Perpetuating the misconception...

In his blog The Daily Outrage at the online version of The Nation, Ari Berman asks several important questions about the draft. Most of his post is right on target, noting the Bush administration's over-reliance on the Guard and Reserve, the Guard and Reserve's impending crisis with recruiting and retention, and the need to and challenges of increasing the size of the force. However, I submit that this bullet is colored by exactly the kind of misconceptions I try to dispel with my latest TomPaine.com article:

** "The biggest predictor of whether you're in the military today is the unemployment rate in your home county," Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver told the National Journal. The average soldier dying in Iraq comes from a family earning roughly $10,000 less than the national median household average ($43,718), while minorities represent 32 percent of combat and 40 percent of non-combat casualties. Only four members of Congress have children serving in active duty. Short of a draft, how can you ensure that minorities and the working poor aren't carrying an undue share of America's military burden?

Berman cites Peter Feaver to support his assertion that "minorities and the working poor" bear the burden of military service, but the complete Feaver excerpt from the article actually contradicts Berman's point:

"There is a class effect, but not the one that people think," argued Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University. The most privileged don't bother to enlist, but the most disadvantaged don't qualify, so "it's the middle classes that are mostly represented in the military," Feaver said. "Obviously, folks who go into the military today are facing economic pressures. The biggest predictor of whether you're in the military today is the unemployment rate in your home county."

"Facing economic pressures" and suggesting that most new recruits come from "working poor" families are not the same thing, and Feaver is clear that the middle class is the most affected. Moreover, the very same article also contradicts Berman on minorities:

It is wrong to say that minorities are disproportionately bearing the burden. Whites are indeed slightly under-represented in today's active-duty military as a whole: They make up 64.2 percent of the force, compared with 69.1 percent of the U.S. population. (The reserve components are somewhat whiter.) But whites are slightly over-represented among the dead, at 70.9 percent.

As I said, the rest of Berman's post is on target, and his heart is in the right place. His larger point about considering who bears the burden of military service is important, but this particular aspect of his analysis merely perpetuates the liberal misconception about today's military.