Military drawing from a shallower pool
Recruits increasingly from a small number of Southern counties or are kin to veterans
“A widening military-civilian divide increasingly impacts our ability to effectively recruit and sustain the force.”
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The sergeant in charge of one of the busiest Army recruiting centers in Colorado, Sgt. 1st Class Dustin Comes, joined the Army, in part, because his father served. Now two of his four children say they want to serve too. And he will not be surprised if the other two make the same decision once they are a little older.
“Hey, if that’s what your calling is, I encourage it, absolutely,” said Comes, who wore a dagger-shaped patch on his camouflage uniform, signifying that he had been in combat.
Enlisting, he said, enabled him to build a good life where, despite yearlong deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he felt proud of his work, got generous benefits, never worried about being laid off and earned enough that his wife could stay home to raise their children.
“Show me a better deal for the common person,” he said.
Soldiers like him are increasingly making the U.S. military a family business. The men and women who sign up overwhelmingly come from counties in the South and a scattering of communities at the gates of military bases like Colorado Springs, which sits next to Fort Carson and several Air Force installations, and where the tradition of military service is ingrained.
More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79% of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30%, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation where less than 1% of the population serves in the military.
For years, military leaders have been sounding the alarm over the growing gulf between communities that serve and those that do not, warning that relying on a small number of counties that reliably produce soldiers is unsustainable, particularly now amid escalating tensions with Iran.
“A widening military-civilian divide increasingly impacts our ability to effectively recruit and sustain the force,” Anthony Kurta, acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service last year.
“This disconnect is characterized by misperceptions, a lack of knowledge and an inability to identify with those who serve. It threatens our ability to recruit the number of quality youth with the needed skill sets to maintain our advantage.”
To be sure, the idea of joining the military has lost much of its luster in nearly two decades of war. The patriotic rush to enlist after the terrorist attacks of 2001 has faded. For a generation, enlisting has produced reliable hardship for troops and families but nothing that resembles victory. But the military families who have borne nearly all of the burden — and are the most clear-eyed about the risks of war — are still the Americans who are most likely to encourage their sons and daughters to join.
With the goal of recruiting about 68,000 soldiers in 2020, the Army is trying to broaden its appeal beyond traditional recruitment pools. New marketing plays up future careers in medicine and tech, as well as generous tuition benefits for a generation crushed by student debt. They often note that most Army jobs are not in combat fields.
But for now, rates of military service remain far from equal in the United States, and the gap may continue to widen because a driving decision to enlist is whether a young person knows anyone who served in the military. In communities where veterans are plentiful, teachers, coaches, mothers, uncles and other mentors often steer youths toward military service. In communities where veterans are scarce, influential adults are more wary.
That has created a broad gap, easily seen on a map. The South, where the culture of military service runs deep and military installations are plentiful, produces 20% more recruits than would be expected, based on its youth population. Northeast states, which have few military bases and a lower percentage of veterans, produce 20% fewer.
The main predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly evenly through middle-class and
“downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns out not to be the prime factor. And the racial makeup of the force is more or less in line with that of young Americans as a whole, although African Americans are slightly more likely to serve. Instead, the best predictor is a person’s familiarity with the military.
“Those who understand military life are more likely to consider it as a career option than those who do not,” said Kelli Bland, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Recruiting Command.
That distinction has created glaring disparities across the country. In 2019, Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is home to Fort Bragg, provided more than twice as many military enlistment contracts as Manhattan, even though that New York City borough has eight times as many people.
This was not always the case. Military service was once spread fairly evenly — at least geographically — throughout the nation because of the draft. But after the draft ended in 1973, enlistments shifted steadily south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The military’s decision to close many bases in Northern states where long winters limited training only hastened the trend.
Today, students growing up in military communities are constantly exposed to the people who serve. Moms pick up their sons from day care in flight suits. Dads attend the fourthgrade holiday party in camouflage. High schools often have Junior Reserve Officer
Training Corps programs in which students wear uniforms to class once a week and can earn credit for learning about science, leadership and fitness through a military framework.
Many schools encourage students to take the military’s aptitude exam, the ASVAB, in the way students nationwide are pushed to take the SAT.
That exposure during school is one of the strongest predictors of enlistment rates, according to a 2018 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses.
In Los Angeles, by contrast, the Army has struggled to even gain access to high schools. By law, schools have to allow recruiters on campus once a semester, but administrators tightly control when and how recruiters can interact with students.
Predictably, enlistment rates are low.
In 2019 the Army made a push to increase recruiting efforts in 22 liberal-leaning cities like Los Angeles. As part of that, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy visited Los Angeles Unified School District in December to push for greater access.
“He was doing a sort of listening tour,” said Patricia Heideman, who is in charge of high school instruction for the school district and said there was a perception the military preys on disadvantaged students. “I told him from the educator perspective, we sometimes feel they are targeting our black and brown students and students of poverty,” she said.