Justin Fox, Bloomberg: Why You Don't Know Anybody in the Military
Getting rid of the draft has something to do with it, but not everything.
There were a lot of complicated things going on in White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's statement Thursday about the combat deaths of servicemen and women and how the nation (and his boss) responds to them. But along the way he made one very simple assertion:
Most of you, as Americans, don’t know them. Many of you don’t know anyone who knows any one of them.
That sounds ... about right. Active-duty military now make up just 0.4 percent of the U.S. population, down from 1.8 percent in 1968 and 8.7 percent in 1945. Military personnel also tend to come from certain parts of the country more than others. Here, from the Defense Department's most recent annual report on population representation in the military services, are the states with the most military recruits in fiscal year 2015 as a percentage of the population aged 18 through 24:
Read more ....
WNU Editor: In Russia ..... every male I know has served in the military. Living in Canada .... the GF's father served in the Canadian military, but aside from him .... and if it was not for this blog .... I would know no one. And this has been the biggest reward (for me) in doing this blog .... it has given me the opportunity to meet and know a lot of people who have served and who are serving. Words cannot adequately express how grateful I am that this has happened .... and I will admit .... it is something that I never expected.
3 comments:
Actually it is simple:
No draft
No war
just secret operations and/or some vague thing called War on Terror, that allows our leaders and military to go anywhere and do anything without congressional approval
Fred it seems that the military coup, strongly supported by the corporate world, happened long ago but was not in any way flamboyant as we have seen coups roll out in other countries.
1950...we did not have a war...we had a "police action", as it was called...but a real war is known despite congress when you are entitled to the G.I. Bill
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