The plan undermines military recruitment and defense spending – limited employment options drive half of enlistment.

The Military is the Only Major Federal Jobs Program in the U.S. Understanding that climate disruption is an outcome of our broken economic system, climate threats cannot be separated from other forms of insecurity that people experience in their daily lives. Vast economic insecurity and inequality are outcomes of the financially extractive, fossil-fueled economy. The U.S. military has long capitalized on economic precarity, recruiting poor people who lack other options and middle-class populations faced with significant debt and instability. As a matter of practicality, the prevalence of militarized jobs in communities remains a key political blockade to reducing military funding. As such, solutions to the climate crisis must also address the absence of an adequate number of well-paying jobs, poverty, inequality, and other prevalent socioeconomic concerns of our time. At the same time, we must convert a major share of U.S. manufacturing and engineering from building weapons of war to building a 100% clean energy economy by 2030. While official estimates are known to be too low, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted about six million people as unemployed and actively seeking work in 2019—a figure now rendered obsolete by the coronavirus crisis, but indicative of our economy under “good” circumstances.96 This figure does not include all working age people who are unemployed and more comprehensive methods of calculating unemployment often double the standard unemployment rate. Even in the best of times, unemployment rates also vary drastically by geography, race, and age; rural workers, Black workers, Latinx workers, and young people all have higher than average rates of unemployment. In normal times, forty percent of the U.S. workforce is employed in insecure positions, such as temporary, part-time, and “on-call” workers, contractors, and the self-employed. 97 While employment statistics can help illustrate the economic crisis, they can also minimize the lived-realities for the tens of millions of people living in poverty in the United States. In the richest country in the world, even prior to the coronavirus pandemic and its associated economic implosion, there were 140 million poor and low-wealth people. That’s over 43% of the population of the United States. Low pay, job scarcity or inaccessibility, and attacks on unionization work together to keep people in poverty. Do We Have a Poverty Draft in the United States? Mandatory military service ended in 1973, and by the 1980s the term “poverty draft” gained prominence as a term used to describe “the belief that the enlisted ranks of the military were made up of young people with limited economic opportunities.”98 In the context of vast economic precarity in the United States, military service often functions as a “draft-like system” that attracts low-income and other marginalized groups into enlisting because of a lack of other job, income, and educational opportunities available in their communities. Half of all young people who join the military do so as a means to pay for future education.99 Military recruiters have historically recruited among middle and lower classes. Reporting by the Seattle Times in 2005 found, for example, that nearly half of new recruits came “from lower-middle-class to poor households.”100 Native Americans, who have the highest poverty rate of any racial or ethnic group in the United States, also serve in the country’s armed forces at the highest rate of any ethnic group in the country.101 Despite such vast economic insecurity, the military is the only major federal jobs program in the United States. Over 1,300,000 Americans are on active military duty and over 800,000 more are in the military reserves. Another 1,600,000 Americans work for companies contracted by the U.S. military not only to supply weapons of war, but also the goods and services that support military operations. 102 The Department of Defense calls itself America’s largest employer - larger than Walmart, even.103 Since the military industrial complex is spread across the United States, some members of congress justify military spending by the jobs it provides their states or districts. War spending is often perceived as an effective way to increase employment, but there are far better ways besides a massive military jobs program to employ Americans.