The calcifying military caste in the US

[Lonestar]

Saw this rather hefty article about army recruiting in Task & Purpose today. Some choice bits

Bryant believes the Army could keep its ranks filled by focusing on a handful of states, most of them south of the Mason-Dixon line, while paying extra attention to communities within those states that have formed around military installations. Current trends support this view: Of the newest crop of Army recruits, half came from just seven states; 79% had relatives who served. The military has become increasingly — some would even add dangerously — insular since the advent of the all-volunteer force. As the journalist Thomas E. Ricks noted in a 1997 article for The Atlantic titled The Widening Gap Between Military and Society, this trend toward homogeneity was likely accelerated by the closing of dozens of bases and installations following the end of the Cold War, which significantly reduced the military’s footprint in the West and Northeast.

and

The Pentagon likes to boast that the armed forces have increasingly reflected the country’s racial and ethnic diversity since desegregating in the ‘40s. That’s true. However, Bryant was right: The physical divide between those who serve and those who would never consider it is growing. The veteran population in the South is currently increasing while it’s decreasing in the more densely populated Northeast, which consistently posts the lowest enlistment percentages of the country’s four main regions. And wealthy communities everywhere are still underrepresented. Is that intentional? It certainly was in the beginning. Acceptable? More than ever. Montclair High School folded its JROTC program several years ago — “because of budget issues,” the school secretary told me. I was skeptical. JROTC programs are partly funded by the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, the Montclair High rowing team has its very own state-of-the-art indoor training facility and a freshly renovated club boathouse on the Passaic River with a 2,800-foot deck.

I work in an environment where nearly everyone is a vet; in a office with over 20 there is exactly one non-vet in it, for example. Most people I know that are/were in the military had close relatives in who were also in the military.

Meanwhile, anywhere without a big military footprint the upperclass avoids service like the plague. My SO is from a very affluent area and enlisting isn't considered an acceptable option for most families with HS-age kids there, but attending West Point or USNA is(IOW, "blue collared" military isn't good, but white collar, so long as it's "ivy league", is).

[Sea Skimmer]

On the other hand we also now have a military that can't operate even on the battlefield proper without direct civilian support.

[Lonestar]

It's because the army & Marines keeps on hoping that if they can't fight without mass mobilization of the Guard & reserves and possibly a draft, they'd get massive support for the endeavor. Instead of the elected officials just going "well pay civilian truck drivers at $200k a year to do the job we don't want to force some kind of draft for it".

[Sea Skimmer]

That's not what I'm talking about actually, civilian truck drivers are not new, even in WW2 when a deliberate point was made to uniform as many people as possible we ended up with a damn lot of civilians hauling supplies around. The merchant marine had a higher rate of KIA then the Marine Corps after all.

What is new, or rather, new considering the past ~100 years only, is how the the basic ability to operate and sustain the weapons systems themselves with military uniformed personal that has progressively gone away for everything big and most things complex. A lot of maintenance and software support hasn't just shifted to contractors (which might or might not be working on a US military base), it often never existed as a uniformed job, and certainly never had enough uniformed troops to actually DO IT ALL. This the subject of a lot of congressional hearings about ten years ago, followed by vows from the various services that they would try to some bare bones level of uniformed personal familar with its software, but that basically got nowhere except in terms of building up Cybercommand to actually security stuff. Even many items we pretend are field maintainable by troops only are because we abandon the idea of fixing parts (or it became impossible to do so realistically) and doubled down on the line replaceable item route we used to laugh at the Soviets for using. Which is yet more shifting towards the civilian side of the military industrial complex. It's just a reality that someone who could make 180,000 dollars programming software isn't really likely to want to accept any pay offer a uniformed service branch is allowed to make by law.

Even in the navy where naturally shipyards always were primarily civilian staffed we've seen the bases themselves go away or have their organic staffs heavily reduced in favor of contractors whom do not directly report to the military the way DoD civilians do. We've now reached the point BTW that the USN says it's physically impossible to maintain the fleet at our existing bases over the next 15 years (they didn't project further) because we cut back so much and yet didn't modernize the remaining old ass facilities.

[Zixinus]

Isn't that due to the general increasingly-infrastructure-hungry nature of technology advance in of itself?

[Lonestar]

Re: shipyards Skimmer is undoubtedly referring to that recent GAO report.

[MKSheppard]

Basic gist of the article is as "new" as a Ted Postol article on ABM; it's a lot of the same that we saw about twelve years ago during Iraq.

Some points:

As the journalist Thomas E. Ricks noted in a 1997 article for The Atlantic titled The Widening Gap Between Military and Society, this trend toward homogeneity was likely accelerated by the closing of dozens of bases and installations following the end of the Cold War, which significantly reduced the military’s footprint in the West and Northeast.

That's kind of what happens when your Congressmen generally don't like DoD spending. Why be somewhere where you're not wanted?

Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics, and the B-1 Bomber has a story where the USAF brass at a Kiwanis dinner (or some such) with the locals near Wurtsmith AFB (IIRC); where they basically said: "There is no chance in hell of Wurtsmith AFB getting a B-1B wing because your senator's an asshole." (Carl Levin-D-MI).

The East Orange Recruiting station that's the centerpiece of this story seems a poor allocation of resources -- five recruiters trying to work a pretty shallow recruit pool, from various bits in the article:

One morning, I joined McDonald and Staff Sgt. Hilton George, a native of Grenada who grew up in Brooklyn, on a trip to Irvington High School, where every morning students line up to pass through a row of metal detectors manned by a cadre of security guards. Some of the recruiters have started waiting until kids here enter their senior year before engaging them in earnest, because until that point the chances of them dropping out of school or getting arrested for a violent crime are simply too high. One of Haddock’s prospective recruits went to jail for murder.

The median ASVAB score in Haddock’s sector is 35, four points above passing and 16 points below what the Army considers “quality.” One of Robinson’s recruits recently scored an 8 on a practice version of the test, twice. Such scores are not uncommon.

It reminds me of the inner city police department recruiting scandals that pop up like clockwork every ten years. Basically, someone somewhere gets a bee in their bonnet, or someone forces them to start recruiting from the community - so they do lots of waivers and such; and this all comes to bite them in about four or five years with the usual scandal of officers convicted of crimes, forced to resign etc.

“I find the body armor jokes extremely offensive,” Robinson said, her eyes fixed on the road. There was palpable disappointment in her voice. “I’ve been to an actual war zone, where I had to wear my body armor every night.”

She gestured with her chin toward a crowded bus stop as we passed by. “This is not Iraq, and these people aren’t insurgents,” she said. “This is America. They are Americans.”

East Orange Crime Stats

It's not the most violent place in America, but it's pretty up there; and the recent "niceness" is a fairly new thing:

Linky Poo II

Better use of scarce USAREC funds could be done by decreasing the amount of recruiters at East Orange branch and reassigning the surplus to hoover up recruits elsewhere; like Abilene, Kansas (man that place is depressing outside of the Eisenhower library).

[Kane Starkiller]

Of the newest crop of Army recruits, half came from just seven states;

More precisely it's 44% according to the report and those seven states are California,Texas,Florida,New York, Georgia,Ohio and North Carolina which comprise 42% of the population of US. To me the ratios seem to match and these states are relatively dispersed throughout the US.

[Ziggy Stardust]

More precisely it's 44% according to the report and those seven states are California,Texas,Florida,New York, Georgia,Ohio and North Carolina which comprise 42% of the population of US. To me the ratios seem to match and these states are relatively dispersed throughout the US.

Does the report at all indicate where in those states the recruits hail from? Even though you are right that this roughly matches population proportions overall, it is worth noting that these are all states that have very sharp political divides between urban and rural regions (California and New York are traditionally blue overall, but have large pockets of deep red territory; Texas and Georgia are the opposite, where they are traditionally red overall but have large pockets of heavily blue leaning populations; while Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina are 'swing states' where the outcome of a presidential election is typically in doubt). I bring this up because if the main thesis of the article is that the army is disproportionately made up of recruits from a particular demographic (and the clear subtext of the article is that the demographic they are referring to is conservative), it is still possible for the recruits from these 7 states to be dominated by a non-representative sample, even if the marginal population proportions are roughly aligned.

[Elheru Aran]

Without comment on the subtext of the article:

It makes a lot of sense that people will join the military if they have family members who have served. Quite often these people get looked up to even if the rest of the family is liberal, sort of a "we're proud you serve/served" thing. It's certainly more likely to depict it as an acceptable choice for a young person rather than immediately pursuing college after high school, for example. Anecdotally, I have a uncle that served something like 30 years in the Marines; my older brother is currently a Major USMC after making his way through the Naval Academy. Was he inspired by my uncle? Probably at least to some degree, yeah.

And as military service members not infrequently settle down with families of their own near their bases... again, it's no surprise you'll get large populations of veterans and families with veteran members in states which have large bases. Georgia has Ft Benning, North Carolina has Lejeune, California has 29 Palms (not that that's really a recommendation from what I hear) and more, etc... say you marry a civilian who lives somewhere near the base you serve on, it makes sense to stay near there. Give it a few generations worth of that happening, it's going to add up.

Speaking of the Marines though. I would be interested in seeing what the recruitment statistics are like for the other branches; that 79% for the Army from seven states is one thing, but where's the Navy getting people from? Air Force? Etc. The Army isn't the whole US military.

[Knife]

Speaking of the Marines though. I would be interested in seeing what the recruitment statistics are like for the other branches; that 79% for the Army from seven states is one thing, but where's the Navy getting people from? Air Force? Etc. The Army isn't the whole US military.

It's antedotal and 20 something years old, but the Marines kind of split the country to west coast Marines and east coast Marines. I'm sure there are some MOS where they went everywhere though. But, back in my days [crusty old man] you couldn't walk 5 feet without tripping over a Texan or Californian[/crusty old man]. You didn't get many people from back east at Pendleton because those Marines got stationed on the east coast or Europe whole west coast Marines got Cali and the Asian/Pacific. I'd have to ask around, but I don't think it's changed much in that one regard. Though, I was infantry, so I'm sure some high speed low drag MOS goes everywhere and is not subject to that. Nor are butter bars, I'm just talking enlisted.

[Zwinmar]

I was an 03 so I was stationed at Lejuene, so many Texans you could throw a rock and hit three. My brother on the other hand, was NBC, stationed in Japan. That said, my family has a long history of serving in the military dating back to the Seven Years war, with every generation having many joining up.