Study shows that the poor and uneducated are under-represented

In 2002 Rep. Charles B. Rangel, New York Democrat, wrote in the New York Times:

A disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups make up the enlisted ranks of the military, while most privileged Americans are underrepresented or absent.

The MSM, liberal politicians, and the anti-Military Left would have you believe that the military “exploits poor, ignorant young Americans by using slick advertising that promises technical careers in the military to dupe them into trading their feeble opportunities in the private sector for a meager role as cannon fodder.”

But the data shows otherwise. It shows that the poor are not shouldering the bulk of the military’s need for new soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines. In fact, the poorest neighborhoods provided only 18 percent of recruits in prewar 1999 and only 14.6 percent in 2003. By contrast, areas where household incomes ranged from $30,000 to $200,000 provided more than 85 percent of recruits.

The Heritage Foundation research found that a higher percentage of middle-class and upper-middle-class families have been providing enlistees for the war on Islamic militants since the September 11 attacks on the United States.

That doesn’t jibe so well with the Left’s “ignorant, poor, naive kids who were duped into an illegal war” meme very well, does it?

I think it’s even more telling to understand why it is that the burden of service is being unequally born on the shoulders of middle-and-upper class families:

The U.S. Department of Defense sees urban schools as ones of its biggest recruiting obstacles. Not because leftist teachers in some of those schools try to keep recruiters out, but because so many potential recruits have to be turned down because of the poor education they have received in those schools.

My brother (a fulltime US Army recruiter who commands his own Recruiting Station south of Houston) tells me time-and-time again that this is true. He says there is not a shortage of kids wanting to join the Army; rather there is a severe lack of qualified kids available to join the Army. In other words, the Army’s recruiting difficulties are not because we are at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but because their schools and teachers have failed them.

Joanne Jacobs gets it:

Low-income youths are underrepresented, almost certainly because they’re not educated enough to qualify.

The Military does in a few short years what the public education system has failed to do in 12+ years: prepare these kids for the real world.

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