The justification for a military draft that you hear most often from the Left is that the military doesn’t represent the U.S. population in that it is disproportionately poor and minority.
Today, my MSNBC host Matt Miller (see video above), in the light of the killing of 16 Afghan civilians allegedly by a man under financial stress, made that argument, asking me if we needed a draft “to make sure that we’ve got shared sacrifice among all sectors of society, so that we’re not only putting some of the hardest working folks from humbler backgrounds into harms way like this.”
But his premise was wrong, I said. U.S. military recruits are fairly decently spread across the income spectrum. Check out the chart here from the National Priorities Project.
Using Department of Defense data, this is the best estimation we can get on the income and background of recruits. It sorts recruits by the income of their zipcodes.
The 3rd through 8th deciles – meaning the lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class are overrepresented in the military, while the poor and the rich are underrepresented. This differs a bit from what I said, that all quintiles are evenly represented. Clearly, the middle quintile is most represented.
The poorest decile was the least represented in the military in the most recent data, with only 7.01% of recruits coming from that decile. The second-least represented decile in the military was the top one. So Miller was not incorrect when he said that the nation’s elites are less likely than average to serve.
But (a) the richest Americans being 30% less likely to serve than the mean American doesn’t indicate, as Miller put it, “the sons and daughters of our elite are not in harm’s way”; and (b) The poor are definitely not bearing a disproportionate burden, judging by this DOD data.
Miller tried to drive his point home anecdotally by asking me if I have friends in the military. Yes, I do. I have lots of them. That’s part of the reason I hate war so much.
Miller, perhaps, has a different experience. Indeed, I’ve had another liberal friend posit that we privileged, white, college-educated professionals are detached from war because we don’t know people fighting.
But I know a healthy number — in-laws, close friends, cousins. I don’t think my friends are overrepresented in the military. I think my liberal interlocutors’ friends are just underrepresented.
My peer group tilts towards white, middle class, conservative Catholics in the Capital region from middle-class to upper-middle-class backgrounds. This demographic, from the data I can gather, is represented proportionally in the military. If I seem to have a ton of friends in the military, it’s because I’m talking to non-Christian liberals from New York City and L.A., all of which are underrepresented characteristics in the military.
