Volunteer Forces – Yeah, They Rock!
How often have you heard this canard? I’m categorizing it as a myth:
MYTH:
“We’ll need a military draft … and it better include women, transgendered and transsexual folks … because our military suffers with an all-volunteer force. They are asked to sacrifice too much, and that’s typical because they are largely poor, minority people who have no other choice but to be victimized by the Bush Administration. Besides, we don’t have enough people willing to be Bush’s stooges.”
BUSTED:
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) produced a study in July 2007 that is distilled and explained at The Heritage Foundation. Liberals will snort at that think tank’s reputation for facts, er, conservative principles, so you may need to get the original report at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/83xx/doc8313/07-19-MilitaryVol.pdf, a 1,016KB PDF file. It addresses the three concerns heard most often, that we don’t have enough troops, that the troops are disproportionately minority and poor, and that they are being asked to make sacrifices never before asked of the military.
The CBO disagrees with the Heritage Foundation over the representation of the poor and middle class, but Heritage shows how to use the CBO numbers to prove that the middle class is over-represented in the volunteer force, and the poor and rich are under-represented, in comparing the Heritage Foundation study to the CBO and the NPP (National Priorities Project) study:
The data from all three studies are quite similar, showing that in the modern military, the poorest and wealthiest youth populations are underrepresented while the middle-class is overrepresented.[4] As a matter of fact, the CBO even shows that recruits with parents in the wealthy 75th-;90th percentile range are overrepresented. Where the studies differ is how they cut the data and spice it up.
The CBO report uses 100 soldiers as its income study group, while the Heritage Foundation used a different methodology. The Heritage Foundation didn’t use personal income, but a much larger sample using the neighborhood the soldiers came from:
The [CBO] results are based on a sample of “just over 100 people,” which is arguably more tentative and subject to a wide margin of error, especially when broken into income brackets.
The Heritage study did not use such a tiny sample, or any sample for that matter, but the entire population of NPS enlistees: “The 2003 data cover 176,410 recruits, the 2004 data cover 175,977 recruits, and the 2005 data cover 149,462 recruits.” One way to think about the statistical validity is the following: a single 5-digit zip code in Heritage’s study included more enlistees than CBO’s entire analysis of socioeconomic fairness.
Some liberals have a litmus test for facts, and one of the favorite tactics is to impeach the source, poison the well, and discard any information from that source. The CBO report is from a non-partisan office that is, nevertheless, produced while Democrats have control of congress. They may still question anything that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions, but they will look foolish doing so.
