Out of 435 congressmen and a hundred senators, only four had children in the military and only one is an enlisted person.
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Joining us now here in Studio 3A to give us a sense of who today's soldier is, is Charlie Moskos. He's a military sociologist at Northwestern University.
And welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
Mr. CHARLIE MOSKOS (Northwestern University): Thank you. It's my pleasure.
CONAN: Can you give us a picture of those soldiers that Mike Shuster was talking about? Who are they?
Mr. MOSKOS: Well, the soldiers today in Kuwait and getting ready to perhaps go to war in Iraq are basically working-class and lower-middle-class young men and women. They are not the bottom of society by any means. They are likely to be higher minority than the general population, but not particularly heavily concentrated in the combat arms.
The most notable thing is that America's elite, our privileged youth, are not in the military today. A recent study was done on Congress. Out of 435 congressmen and a hundred senators, only four had children in the military and only one is an enlisted person.
Well, I listened to Mike, too. I was in the Gulf War, and this is like deja vu all over again. Most of the troops there really wanted to go home, get this war going so we could get out of here and go back home. So it's the absence of the elite. That's probably what we've lost in the last 30 to 40 years.
You mentioned earlier, too, Neal, about what do their fathers think who might have been veterans? That's another difference. Most of these don't have fathers who are veterans. Today it would be grandfathers. We haven't had a draft effectively since, you know, the early 1970s, so you're talking a 30-year gap now...
CONAN: Right.
Mr. MOSKOS: ...between conscription. So this has been an all-volunteer force for over a generation.
CONAN: With an all-volunteer force, is the average age older than it was when there was a draft army?
Mr. MOSKOS: Actually it's about the same, but the difference is if there's a big sociological difference between the draft army and today's all-volunteer army is the high number of married junior enlisted people. In military terms, if you look at something like corporal or specialist in Army terminology, there are as many married people at that level, which is a lower enlisted level, as there are first lieutenants. In the old days, the expression was that if the Army wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one. In a manner of speaking, they may be doing that now. But that's, I think, one of the big differences sociologically between this current army, is the highly married junior force.
Another factor is when people are joining, they do join for a variety of motives. Some want it because it's a job, some want the excitement. Patriotism is certainly always an underlying element. But a very big attraction today is the educational benefits, the GI Bill. The big competition for recruiters today is not the economy, but it's college. Two out of three high school graduates today goes on to college and virtually every Army person is at least a high school graduate. And that's where the competition comes from, and people are sort of, you know, weighing those kinds of alternatives.
CONAN: And that might be a reason why the sons and daughters of congressmen are not in the military; they may be off in college or starting their careers.
Mr. MOSKOS: Well, if I can just give a personal anecdote, I graduated from Princeton in 1956. Out of 750 males, 450 served. Last year at Princeton, with a class of 1,000, male and female, only three served. So you can see the change in the class background.
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