The military disproportionately recruits from lower income households. Decreasing inequality would undermine enlistment.
Kriner and Shen ’16 [Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen; Kriner is the Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions at Cornell University. Shen, JD, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and the MGH Department of Psychiatry. Previously Dr. Shen was a Professor of Law, McKnight Presidential Fellow, and faculty member in the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota; 2016; “Invisible Inequality: The Two Americas of Military Sacrifice”; The University of Memphis Law Review; Accessed 6-30-2023; DQ]
One of the most straightforward explanations for inequality in wartime death is inequality in who serves in the military. For more than fifty years, an extensive literature at the crossroads of sociology, history, economics, and political science has investigated military manpower policies and changes in them over time.53 Today, a small percentage of Americans serve in the military.54 This has led to a civil-military gap along a number of dimensions.55 Men and women join the military for many reasons; for many, patriotism and a desire to serve are undoubtedly key factors. Yet an extensive literature also documents the critical importance of economic incentives in spurring enlistments throughout American history.56 At the aggregate level, a number of studies have demonstrated strong correlations between the health of the economy and patterns in military enlistments. For example, in a 1994 RAND study of the factors correlated with the successful recruitment of high quality enlistments from 1978 to 1993, two of the factors with the greatest influence on the number of high quality recruits obtained by the Army were the youth unemployment rate and the rate of military pay growth relative to the civilian sector.57
This linkage continues to the present day. Reflecting on the surge in military enlistments during the economic troubles of 2008, which followed immediately on the heels of two of the most difficult recruiting years in recent memory in 2006 and 2007, Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness David S.C. Chu readily acknowledged the faltering economy’s role in boosting volunteering: “We do benefit when things look less positive in civil society.”58 Other analyses of enlistment decisions at the individual level demonstrate, logically, that the young men and women most likely to volunteer are those for whom the occupational and educational benefits that the military affords are most appealing compared to their options in the civilian labor market.59 As summarized by military historian Peter Karsten, “Most volunteers, today and for the past 200 years, joined the service in order to gain economic rewards, social mobility, or skills needed later in civilian life.
60 Recognizing these economic incentives, it is not surprising that Army recruits have come disproportionately from parts of the country that are lower on the socioeconomic scale.61 The military has struggled in some years to meet its enlistment quotas, and as a result it has drawn on recruits with lower qualifications.62 During some of the relevant periods of recruitment for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army lowered its recruitment standards63 and offered larger financial incentives.64 Such selection mechanisms have the potential to create casualty gaps. But this is only part of the story.
The vast majority of those who serve do not die in combat, and those who do die are not a random sample of the military population as a whole. As Colonel Samuel Hays wrote in Army Magazine in 1967, “In many ways the differences in sacrifice between those who are called to the service and those who are excused are less drastic than the differences which result from different assignments in the Services . . . no one could find much equity between pounding a typewriter in the Pentagon and carrying the M16 rifle in the jungles of Vietnam.”65
Occupational assignment is far from random. Through a series of tests, the military assesses each new soldier’s aptitudes and pre-existing skill sets and, on the basis of this information and additional evaluations, it assigns each soldier to the tasks thought to be best-suited to his or her personal skills and to the military’s needs.66 If soldiers assigned to positions with high risks of combat exposure differ systematically from soldiers assigned to occupations with lower levels of combat risk, occupational assignment, too, has the potential to generate a casualty gap.67
When one examines the difference between enlisted and officer casualty rates, we find strong evidence that occupational sorting leads to casualty gaps.68 Casualty rates for the infantry and the enlisted ranks are more inversely related to community wealth and education than are non-infantry and officer casualty rates.69
Because lower-skilled recruits are more likely to come from less advantaged communities, and because they are subse- quently more likely to be assigned to occupations with greater combat risks than are recruits with higher skills, the occupational assignment mechanism may produce a casualty gap, even if the military as a whole were representative of the civilian population.70 Similarly, because the enlisted ranks come disproportionately from lower income/education communities, and because enlisted soldiers are more likely, on average, to see front line combat than are officers, assignment by rank also explains why a casualty gap can develop even if the military’s overall demographics may roughly mirror society.
In sum: We believe there is extremely strong evidence that poorer parts of America are bearing a greater share of the human costs of war. In the next two Parts we explore some of the social and political consequences of these Two Americas of military sacrifice.