Investor's Business Daily, August 13th, 2007
Military: Three days after a national security adviser discussed the possibility of reinstating conscription, the Pentagon rightly set the record straight Monday. Americans will not be dragooned into service.
But the hours between Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a White House deputy national security adviser, talking about a possible return to the draft in a Friday radio interview and Monday's clarification was enough for one agitator to muddy the waters yet again.
Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel has long attempted to fight a class war over who serves in the military. Twice he's introduced forced conscription bills, claiming that the poor, the uneducated and the disadvantaged make up the majority of the armed forces while the sons of privilege are able to avoid their duty.
Lute's comments gave Rangel a golden opportunity to mount the soapbox -- and yet again set the facts askew.
"They'll get out of Iraq so fast if they thought that Middle America had to make any sacrifices," Rangel, of New York, said Sunday on ABC.
"But I do believe that any time our great country is at war, it shouldn't be sacrifices just by the low or middle-income people. Everyone should share the sacrifice," he said.
Does Rangel mean those sharp, educated soldiers, sailors and airmen who are making the sacrifices in the all-volunteer armed forces? Is he talking about a military where roughly 95% of the recruits are high school graduates? (The national average is about 80%.) Or the Air Force, where nearly 50% have advanced professional degrees?
Is Rangel referring to the armed forces where the poorest Americans made up less than 15% of the recruits in 2003 while recruits from households earning between $42,000 and $200,000 a year constituted nearly 45%?
Rangel's intent is to inflame, but he can't burn the truth -- and the fact is, the military has a distinct middle-America look.
The bulk of recruits come from households with annual income of $25,000 to $45,000. The share from households where the yearly income is $75,000 or $80,000 is strikingly similar to that from households where the income is $10,000 a year.
Moving on to racial makeup -- only because that's Rangel's fixation -- we learn from the Heritage Foundation that in 2003, less than 15% of military recruits were black, while their percentage of the population was 11.3%, hardly an overrepresentation.
Whites, who made up 77.4% of the population, were 75.8% of armed forces recruits. Across all racial divisions, the percentage of recruits closely mirrored their share of the general population.
If none of this is convincing enough, consider this: A draft corrupts the volunteer military in which every person, with rare exception, wants to be there, is prepared and motivated. There's no question as to which force is the better fighting machine.
