Sure, that happened, but that has nothing to do with my objection to the assertion.
My quarrel with that poster’s assertion is with the notion that people who came from money, but who were drafted anyway, were somehow able to avoid being sent to Vietnam and that therefore the poor had a larger presence as a result. The logic doesn’t work for me. With all the billets around the world, there were a large number of people who never saw a day in a combat zone. There were a large number of Naval ships whose personnel never saw a day on the ground or were even in any danger. Were all of those people rich?
Also, people who don’t come from money tend to be less educated and end up as enlisted personnel. There are, of course, far more enlisted than there are officers; ergo, the poorer and less-educated element does most of the fighting and dying in any war.
It’s not a cite-- it’s a casual conversation I had many years ago with my father. He began his career as a college professor in 1960, while still serving in the Air Force reserve (he paid for college with the ROTC, and then spent 2 years on active duty); what he said at the time was that since college was a way to avoid going to Vietnam, middle class parents who otherwise would not have paid for such a thing, did whatever they could to send their sons. Student loans became broadly available in 1965 (a fact my father knew off the top of his head, but I just had to look up), and that led to many more people going to college, people living off campus, the end to in loco parentis status for universities, and a huge broadening of majors.
The school where my father taught was and is still, I think, the Mecca for those seeking independent majors (Will Shortz holds a 1974 degree in enigmatology, and a friend of mine who is a master juggler holds one in street performance; I have an independent minor in Deaf studies). It became so during the Vietnam war, spurred by all the people looking mainly for draft deferral, and trying to think what the hell they could stand to read about for 4 years.
I think there’s something fairly simple at work there, as well. You have to take an aptitude test called the ASVAB, to join the US military, which is conducted in one location over several hours, on a variety of subjects. For anyone who has taken the SAT, it is a walk in the park, but for someone who has not, it can be anxiety-producing, leading to lower scores, and also has quite a few questions of the type that can be answered quickly by analyzing how the test is structured.
Anyone who ever took a “SAT preparedness” class, or even read one of those thick manuals on the subject, will be way better prepared to score well on the ASVAB. Just having been told to skip a hard question, complete the section, then return to unanswered questions, will improve a person’s score, but someone who never took the SAT may not know that, and may not think of it due to the pressure of the situation.
If I read the OP correctly, he seems to suggest that recruits today are on average not physically fit, lack a moral compass and have trouble analyzing a complex subject and expressing the problem in question and possible solutions clearly in writing. I cannot deny that there are grounds to believe what the OP claims. The question would be whether this problem is worse in the USA than in other countries, particularly the potential enemies the USA may have to fight some day.
I would not worry wrt Russia. China, I’m not so sure.
That’s the British class system colliding with the progressively increasing lethality of war over time and the resultant higher casualties of officers directly leading men in battle during this period. It was statistically more dangerous to be a line officer than an ‘other ranks’/enlisted in both the US Civil War and WW1. Middle and upper classes held officer ranks in the British army out of tradition, not necessarily out of qualification. Direct purchasing of commissions in the British army wasn’t abolished until 1871. While the average ‘class’ of an officer in the US army in the Civil War or WW1 was probably higher than that of the average enlisted man, social class and mobility within it in Britain was far more solid and structured than was the case in the US.
While officers had a higher mortality rate than enlisted soldiers in the US Civil War, officers weren’t necessarily wealthier or socially better off than average. Grant, for a well-known example, was unsuccessful in his civilian life and often in debt or on the verge of it. What made the Civil War conscription system a conscription of the poor was the practice of substitution and commutation. Anyone drafted could either find (and pay) someone else to substitute for them or directly pay $300 in commutation and avoid being drafted altogether.
Yes, I remember it well. During Vietnam, the Army lowered its ASVAB score requirements so that those who scored in the 10th to 30th percentile would be eligible for service. It was called “Project 100,000”, and about half of them ended up in combat.
I don’t know how much the Vietnam era test was like the one I took, but given that nearly every question was a 4-answer multiple choice, you really have to wonder about the lowest scores.
Yes, I realize that “10th percentile” does not mean 10% correct, but they did have a minimum correct at my (non-war) time. It was something like 35%, or barely above chance.
I did meet a guy once who told me that he scored 30%, and got turned away, but he was allowed to take it again after n months (I don’t remember how many), and yes, he was someone I would not want to share a foxhole with.
Anyway, I wonder how much someone in the 10th percentile was maybe attempting to fail on purpose.
Old people have been whining and bitching about young people forever. What a bunch of horseshit.
Recruits have NEVER been up to the PT standards of the military when joining, that’s why you have basic. There were out of shape guys on my basic in 1989. There were out of shape guys in 1969. A guy being a “Disgusting fatbody” is a plot point in Full Metal Jacket, set in 1967 or 1968, and that was not regarded as being some crazy impossible thing.
Conscription is immoral and should only be used when the very existence of a nation is under threat.
But in a modern army, where even low level enlisted men are technical specialists and small unit coordinated combat requires lots of training and dedication, conscription is a bad idea. Conscription worked in the days when soldiers were cannon fodder, handed a gun and told to march towards the enemy.
Today, one bad soldier can ruin the effectiveness of a unit. We are seeing this in Ukraine, where Russia should be doing much better than it is but the quality of its conscript soldiers and lack of a decent NCO corps is causing them to be pretty ineffective compared to their on-paper firepower. That’s only going to get worse as they have carried out a general mobilization and are now pulling ‘recruits’ from all the poor areas of the country.
Officers have always carried more risk than the enlisted, especially at the Lieutenant and Captain levels. But it’s getting worse now, because precision weaponry, satellite imagery and SIGINT is getting really good at spotting command posts, command vehicles, etc. Russia lost ten generals in the first three months of the war, and countless other officers. Being in a command trailer 150 km from the front lines is no longer a guarantee of any kind of safety. Standing in front of your troops giving orders is a good way to get a drone bomb dropped on you.
I have a modest proposal: If we have a new draft, let’s make it for back-office positions that need to be filled, rather than for soldiers. The soldiers need special training and skills. But a JAG lawyer or a logistics accountant can be pulled from the ranks of accountants and lawyers.
For a change, if we must have a draft at all, let’s draft the professional classes. Professors should be more worried about being drafted than their students. Wall street quants might make excellent analysts of military data. Professors of political science can do a stint as intelligene officers. Economists can work in logistics.
Of course, once you make the draft apply not to the kids but to the professionals and the powerful, it’ll never happen. Which would be a good thing.
To be entirely fair, childhood obesity in the U.S. is substantially higher now than it was in the '60s, or even in the '80s.
The chart below (from the CDC report linked to below) shows that, in the late '60s and early '70s, the obesity rate among 12-19 year olds was around 5%. In the late '80s, it was around 9%. Today, it’s over 20%.
So, yes, new military draftees/recruits have often been out of shape; it may be an even bigger problem now.
They weren’t drafted, but a number of professors served in the OSS during WW II, including Marxists like Herbert Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School. I am not sure that many economists would have much to offer in logistics as the academic discipline is pretty far removed from practical matters and analysis. “Assume a can opener” is the punchline to a joke about the economist on a deserted island for a reason.
I work in a preschool which is considered elite, and commands a pretty high ticket. There are some scholarships, and ways of getting discounts, but generally speaking, the parents of the kids there are pretty high earners, and well-educated.
The kids skew toward slender.
We get the occasional somewhat chubby 4 or 5 yr-old, but I can’t think of a single child who could possibly be medically obese, and really, not even one who might be overweight, unless it is a borderline case, where a kid whose ideal BMI is a maximum of 24.9%, and the kid might be 25.5%.
Not really sure what the correlation and causation factors are, but I know I have read plenty of articles citing reliable sources that childhood obesity is more of a problem among the poor than the wealthy.
When you have more people from the poorer classes entering the military in the first place-- which has been true for a long time-- you are going to get more than your share of the overweight and obese applying for entrance.
That MAY be the case, but MAY is doing a lotta work there. It may… also not be the case. We would expect the military to see roughly twice as many obese recruits if people joining the armed services are randomly drawn from the population. That, however, is not the case. It’s a self-selecting sample.
BMI is not a percentage.
Your point is a good one though. For instance, a man who is six feet tall and weighs 230 is “obese.” That’s a BMI is a hair above 30. A 6’0" man really should not weight that much, unless he’s extremely mesomorphic, but that’s not unreasonable to start out as at the beginning of Basic. Such a recruit would not need special accommodations about would be in much better shape within eight weeks. Bear in mind the recruit is a YOUNG man (or woman, if you want to plug in different numbers) so they’ll lose some pounds easily enough.
Sure, there are people out there who are legitimately, unhealthily fat but those aren’t the ones signing up to be a soldier. The 47-year-old 5’9" guy who weighs 290 and can’t climb a flight of stairs without a rest period isn’t the guy applying to be a Marine. I’d guess the VAST majority of people walking into recruitment centers who are technically “obese” are edge cases.
That may well be true. You’re likely right; the self-selecting sample of volunteers probably includes relatively few obese 18-year-olds.
OTOH, that cite also notes that obesity rates are even higher among lower income levels, which is a demographic group that frequently winds up enlisting in the military, due to limited other options for starting a career.
The net, I suspect (and I apologize that I didn’t spell this out more, previously) is that the potential and interested talent pool from which the military can draw is getting narrower, because there is a substantial proportion who either won’t consider enlisting, or wouldn’t make it through a preliminary physical, due to weight and related health issues.
Trivia side note - Vincent D’Onofrio had to put on 70lbs for the role when Stanley Kubrick cast him, apparently the record for the most weight gained by an actor for a role.
Googling, Full Metal Jacket was filmed in 1985-86, while Adventures in Babysitting (in which Vincent D’Onofrio was in shape) was filmed in early 1987, so he lost the weight relatively quickly.
