Heritage Foundation's Report on Who Serves in the Military Reveals Surprising Information

I strongly urge you to read Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics column in the September 22nd New York Times at http://snipurl.com/whoserves. The Heritage Foundation's report that Dubner discusses in his column includes these surprising facts:

So 50 percent of the enlisted recruits (i.e., not including the officers’ corps) come from families in the top 40 percent of the income distribution, while only 10 percent come from the bottom 20 percent...

These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (R.O.T.C.) program,” reads the report, “in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods ...

Read the column yourself to learn more, including this information:

There’s a further important point that can’t be found in this report but can be found in another one, which compiles race-specific U.S. military fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of March 1, 2008, there were 2,964 white fatalities in Iraq, representing 74.8 percent of the total; in the general population, meanwhile, whites in that age cohort make up about 62 percent of the population, so whites are overrepresented among Iraqi fatalities. Blacks and Hispanics, meanwhile, are both underrepresented; the same is true in Afghanistan.

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Mrs. Lieutenant, Iraq War, ROTC, deployed military personnel, New York Times, Freakonomics, Stephen J. Dubner, Heritage Foundation