I read somewhere, that never has such a burden been met by so few. Surprised to learn that many that have the power to use the military never even wore a uniform. I cant predict the future but this trend will effect future generations. In her 2008 paper “Who Joins the Military?: A Look at Race, Class, and Immigration Status” Amy Lutz concluded that “as family income increases, the likelihood of having ever served in the military decreases.” Further, she found “low representation of the children of the very rich” within the armed forces and that “the highest income quartile was significantly less likely to have served than the lowest.” Donald Downs, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who’s written about the relationship between the military and top universities through the ROTC system, says the cost of the civilian-military gap is “alienation that impoverishes citizenship on both sides.” The vast and increasing social distance between the large majority of current elite decision-makers and the warrior class amounts, he says, to a “corrosive civic scandal: Elites wash their hands of this burden. It’s out of sight, out of mind.” People on “both the right and the left,” Downs says, “can agree that this is problematic.” Political scientist Michael Nelson argues that the expulsion of ROTC from elite campuses, combined with the implementation of the all-volunteer military, has produced a dangerous estrangement of meritocratic elites from the armed services, one that has “made the nation’s inclination to war and other military action greater than at any time in its already war-saturated history.” The decision by policy-makers to go to war, to use the bodies of their citizens as instruments in waging that violence, is the most consequential and solemn elected representatives can make. newsbound/chris-hayes-explains-the-cost-of-the-civilian-military-gap/
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 17:28:05 +0000
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