“For poor blacks and poor whites there was simply nothing like the Army,” wrote Charles Moskos, a military sociologist, in 1986, over a decade on from the abolition of the draft. The stereotypical grunt was proletarian cannon fodder: an unskilled young man, from the impoverished boondocks or inner city, driven to the recruiting office by desperation and the promise of self-betterment. “Take a look at the Marines—what you see is black faces, from the ghettos,” said Noam Chomsky in 1989. “Sometime in the Seventies, the American army shifted to a traditional mercenary army of the poor.”
If there was once some truth to that, it is now a myth, according to a new paper* published in the Journal of Strategic Studies. Its authors compared data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth from 1979 (those born between 1957 and 1964) and 1997 (born 1980-84), which involved thousands of subjects interviewed regularly year after year. In the first cohort, who came of age in the aftermath of Vietnam, those who enlisted did indeed have lower parental income and wealth than equivalent civilians.
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