Who Are the Recruits? The Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Military Enlistment

[darrels joy]

Who Are the Recruits? The Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Military Enlistment, 2003?2005

by Tim Kane, Ph.D.

Center for Data Analysis Report #06-09

A pillar of conventional wisdom about the U.S. military is that the quality of volunteers has been degraded after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Examples of the voices making this claim range from the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Daily News [1] to Michael Moore?s pseudo-documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Some insist that minorities and the underprivileged are over?represented in the military. Others accuse the U.S. Army of accepting unqualified enlistees in a futile attempt to meet its recruiting goals in the midst of an unpopular war.[2]

A report published by The Heritage Foundation in November 2005 examined the issue and could not substantiate any degradation in troop quality by comparing military enlistees in 1999 to those in 2003. It is possible that troop quality did not degrade until after the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, when patriotism was high. A common assumption is that the Army experienced difficulty getting qualified enlistees in 2005 and was subse?quently forced to lower its standards. This report revisits the issue by examining the full recruiting classes for all branches of the U.S. military for every year from 2003 to 2005.

The current findings show that the demo?graphic characteristics of volunteers have contin?ued to show signs of higher, not lower, quality. Quality is a difficult concept to apply to soldiers, or to human beings in any context, and it should be understood here in context. Regardless of the standards used to screen applicants, the average quality of the people accepted into any organiza?tion can be assessed only by using measurable cri?teria, which surely fail to account for intangible characteristics. In the military, it is especially questionable to claim that measurable characteris?tics accurately reflect what really matters: cour?age, honor, integrity, loyalty, and leadership.

Those who have been so quick to suggest that today?s wartime recruits represent lesser quality, lower standards, or lower class should be expected make an airtight case. Instead, they have cited selective evidence, which is balanced by a much clearer set of evidence showing improving troop quality.

Indeed, in many criteria, each year shows advancement, not decline, in measurable qualities of new enlistees. For example, it is commonly claimed that the military relies on recruits from poorer neighborhoods because the wealthy will not risk death in war. This claim has been advanced without any rigorous evidence. Our review of Pen?tagon enlistee data shows that the only group that is lowering its participation in the military is the poor. The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005.

This report updates the previous Heritage Foun?dation report, with data on all U.S. recruits during 2004 and 2005. We introduce the term ?wartime recruits? to identify volunteer enlistees in all branches during 2003, 2004, and 2005. Like the previous report,[3] the analysis considers the follow?ing characteristics:

Household income,
Level of education,
Race/ethnicity, and
Regional/rural origin.

In summary, the additional years of recruit data (2004?2005) sup?port the previous finding that U.S. military recruits are more similar than dissimilar to the American youth population. The slight dif?ferences are that wartime U.S. mil?itary enlistees are better educated, wealthier, and more rural on aver?age than their civilian peers.

Recruits have a higher percent?age of high school graduates and representation from Southern and rural areas. No evidence indicates exploitation of racial minorities (either by race or by race-weighted ZIP code areas). Finally, the distri?bution of household income of recruits is noticeably higher than that of the entire youth population.

Demographic evidence discredits the argument that a draft is necessary to enforce representation from racial and socioeconomic groups. Addition?ally, three of the four branches of the armed forces met their recruiting goals in fiscal year 2005, and Army reenlistments are the highest in the past five years. A draft is not necessary to increase the size of the active-duty forces. Our analysis using Pentagon data on wartime volunteers effectively shatters the case for reinstating the draft.

Household Income of Recruits

Like their peers in 1999 and 2003, recruits in 2004 and 2005 came primarily from middle-class areas. Poor areas are proportionally underrepre?sented in the wartime years (2003?2005).

The Department of Defense (DOD) does not track family income data for recruits, and there are no individual income data for enlistees. Military service is the first full-time job for most of them. We approx?imate each recruit?s household income by using the median household income of his or her hometown ZIP code.



Much of the analysis in this paper (including this section) uses five-digit Census ZIP code tabulation areas (ZCTAs) as the unit of analysis. The Census Bureau uses ZCTAs to approximate U.S. Postal Service ZIP codes. In most cases, ZCTAs corre?spond to postal ZIP codes. For exam?ple, Representative Charles Rangel (D?NY), who advocated reinstating the draft in 2003, resides in the postal ZIP code 10037. The corresponding five-digit ZCTA 10037, shown in Fig?ure 1, had a 1999 median household income of $26,561. In 2004, six recruits originated from the area. In 2005, two more recruits from that ZIP code enlisted.

By assigning each recruit the median 1999 household income for his hometown ZIP code as deter?mined from Census 2000, the mean income for 2004 recruits was $43,122 (in 1999 dollars). For 2005 recruits, it was $43,238 (in 1999 dol?lars). These are increases over the mean incomes for the 1999 cohort ($41,141) and 2003 cohort ($42,822). The national median published in Cen?sus 2000 was $41,994. This indicates that, on aver?age, the 2004 and 2005 recruit populations come from even wealthier areas than their peers who enlisted in 1999 and 2003.

When comparing these wartime recruits (2003? 2005) to the resident population ages 18?24 (as recorded in Census 2000), areas with median household income levels between $35,000 and $79,999 were overrepresented, along with income categories between $85,000 and $94,999. (See Chart 2.) Though the mainstream media continue to portray the war in Iraq as unpopular, this evi?dence suggests that the United States is not sending the poor to die for the interests of the rich.

With the addition of data for the 2004 and 2005 recruits, the quintile trends noted in the previous report are even more striking. (See Table 1.) From 2003 to 2005, the representation of the highest-income quintile rose 0.68 percentage point, from 22.17 percent to 22.85 percent. As conflict in Iraq continues, youth from wealthy areas continue to volunteer for duty despite increased risk. Addition?ally, over the course of these three recruit years, representation from the poorest quintile has decreased dramatically. The representation among recruits of the lowest-income quintile fell nearly a full percentage point, from 14.61 percent in 2003 to 13.66 percent in 2005.



This change in proportional representation of areas based on ZCTA median household income is even more noteworthy when compared to the pre-9/11 recruits in the 1999 cohort, in which 18.6 percent of the recruits came from areas in the wealthiest quintile and 18.0 percent came from areas in the poorest quintile, indicating underrep?resentation for both the high and low ends of the income distribution. As shown in Chart 3, each of the top three quintiles increased in representation from 2003 to 2005, and all were overrepresented in comparison to the Census 2000 population ages 18?24.







Education

Educational achievement is the characteristic most commonly cited as evidence of lower military standards driven by the Iraq War. While some mea?sures, such as the higher percentage of Category IV recruits in the Army, are cited, other measures, such as the higher percentage of Category I recruits, are ignored. In general, the higher quality of recruits compared to equivalent civilian popula?tion has held steady during the war years.

The previous study noted the significant differ?ence between the national recruit high school grad?uation rate of 98 percent and the national youth graduation rate of 75 percent. This strong distinc?tion continues among the 2004 and 2005 recruits when compared to the national educational attain?ment levels reported by the Census 2004 American Community Survey (ACS).[4]

Given the nature of the military rank structure, most enlisted recruits do not have a college edu?cation or degree. Members of the armed forces with higher education are more often commis?sioned officers (lieutenant and above). In 2004, 92.1 percent of active-duty officer accessions held baccalaureate degrees or higher.[5] From 2000 to 2005, between 10 percent and 17 percent of active-duty officer accessions held advanced degrees, and between 35 percent and 45 percent of the active-duty officer corps held advanced degrees.[6] This indicates that officers continued their educa?tion during the course of their mili?tary service.

Many enlisted personnel are drawn to the benefits offered by the armed forces that allow them to obtain funding for college. In recent years, incentives to join the military have increased, providing more of the enlisted recruits with additional resources to finance their education. Although only about 7 percent of recruits for 2003?2005 entered the military with some college experi?ence, over 11 percent of the 2004 active component enlisted force had some college experience.[7]

Additionally, in the most recent edition of Population Representation in the Military Services, the Department of Defense reported that the mean reading level of 2004 recruits is a full grade level higher than that of the comparable youth population.[8] Fewer than 2 percent of wartime recruits have no high school creden?tials. Table 2 shows the breakdown for the educational attainment of the war?time recruit cohorts. The national high school graduation rate taken from the Census 2004 ACS is 79.8 percent.

In previous years, the Department of Defense adhered to a policy of accepting no more than 2 percent of recruits scoring in Category IV on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT), the stan?dardized test administered to all recruits to deter?mine eligibility. Category IV indicates that the individual scored between the 21st and 30th percen?tiles. Congress accepted a revised policy of up to 4 percent to allow for flexibility in the current recruit?ing market. Despite three of the four branches accepting limited numbers of Category IV recruits, in November 2005, the media criticized the Army for accepting a high number of recruits from Cate?gory IV.[9]








In fiscal year 2005, 4.4 percent of Army recruits scored in Category IV, and the Army is optimistic that it will remain within policy guidelines with its recruits for fiscal year 2006. For the first three quarters of fiscal year 2006 (October 2005?June 2006), 3.4 percent of Army recruits scored in Cat?egory IV. While the Army has been criticized for its AFQT score policy, only 1.2 percent of Marine Corps recruits for the first three quarters of fiscal year 2006 scored in Category IV, and the Air Force and the Navy have no such recruits for this period. In 2005, only 2.2 percent of the recruits from all four branches in fiscal year 2005 scored in Cate?gory IV. By comparison, because the Army does not accept any recruits below the 21st percentile, the nature of AFQT scoring indicates that 20 percent of the comparable civilian population would score below Category IV.

The policy regarding high school graduation status (or the equivalent) remains stringent across all four branches of the military. At least 90 per?cent of recruits must be high school diploma graduates (which does not include equivalency). Recruit accessions from the first three quarters of fiscal year 2006 are above this guideline in all branches except the Army. As of May 2006, 83.1 percent of accepted Army recruits met this requirement, which is still a greater percentage than the national graduation rate including equiv?alency. Additionally, for fiscal year 2006, the Army is in step with the other three branches in meeting the overall DOD guideline that more than 60 per?cent of enlistees should score above the 50th per?centile on the AFQT.

The military defines a ?high quality? recruit as one who has scored above the 50th percentile on the AFQT and has a high school diploma. The percentage of high-quality recruits has increased from 57 percent in 2001 to 64 percent in 2005 (67 percent in 2004),[10] indicating not only that the military is accepting intelligent and well-educated recruits, but also that the representa?tion of these recruits has increased strongly since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

While the military has changed its policies to allow flexibility in recruiting standards, it has cer?tainly not abandoned them. The current guidelines allow each force the flexibility to accept recruits who satisfy only one criterion: either a high school diploma or an above-average score on the AFQT, which is a standard equal to or exceeding the gen?eral youth population.

Race

According to the 2004 Census ACS, 75.6 per?cent of the national adult population self-identifies as belonging to the racial category white alone. In both 2004 and 2005, 73.1 percent of recruits were classified as white alone. This indicates a recruit-to-population ratio of 0.97, with 1.00 indicating an exact proportional representation. (See Table 4.) Whites are the most proportionally represented racial group among recruits. Excluding the group of a combination of two or more races, minority representation varies between being moderately proportional to extremely disproportional. The most overrepresented group is Native Hawaiian/ Other Pacific Islander, with a ratio of 7.49 in 2005, or an overrepresentation of 649 percent. The Asian category is the most underrepresented group, with a ratio of 0.69 in 2005.

Similar ratios appear in the proportional repre?sentation of racial groups among Army recruits in both 2004 and 2005, with the exception that blacks are more proportionally represented among 2005 Army recruits than they are in the total recruit population. The change in propor?tional representation of blacks among military recruits is a notable change from the 2003 cohort to the 2004 and 2005 cohorts. In the last three quarters of the 2003 recruit year, blacks were largely overrepresented, with a recruit-to-popula?tion ratio of 1.32 among all recruits and 1.44 among Army recruits. For 2004, these ratios were 1.19 and 1.17, respectively. In 2005, they were 1.07 and 0.96, respectively, which indicates that in the past two years of military recruits, the pro?portion of blacks in the military approached the proportion of blacks in the population.

The 2005 Army recruit-to-population ratio for blacks is 0.96. Additionally, they are more propor?tionally represented in the Army than whites, who have an Army recruit-to-population ratio of 0.95.



The 100 three-digit[11] ZCTAs with the highest proportion of blacks (in any combination of other races) according to Census 2000 contained 14.63 percent of the adult population. The recruits from these areas represent 14.09 percent of the 2003 cohort, 14.14 percent of the 2004 cohort, and 13.37 percent of the 2005 cohort. This indicates that these areas are not being overtly targeted to enlist large numbers of black recruits. For these 100 three-digit ZCTAs, the percent?age of those who self-identified as black in any combination in the 2004 cohort (42.94 percent) was almost equal to the percentage of those who self-identified as white in any combination (45.67 percent).

An accurate ratio of proportionality of Hispanics cannot be determined from the recruit data for 2004 and 2005 due to the high percentage of recruits who declined to respond. (See Table 5.) However, when consid?ering only those that did respond, the 2004 recruit-to-population ratio is 1.09 for Hispanics and 0.99 for non-Hispanics. (See Table 6.) For 2005, these ratios were 1.15 and 0.98, respectively. While this suggests that Hispanics are overrepresented among recruits, it does not reflect a gross underrepresenta?tion of non-Hispanics. No evidence suggests that the military is targeting its recruiting efforts to draw principally from Hispanic areas or to enlist primarily Hispanic youth.





Regional

In reexamining the question of whether the troops originate primarily from rural areas, the data for 2004 and 2005 indicate the same pattern seen in the 2003 data. As the rural concentration increases, so does the proportional overrepresenta?tion of recruits when compared to the population ages 18?24. (See Table 7.)



Additionally, the data for 2004 and 2005 confirm the strong military tradition in the South. In each year from 2003 through 2005, approximately 38 percent of the U.S. population resided in Southern states. In 2003, 43.82 percent of military recruits listed South?ern hometowns. Southern representation among recruits remained consistent with 43.49 percent in 2004 and 43.8 percent in 2005. (See Table 8.)



In 2004 and 2005, 29 states were overrepresented among military recruits in comparison to the general population.[12] (See Table 9.) The top five states with the highest proportional enlistment ratios for 2004 and 2005 are Montana (1.69, 1.57); Texas (1.34, 1.46); Wyoming (1.44, 1.41); Alaska (1.47, 1.40); and Oklahoma (1.31, 1.37). As mentioned in the previous report, one might expect states directly affected by the 9/11 terrorist attacks to respond with increased enlistment proportions. However, Virginia and New York continued to decrease in proportional representation from during 2004 and 2005.

The states with the most positive upward move?ment in their enlistment ratios from 2003 to 2005 were New Hampshire (+0.13), Texas (+0.12), and Maine (+0.10). The greatest decreases in enlistment ratios correspond to the District of Columbia (?0.15), Mississippi (?0.14), and Florida (?0.14). However, in both 2004 and 2005, Florida remained overrep?resented among recruits, with a 2005 recruit-to-population ratio of 1.02. From 2003 to 2005, 26 states had little variation (0.05 or less) in their recruit-to-population ratio.

Conclusion

As support for the war in Iraq has declined, criti?cism of the war has translated into criticism of our nation?s troops, at least by way of criticizing the quality of wartime recruits. The November 2005 Heritage Foundation study found that recruits enlisting at the start of the war were of high quality and in many respects comparable to the youth population. This updated report?s examination of three years of wartime recruits shows that recruit quality has not declined.

The estimate for mean household income of recruits increased every year from 2003 through 2005. The poorest areas continue to be underrep?resented, while middle-class areas are overrepre?sented. Although the richest income brackets are underrepresented, the difference between the recruit and population proportions for these brack?ets is less than 0.25 percent. Overall, the distribu?tion for recruit household incomes is very similar to that of the youth population.



The military continues to enforce educational standards in its recruiting process. The high school graduation rate among recruits is higher than it is among the national youth population. While the active-duty enlisted ranks have fewer college grad?uates than the comparable civilian population, DOD annual updates on population representation indicate that many who join the military are taking advantage of educational opportunities while serv?ing and that many others continue their education after completing their enlistment period.

The enlisted ranks are not disproportionately composed of minorities. Whites serve in numbers roughly proportional to their representation in the population. While blacks continue to be overrepre?sented, their representation has decreased during the wartime years and is much closer to being pro?portional in 2005 than it was in 2003. Additionally, recruiters are not targeting black-concentrated areas in an effort to exploit the black population.

Wartime recruits come more from rural areas, particularly from the South. However, many states outside of the South, such as Alaska and Montana, continue to have strong proportional representa?tion. Areas classified as entirely urban are strongly underrepresented compared to areas with increased rural concentrations, all of which were overrepresented.

Overall, the wartime recruits are more similar than dissimilar to their civilian counterparts. The all-volunteer force displays near proportional rep?resentation of income backgrounds. Whites serve in approximate proportion to their population, although representation of minority groups varies. Recruits must meet educational standards, and the military provides resources for furthering educa?tion to those who might not otherwise have the opportunity to attend four-year colleges. Although rural representation is disproportional, the military offers the opportunity to gain new skills and enter industries that are not available in rural areas.

With regard to income, education, race, and regional background, the all-volunteer force is repre?sentative of our nation and meets standards set by Congress and the Department of Defense. In con?trast to the patronizing slanders of antiwar critics, recruit quality is increasing as the war in Iraq contin?ues. Although recent recruiting goals have been dif?ficult to meet, reenlistment is strong and recruit quality remains high. No evidence supports argu?ments for reinstating the draft or altering recruiting policies to achieve more equitable representation.

Tim Kane, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for International Trade and Economics at The Heritage Foundation.

[Keith_Hixson]

I know several men in the military from Ellensburg. All came from white, well educated homes, with both parents having a good income. Interesting that my experience which is very local represents the national trend.

Keith

[SuperScout]

Somebody tell John "Did I ever tell you I was a Vietnam veteran?" Kerry, and make him read this post, committing it to memory, before he opens his mouth and proceeds to waltz around in it again.