Email this page

The Poverty Draft

Eight things you need to know!

1. In 2003 the Pentagon spent almost $4 billion targeting high-achieving low income youth with commercials, video games, personal visits, enlistment bonuses, and slick brochures.

2. The US military takes advantage of an economy that increasingly squeezes out those without a college degree, while gutting college financial aid and eliminating affordable housing.

3. Military recruiters never mention that the college money is difficult to come by, or that very few job skills are transferable from military to civilian life.

4. African Americans represent about 29% of the enlisted personnel of the Army, 21.1% enlisted personnel of the Navy, 15.8% enlisted personnel of the Marine Corps, and 18.5% enlisted personnel of the Air Force with only 8% overall represented as officers. Latinos represent about 9% of the enlisted personnel of the Army, 10.5% enlisted personnel of the Navy, 14% enlisted personnel of the Marine Corps, and 5.6% enlisted personnel of the Air Force with only 4% overall represented as officers. 17.5% of Latinos in the armed forces are in critical combat-related positions. These numbers are disproportionately high considering that African Americans make up about 13% of the US population and Latinos make up about 13.5% of the US population.

5. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that whites are over represented in combat positions and that people of color tend to be in administrative roles, but Secretary Rumsfeld also recently said that he would like to move people in uniform out of administrative tasks and back into combat units in order to continue the aggressive use of US troops throughout the world. There is no job in the military safe from war.

6. Puerto Rico is the Army’s number one recruiting territory. Capitalizing on an unemployment rate of more than 40%, Army recruiting offices in Puerto Rico garner more than 4 times the number of recruits US-based recruiting offices average on a yearly basis.

7. JROTC programs in US public schools are growing at an exponential rate. JROTC is not considered a recruiting tool by the Department of Defense (DoD), but the DoD encourages the relationships between JROTC instructors and military recruiters. In spite of the DOD’s claim, more than 50% of JROTC cadets with two or more years of JROTC experience join the military as enlisted personnel. Most JROTC programs occur in schools in working class or impoverished communities. More often than not those schools are also predominately populated by youth of color.

8. The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test (ASVAB), the admissions and placement tool for the US military, is administered in over 14,000 schools throughout the US. It determines whether a potential recruit is qualified for the military and for certain military jobs. Offered free of charge to schools by the Pentagon, the test’s primary aim in the secondary school environment is to identify pre-qualified leads for military recruiters.

^ Top of page