The US military recruitment focuses on low-income household – eliminating poverty reduces available recruitment information for low income household and reduces the available target areas for recruitment

[Roberto Camacho, Chicano freelance multimedia journalist who focuses on criminal justice reform, immigration, Chicano/Latino issues, hip-hop culture, and their intersections to social justice] 4/18/22, “Marginalized students pay the price of military recruitment efforts”, accessed 7/2/2022, https://prismreports.org/2022/04/18/marginalized-students-military-recruitment/ - JR

The U.S. military utilizes a number of different recruitment methods to garner new enlistments, but their target audience has consistently remained the same: high schoolers, particularly young men from low-income and rural areas. Eighteen is the youngest age one can join the military without parental permission, but the armed forces still regularly market military propaganda in schools. Although the military does enjoy support within the public system, a grassroots movement of students, teachers, parents, and organizations has led efforts to reduce military recruitment presence and activities on high school campuses.

“We face an uphill battle not only because of the prominence of militarism in our society but [also] because there has been a lack of foresight by progressive people who aren’t thinking about what can happen 10 years down the line,” said Rick Jahnkow, former program coordinator for the nonprofit Project on Youth & Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO) and a current member of the organization’s board of trustees.

The U.S. military has been an all-volunteer service since the end of the draft and the Vietnam War in 1973, making aggressive recruitment efforts essential to maintaining its 1.3 million-member active-duty global military force. Military recruitment in public schools isn’t new, but the level of access the military has to students and their information has increased alarmingly over the past several decades. Notably, recruiters got a significant boost when then-President George W. Bush signed the “No Child Left Behind” Act into law in 2002—under Section 9528 of the act, schools can lose their federal funding if they fail to allow military recruiters the same level of access to students and their private information as they do to other recruiters from community colleges and universities.

Students and their families can decline to share their private information with the military. But while some schools have chosen an “opt-in” approach where affirmative permission from parents is needed before recruiters can initiate contact, most use an “opt-out” method where student information is given to recruiters unless parents explicitly say no. Schools can also be opaque about parents’ options to limit access to their children’s information, which disproportionately affects time- and resource-poor households, such as single parents, parents who work multiple jobs, those who are English language learners, and families who are simply unaware of these policies to begin with, by making them easier targets for recruiters.