Race and US Military Recruiting

Remember the talk from the Democrats about reinstating the draft because minorities especially blacks are the ones dying for a white man’s war?:

Conyers said in a statement that “once the conscription process for service in the military becomes universal and mandatory for all those who meet the criteria . . . it removes the long-held stigma that people of color and persons from low-income backgrounds are disproportionately killed and injured while serving as ground troops on the front line.”

Critics of the congressmen, along with neutral observers, said their motive appeared to be a political attempt to call attention to race and class inequities in the military during the buildup to Iraq, rather than a call for mobilization toward war.

I would like these critics of the military to point out these “race and class inequities”. They never do because they can’t. They know full well that there isn’t an institution in the United States that gives blacks or any minority for that matter a fairer opportunity to excel than the US military.

Additionally their claims that blacks are dying in disproportionate numbers in Iraq have been proven to be totally and utterly false:

Contrary to the perception that citizen soldiers are bearing an inordinate portion of the overall burden, National Guardsmen constitute about 24 percent of all military personnel but accounted for 16 percent of those lost in Iraq. Some 95 percent of the fatalities had high-school diplomas, though only 85 percent of all Americans have finished high school. Blacks and Latinos made up 10.9 and 11.5 percent of the dead, respectively — about their same percentages in the general population, but in the case of blacks less than the 18.6 percent currently serving in the military. Twenty-nine percent of those who died attended high schools in poverty-stricken areas, versus about a 30 percent poverty rate for all high-school graduates.

That is a lot of facts that I’m willing to bet a whole lot of people didn’t know before reading this because the “conventional wisdom” created by our media is so false. So if blacks make up 18.6% of the total military yet only 11.5% of the combat deaths, than what are these Congressmen complaining about? It is because these Congressmen don’t know what they are talking about and blacks are in fact under represented in the combat arms branches:

“Blacks are attracted to military jobs that have transfer value to the civilian economy when they leave the military. Enlisting in the infantry doesn’t do that for you,” Segal told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

“Historically, blacks have been over represented in the military, but not in the combat arms,” Segal said. “A larger percentage of blacks work in administrative jobs, logistical services or medical fields.”

According to data from the U.S. Department of Defense, 41 percent of blacks in the military work in technical jobs, 47 percent are in administrative jobs and 12 percent are in combat.

Even more interesting information you probably didn’t know is that blacks actually have a higher casualty percentage in Philadelphia than in Iraq:

Experts are also comparing battlefield casualties with other areas of American society, such as young men living in violence-prone urban areas. Young black men in Philadelphia, for example, have a death rate 11 percent higher than troops in Iraq, according to Preston.

So who is over represented in the combat arms branches and over represented in the casualty statistics you may ask? Brace yourself for this, white soldiers:

Seventy percent of those lost were white men, although they currently make up only about a third of the U.S. population.

Will there be Congressmen demanding the draft to stop the over representation of white soldiers? I won’t hold my breath waiting for that announcement. Personally I don’t have a problem with white soldiers being over represented in the combat arms branches and taking the majority of the casualties in Iraq. In the military you volunteer and choose the job you want to do. We don’t need racial quotas in the military because you choose what you want to do and no one is going to deny you from doing it as long as you qualify for it. If more white recruits want to join the combat arms branches than so be it, it is their choice. If more black recruits want to enlist for service support jobs in order to develop job skills, I think that is great as well, because that is opportunity that many minorities are denied in regular US society.

So with so many young black recruits joining the military and receiving these job skills and leadership training, it amazes me that people in the black community would rather have their youth on the streets of Philadelphia than in the US military:

Black youth across the country appear to be heeding similar advice from parents, teaches, ministers, coaches and other black veterans. There have been changes in the racial composition of U.S. forces, particularly among first-term enlistees of ground forces heavily involved in Iraq.

Racial data on enlistees, compiled for Military Update by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), show that in fiscal 2002, the year before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Army had 43,400 blacks among its first-term soldiers, or 21 percent of the total. By 2006, the number of blacks on their first hitch had fallen to 30,000, down to 14.5 percent.

That’s a drop of 30 percent in black representation over four years.

So what is causing less blacks to enlist you may ask? Three letters, B.D.S:

“This lady looked at me and said, ‘I don’t care if you came from Iraq. You didn’t fight for me. You fought for Bush!’ And this lady was my own [race]! I [expletive] snapped. Excuse my language, but I snapped.”

Now with the drop in black recruits you would think recruiting numbers have suffered, however that is not the case as the US military has been repeatedly meeting recruiting numbers. So who is filling the recruiting gap with the loss of black recruits? Well would you believe more white recruits:

Over that same period, while the number of black first-term soldiers fell by 13,400, Army’s overall first-term enlisted population rose by 2,700. The number of white soldiers rose to close that gap while the proportion of Hispanics serving first enlistments didn’t shift significantly.

I don’t know if the white soldiers enlisting consider themselves Republicans or not, but the next time someone says more white Republicans need to enlist in the military and go to Iraq, give them this statistic the chew on because more whites are enlisting.

Also notice the rise in total recruitment numbers by 2,700; this is because of the expanding Army which makes the recruiter’s job that much more difficult. The fact that recruiters are attacked, banned by cities and schools, and their offices destroyed and even smeared with feces by anti-US hate groups doesn’t help either. Yet recruiters are still meeting their recruiting missions. I’m not a recruiter and I never have been, but I respect what they do. It is a tough and thankless job made harder by the bias media and the anti-US hate groups targeting these recruiters.

So overall I find it interesting how quickly people are willing to play the race card in order to reinstate a draft though hard data shows their reasoning is totally flawed. Additionally I think it is sad that people are willing to discourage black youths interested in joining the military for something as superficial as “Bush’s War”. A decision to join the military by anyone of any race should be something based off of more factors than just a superficial slogan. It is even sadder when any soldier comes back to America and gets treated like the soldier mentioned in article did. It appears the effort to paint soldiers of any race as uneducated low lives that are committing war crimes all over Iraq is working in some sectors of the American public.