
Where have you heard that? I've never heard someone say that. People deify the military (in an unhealthy way) these days, IME.
>Where have you heard that?
My classmates in grad school, other networking events with perhaps over-educated professionals. N = 1 and all that.
One idea is a draft for the reserves, not for active duty. That gives us the benefits of an AVF - the professionalism, etc. - and also gives Americans 'skin in the game' when at war, when reserves are called up. It's hard to imagine Afghanistan dragging on for 20 years if, for the whole time, civilians were being sent there to drive trucks, make dinner, even do some skilled labor, etc. And it would solve the civilian-military divide.
But how much effectiveness would we lose with draftee reserves? I believe that volunteer professionals are far superior to draftees in active duty, but reserve jobs frequently seem different.
> I could argue it’s almost becoming a “warrior caste” situation, where fathers serve, (at least one of) their sons serve, and so on. I’m not ready to say this is unhealthy, necessarily, but it’s a very real trend.
I've seen that phrase many times, but how can that be a good thing, especially in a democracy?
We got lied to about Vietnam. Iraq had WMDs. Afghanistan was a budding democracy, fully equipped to stand on its own. Russia was an unstoppable modern military and we need hundreds of billions to hold them off!
Now. All those people lied - buy we're blaming the civilian population for not having skin in a game which is clearly run by liars, and not "doing more" to stop these liars?
We've watched it mangle generation after generation of our young people, and none of the liars are held responsible.
Of course we don't want skin in the game.
In a healthy democracy, these military liars wouldn't last. It's not a healthy democracy.
Those people are us. The system is us, including you and me. There's nobody else to blame, and nobody else to do anything about it. Nothing in the parent comment offers a solution, or a better solution, or an improvement on the existing solution.
Blaming some unnamed entity, pulling out a list of bad things that have happened over a half-century, simplifying and hyperbolizing them, taking them out of context (of the good, of the possibilities, of the causes and effects, etc.) - that only disrupts the situation further, and that act is part of the reason our system sometimes doesn't work. That comment was written in your capacity as a fully fledged, fully vested actor in the system. Of course it isn't working right here, right now.
No. There's no context - they lied to get us into multiple wars. The American people don't want that shit. This sounds like apologia for the military-corporatic interventionist garbage.
Honestly it's the same infuriating "personal responsibility" CRAP like recycling - it's a smokescreen, meant to make a collective problem your personal responsibility. It doesn't matter how many bottles you throw out if you allow the factory up the street to make 1B of them, some of them are going to end up in the river, but do we hold the businesses accountable or make them switch to glass bottles? "That would impact their profits!"
A rational actor would avoid, if at all possible, anything to do with the military. It hasn't "worked" for us for decades and decades. Those people are NOT US.
Nobody is coming to save us, nobody else runs any mysterious system, there is nobody else. It's you and me buddy.
Most of the people I served with had some college. There were a couple of guys in Basic with Bachelor's degrees, and we wondered why they went enlisted instead of officer. But each to their own.
[0] Enjoy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu5a0Bl8eY
[1] Different unit than the author of the article was in. The Cheshire Regiment was line infantry, so full-time soldiers.
That is false. Middle and upper class are more likely to serve in combat roles than lower class.
>Combat is for the lower classes, preferably rural poor
Complete opposite actually.
Unless you have sources that claim otherwise, my original claim stands.
Facts don't care about your feelings.
Facts don't care about feelings, but this doesn't support your point at all.
It actually doesn't.
>Facts don't care about feelings, but this doesn't support your point at all.
It 100% supports the OPs point: lower classes are underrepresented. Upper classes are overrepresented.
QED.
It... Doesn't support your point at all?
Here's the Wall Street Journal saying the quiet part out loud:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/student-debt-relief-payment-pau...
"If young Americans can access free college without having to earn the GI Bill or sign up for follow-on military service, will they volunteer for the armed forces in adequate numbers?"
It's really hard to say "rich people are overrepresented" and then "who will sign up if we make college free" in the same breath.
Immaterial. The class definitions are in quantiles which means proportional per capita. The facts of the matter is the lower classes are underrepresented, the upper classes are overrepresented.
QED.
>and you're defining "upper class" as anything above 60-odd K - an amount that would not allow you to rent a two bedroom apartment...almost anywhere in the USA.
"Upper classes", as in, the top quantile of classes. $60k (2007 numbers) would allow you to rent a two bedroom in almost everywhere in the USA, except the most expensive areas (in 2007). Not everyone is making $300k combined. Your SV bias is showing.
>It... Doesn't support your point at all?
It... 100% supports my point absolutely.
>Here's the Wall Street Journal
Paywalled opinion piece.
>saying the quiet part out loud:
Leftist shibboleth. Not that I'm surprised, but reddit is that way.
>It's really hard to say "rich people are overrepresented" and then "who will sign up if we make college free" in the same breath.
Yeah... Because it's an opinion piece from a random contributer that similarly fell for the fake news. Poor Americans are not joining the military in disproportionately higher numbers to pay for college and what have you. That is a fact. If college becomes free, the military can raise pay and sign on bonuses, add other programs, etc. They'll find a way, no doubt.
Yes - hence the problem with income inequality in the numbers.
The "upper quartile" is so low, it includes people making 60k a year.
More granularity in your numbers would show that actually wealthy people don't sign up.
It looks like you're using statistics to lie. It's pretty clear that "wealthy people are overrepresented" is only true if you do things like, define "rich" starting at 60k.
Immaterial. You're just announcing to the world that you don't know how "per capita", census tracts, or quantiles work.
>The "upper quartile" is so low, it includes people making 60k a year.
Because that's the facts for the median income of the census tract.
During 2009–2013, Beverly Hills had a median household income of $86,141 as an example.
Pacific Heights has a median household income of $125,550 per year.
>More granularity in your numbers would show that actually wealthy people don't sign up.
It would show the complete opposite, as it shows with the quintiles now.
>It looks like you're using statistics to lie.
No. I'm using statistical FACTS to tell the truth. It's an inconvenient truth that shatters the narrative and the fake news the left has been spewing on this topic for decades, but it's still the truth.
The fact that you just can't handle the truth shows how bad you've been subverted.
>It's pretty clear that "wealthy people are overrepresented"
Of course it's clear, that is reality.
>only true if you do things like, define "rich" starting at 60k.
The upper quintile for census tract median income starts there. You want to deny statistical fact because it goes against the narrative.
The statistics show clearly that the lower classes (lowest quintile) are underrepresented. Poor people do not serve as much as the upper classes (top quintile) do. QED.
and while sure, those 6 or 8 or whatever out of 10 army people per 1 grunt do contribute a lot, they don't get shot at. no risk, all reward
how many logistics and support personnel casualties did the US have in any war during this century?
https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/oifnames-of-fa...
still tho, senators' and millionaires' sons aren't the E-rank grunts driving the trucks
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/john-fogerty-a...
That is false. Middle and upper class are more likely to serve in combat roles than lower class.