Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight? Technological Change, Tactical Developments and the Demographic Composition of the American Military

Abstract

According to the consensus among the public, policy-makers and academics, the poor are both more likely to enlist in US armed forces and to pay with their life the price of US security. In addition to moral considerations, this topic is important also for its policy and theoretical implications: a military primarily composed of the poorest segments of a society can, among others, alter policy-makers’ incentives to resort to force as well as affect its performance in the battlefield. In this article, we question this consensus. First, the causal mechanism underlying existing research is based on unwarranted assumptions. Second, the empirical evidence supporting this argument relies on aggregate data (e.g., average or median income by zip-code) that do not permit to reach definitive conclusions about military personnel’s socio- economic background. We address these problems by drawing from recent works on the evolution of modern warfare and change in military technology in order to develop a demand-side theory of military personnel that we test on individual-level data gathered from the Department of Defense and the NLSY97 survey. We argue that the 1970s U.S. Offset Strategy has promoted a dramatic change in warfare (the 1990s information technology-driven Revolution in Military Affairs) that has progressively led, on the one hand, to a more capital-intensive military and, on the other, to a more selective recruitment process. According to our theory, we expect those coming from poor and disadvantaged segments of the American society to be less likely to meet the requirements of the military. Consistently with our argument, in contrast to the post-Vietnam era, we find that those who enter the U.S. military are not statistically different from the median household with regard to education, cognitive abilities, parental income and other socio-economic indicators.