Who Really Serves?

It’s almost a cliché. Political commentators and elected officials from both sides of the political spectrum agree: the American military gets its recruits from America’s poor. There’s just one problem. They’re all wrong. Kinda.

In my last column, I mentioned in passing that the American military tends to be made up of America’s most disadvantaged citizens. The image of the military as the last refuge of the poor has gotten a lot of play since the start of the Iraq war. It’s a myth that serves both sides of the debate. Conservatives can use it to paint anti-warriors as out of touch elitists too pampered to do the kind of ass-kicking the American people deserve. If military equals poor, then anti-war equals wealthy and snobbish.

But the soldiers-are-poor image also serves the left. When Congressman Charles Rangel introduced a bill to reintroduce the draft, it was widely seen as an anti-war gesture. The idea was that, if the military became an institution that truly represented all Americans—not just the desperately poor—then Congress would only send us to war if it was absolutely necessary.

First, liberals like to point out that only one Congressman who supported the Iraq war has a son enlisted in the military (a few others have children who are officers). If Congressional hawks are getting their families out of military service because they can afford to provide their children with better options, then the war in Iraq starts to look not just ill-advised but downright unjust. Suddenly Bush and his cronies start to look like the pampered pansies, while anti-war liberals can claim to be representing the underclass. Second, liberals want to believe that the people who fight in unjust wars don’t have any other choice. If that’s true, then the troops bear no responsibility for the war in Iraq; it’s all the fault of the chickenhawk in the White House.

After my column on this issue, one of Harvard’s few military officers informed me of a Heritage Foundation study which claims that the American military is actually about as representative of the American public as anyone could hope. The study argues that the military looks just like the rest of the country in terms of income, education, and race. If this is true, then Congress didn’t just send the poor to war; it sent all of us.

Heritage’s study has some serious flaws. General speaking, it claims to show a military that looks just like America, but it winds up with a picture of an institution that falls somewhere between the general population and the dirt poor army of popular legend. Heritage claims that the average military recruit comes from a family just as well off as the average American. While it’s difficult to tell from their methodology section, it seems like Heritage compared the family income of military recruits with the income of all American families. They estimated that the mean income of military recruits was $41,141, almost the same as the national average of $41,994. But families with 18-24 year old children tend to have parents in their peak earning years. Comparing recruits to all families—including young families with low incomes and low expenses and old families with lower incomes and lower expenses—makes military recruits seem middle class. If we compare them with families headed by individuals in their 40s, the picture looks different. These families have an average income of $56,000 to $60,000, depending on which age range you focus on. In other word, the families that military recruits come from are making as much as $20,000 a year—half their income—less than the average for their peers, placing them solidly in the working class, not the middle class.

Heritage also claims that military recruits are better educated than the general population. They note that 98 percent of recruits have a high school education, compared to 75 percent of the general population. But recruits are far less likely to have completed any college than their peers. It’s hard to make the case, based on Heritage’s data, that recruits are desperate due to lack of education, but it’s also hard to argue that they have more educational resources than their peers.

Heritage’s study doesn’t show that the military perfectly mirrors the general population. But it does show that the situation is not as bad as Rangel and others have suggested. Individuals from all income strata choose to join the military. The average recruit may not be middle class, but he is not dirt poor either.

This means that liberals have to recognize a hard truth: some people really disagree with us. Bush and Congress may be buying their children out of this war, but plenty of middle class families with all sorts of options have sent their children to fight in Iraq. The military doesn’t rely on the poorest of the poor. It relies on hundreds of thousands of middle and working class families. If liberals are going to stop the Iraq war and prevent others like it, we can’t rely on a draft or some other measure to spread the sacrifice. We have to win over those millions of middle class families who supported this war with their votes, their money, and their lives.



Samuel M. Simon ’05-’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears regularly.