Quote:
Originally Posted by magpan
A recruiting demographics report entitled 'Who Serves in the U.S. Military? The Demographics of Enlisted Troops and Officers' can be viewed here. This report was released in August, 2008.
An article from around the same time, located here but quoted (Shanea Watkins, Ph.D. and James Sherk Center for Data Analysis Report #08-05), summarizes the report:
'Conventional wisdom holds that military service disproportionately attracts minorities and men and women from disadvan taged backgrounds. Many believe that troops enlist because they have few options, not because they want to serve their country.
Others believe that the war in Iraq has forced the military to lower its recruiting standards.
Previous Heritage Foundation studies that examined the backgrounds of enlisted personnel refute this interpretation.[1] This report expands on those studies by using an improved methodology to study the demographic characteristics of newly commissioned officers and personnel who enlisted in 2006 and 2007.
Any discussion of troop quality must take place in context. A soldier?s demographic characteristics are of little importance in the military, which val ues honor, leadership, self-sacrifice, courage, and integrity?qualities that cannot be quantified. Nonetheless, any assessment of the quality of recruits can take place only on the basis of objec tive criteria. Demographic characteristics are a poor proxy for the quality of those who serve in the armed forces, but they can help to explain which Americans volunteer for military service and why.
Based on an understanding of the limitations of any objective definition of quality, this report comhapares military volunteers to the civilian population on four demographic characteristics: household income, education level, racial and ethnic back ground, and regional origin. This report finds that:
U.S. military service disproportionately attracts enlisted personnel and officerswho do not come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Previous Her itage Foundation research demonstrated that the quality of enlisted troops has increased since the start of the Iraq war. This report demon strates that the same is true of the officer corps.
Members of the all-volunteer military are sig nificantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods. Only 11 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth (quintile) of neighborhoods, while 25 per cent came from the wealthiest quintile. These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) pro gram, in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods?a number that has increased substantially over the past four years.
American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted perhasonnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18?24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor?s degree.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service. Enlisted troops are somewhat more likely to be white or black than their non-military peers. Whites are proportionately represented in the officer corps, and blacks are overrepresented, but their rate of overrepresentation has declined each year from 2004 to 2007. New recruits are also disproportionately likely to come from the South, which is in line with the history of South ern military tradition.
The facts do not support the belief that many American soldiers volunteer because society offers them few other opportunities. The average enlisted person or officer could have had lucrative career opportunities in the private sector. Those who argue that American soldiers risk their lives because they have no other opportunities belittle the personal sacrifices of those who serve out of love for their country.'
@PSSuperstars - I certainly appreciate that you can appreciate (without necessarily having to accept) more sides of an issue. It is refreshing.  |
All of which supports what I stated in a previous post.
Good post. Some civilians are unaware that all Officers have...at the least a Bachelor Degree and many of them...if not most...have advanced degrees. They are also unaware that most...if not all...Senior NCO's (and some Junior NCO's) have at least an Associate Degree and many have a Bachelor Degree as well as advanced degrees. They make the military their career...not because they are not qualified to do anything else...but because they choose to make the military a career for multiple reasons.
You also are correct when you say that some run other businesses while they are in the military. I for one...began a business and ran it for ten of my twelve years of service...a business that I continued with up until a few years ago. I would have stayed for thirty years if I had not been forced to be medically discharged...and certainly not because I was not qualified to do something else.
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When you're running down my country hoss...you're walking on the fighting side of me!