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Some disorganized thoughts and not a thorough review bc I haven’t systematically kept up with this literature. These are mostly sociologists, and voices I’d add to the convo. Not up to @jimgolby standards but here goes 1/
There’s a distinction btw looking at the objective SES backgrounds of those who wish to enlist, those who do/are able to enlist, and looking at those who recruiters target for enlistment and their messages. 2/
You can look to the past Bachman et all studies of enlistment propensity among HS students, and note the dramatic decline in interest from black students starting around the Gulf War. It doesn’t really recover. See linked piece here and cites within. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235057874_Youth_Attitudes_and_Military_Service_Findings_from_Two_Decades_of_Monitoring_the_Future_National_Samples_of_American_Youth 3/
I have older pieces looking at who enlists, noting the importance of local military presence https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2006.00380.x, and with RAND colleagues looking at why Latinos were/are underrepresented https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG773.html 4/
Alair MacLean’s work has looked at SES influences on enlistment but also exposure to combat once enlisted. Lower SES end up in military roles closer to combat, even if not more likely to enlist overall https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1525/sop.2010.53.3.347 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X10000773 5/
Amy Bailey @drakbailey has ongoing work in this area using zip code/geo origins and military service, and linking changes in enlistments to changes in incarceration https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/6/1/30 6/
Semi-related, interesting work from @devah_pager and colleagues looks at the attrition of enlistees with a criminal history, but offers insights into how mass incarceration affects the characteristics of who can and does join the military. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sox092 7/
Wendy Christensen’s @wendyphd work on military mothers touches on recruitment tactics and messaging, and this gets closer to the “poverty draft” ideas. But note the shift in what is under analysis—the tactics/messaging in recruiting. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538114247/Mothers-of-the-Military-Support-and-Politics-during-Wartime 8/
Multiple things can be true: recruiters can target those with less, draw on messages that feel predatory, AND the military may be enlisting those with relatively more advantaged backgrounds over time AND increasingly closing the door on those with the lowest SES backgrounds. 9/
But, recruiters have to adapt their messaging to attract recruits. USAREC is always looking at the tensions btw “quantity” and “quality” of recruits, and how to set and make mission and looks like they are also now altering their strategy https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/us/army-recruiting-tech-industry-seattle.html 10/
All of this is a complex system with lots of endogenous moving parts. It’s never as straightforward as it is made out to be. I think there’s a lot of motivated reasoning on this topic between empirical results and the conclusions drawn from them. 11/fin
