Posting #13: The story of American patriotism in the US Military

“Ever since the draft ended on July 1, 1973, Americans have joined our military out of conviction, not compulsion. Over the years, the members of our All-Volunteer Force have been motivated by patriotism, pride, and principle—by the desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves, and by their love for our exceptional nation.”  Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, June 30, 2023

The story:  People who serve in the US military do so out of selfless patriotic fervor. Their primary objective is to protect the United States and all it represents.  They take an oath pledging to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Though in that support and defense they may have to make what is called the “ultimate sacrifice,” they are willing to be killed if it means others may live with democratic freedoms. Their motivations for volunteering are more love for country and their compatriots and less about pay, bonuses, and other compensation and benefits they receive.  Such patriots long to serve their country and we let them, sending them to war.

My take on the story.  Instead of the story of fervent patriotism, I think the military is a business and people who work in it have jobs that pay the bills.  It is a business that can’t balance its books and doesn’t pay a price for that inability (see Posting #9), but it still is an entity whose industry is national security or, not to put too fine a point on it, efficient killing.  It is a massive industry.  The Department of Defense is the nation’s (and reportedly the world’s) largest employer with nearly 3 million employees, just under a million of those being civilian employees.  As immense as that is, the 3 million obviously neither includes the vast defense contractor complex—the Raytheons, the Northrop Grummans, the Lockheed Martins, the General Dynamics, the Boeings—nor the private military contractors—like Blackwater, Halliburton, Custer Battles, and DynCorp—nor the research “think tanks”—like Rand, Brookings, Carnegie Endowment, and the Atlantic Council.  These businesses are all part of the “military-industrial complex,” an industry whose work is war.  And with the latest conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, business is booming.   

This concept of the military as business is not unknown to young people, the population needed most to fill the ranks.  Their “propensity” to volunteer—the word “volunteer” obscuring the bonuses and financial compensation used to aggressively recruit young Americans—is primarily based on self-interest.  A survey of over 5000 Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 found that the first of the top ten reasons to join the US military is “Pay/money.”  Only two of the top ten, the sixth and the tenth, are not based on self-interest: “To help others” and “Make a positive difference in my community.”  But self-interest is paramount on the list.  After all, that’s what the Army’s revived recruiting mantra, “Be All You Can Be,” blatantly encourages (See Posting #3).

Moreover, joining the military can be a family business, or what recently has been called the “warrior caste.”  Studies have found that “80% of new recruits come from families with at least one parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle, sibling or cousin who has also served in the military. More than 25% have a parent who is a service member or veteran.”  Serving in the military has become naturalized for many of us, as the normal course of life, not necessarily as a patriotic oath. 

This normalization has certainly been the case on my father’s side of my family.  (Per patriarchal custom, I don’t know about my mother’s side.) My father’s father served during World War I as a cook.  Most of his five sons served in the Air Force and the Army, including my career-Army father, who deployed abroad to postwar Korea once, to West Germany once, to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) once, and to during-war Viet Nam twice.  Numerous of my four uncles’ children served, and six of my eight siblings—plus I—were sent to college on the taxpayers’ dime and repaid our obligation with time on active duty.  (One of the six left West Point after two years, but, astonishingly, he did not have to repay anything.  The other three sibling West Pointers graduated and fulfilled their obligations.)  A couple of my siblings spent the requisite 20 years in the service to retire with a pension.  Several of my active-duty siblings married other active-duty members (West Pointers who also came from military families), some of whom also spent the requisite 20 years on active duty before retiring with a pension.  Six of my seventeen nieces and nephews have also been sent to college or graduate school at taxpayer expense and served or are serving on active duty.  By my rough count, that means that in the last four generations of my father’s family, at least twenty of us have served on active duty and among my siblings and their children, 11 of us have had our higher education paid for by taxpayers.  Still, as I recall it, patriotism was so naturalized it was like a religion: we went through the motions of pledging allegiance and rituals like reveille and Parade, but it wasn’t something I thought about and certainly not as optional.  It just was. And in such a large family, joining the family business was a way to go to college at taxpayer expense.   

This is not to say that I thought we were an ordinary bunch.  In fact, I can recall thinking my family was superior, not only because we were a big military family but also because we were Roman Catholic.  In my child’s mind, that combination made us exceptional, and our multiple taxpayer-funded full rides to college only confirmed that.  (I have since learned that in terms of these full rides, we were advantaged as part of the warrior caste.  See Posting #6.)  I don’t know whether my siblings or other Army “brats” also saw themselves as exceptional, but I remember thinking and feeling that distinctly. Let’s say I’m still in recovery from such a fixed mindset. 

Recent studies of the “warrior caste,” though, emphasize the growth in exceptionalist thinking by military members following the 1973 institution of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF). What the Secretary of Defense in the quote above dares not say about the AVF but three scholars from the National Defense University do:

The shift from a drafted armed forces to an all-volunteer force has had a number of consequences, especially in the 20 years of war that have followed the attack of September 11. Specifically, it has led to increased isolation for U.S. servicemembers, to military members shouldering the brunt of the burden of war, and to a feeling among society — and the military— that those who serve are somehow exceptional or set apart — that they are, in a sense, secular saints.

In Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War, Phil Klay, the author of the 2014 National Book Award winner, Redeployment, calls this hagiographic treatment of servicemembers “patriotic correctness” (120).

So who are these saints?  Who are the people who “have joined our military out of conviction, not compulsion”? What indications are there of their motivations for signing up? And how does that impact what the rest of us think of them?  Below I raise four issues to try to answer these questions: how likely are young people to join; from which geographic areas of the United States do they originate; what are their ages, races, ethnicities, and sexes; and what are their religious preferences?

How likely are they to join in the first place? According to a 2022 study of the likelihood of serving, or propensity, among youths aged 16-24, Hispanic and Black males see themselves as the most likely to serve. Many of these youths find it difficult for someone their age to find full-time employment in their community, making “Pay/money” the number one reason for potentially joining.  From 1984 to 2014, males have been nearly twice as likely as females to imagine themselves in the US military.  In the last decade, however, the proportion of men who expect to join the military has plummeted to be closer to the women’s numbers: about 10 percent. Those who are prone to committing to military service imagine themselves enlisting primarily in the Air Force and the Army, which happen to be the two largest military branches and so need more recruits than the Navy or Marine Corps.  How likely is the “Pay/money” motivation likely to produce patriotism?

From which geographic areas do servicemembers come? The largest number of servicemembers hail originally from California, USA’s most populous state.  Other states that fill the ranks in terms of raw numbers are among the country’s top twelve most populous: Texas, Florida, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.  But relative to state populations, not just raw numbers, the highest proportion of servicemembers are originally from southern states, not coincidentally where a higher number of military installations and defense contractors are located and so joining the military is normalized.  These southern states include, in order, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and North Carolina.  Other disproportionate-to-their-population states represented by servicemembers include Hawaii, Alaska, Colorado, and Nevada.

Not only do these communities feel more intensely the everyday presence of the US military, but in committing more of their community members to the military, they feel more the consequences of war.  They feel the impact of having so many troops in one place, with jobs and tax revenue seen as an advantage. A disadvantage, in my experience, is that the businesses in the vicinity cater to/prey upon the potentially tens of thousands of (mostly young male) troops on the military bases, meaning strip clubs, payday lending institutions, national fast-food franchises, gun stores, liquor stores, bars, Army/Navy surplus stores, used car lots, and Big Box stores constitute the sprawl surrounding military installations.  As more or less bro-culture, this kind of sprawl doesn’t reflect the family life and community sentiments ostensibly encouraged by American values. 

Equally, because whole units usually deploy together, significant numbers of servicepeople in those sprawling military areas can be gone for long periods of time, negatively affecting those businesses.  Perhaps most importantly, the concentration of military servicepeople in the southern states that disproportionately populate the ranks means that they experience what is called a “casualty gap”, or more deaths among their fewer young servicepeople. Certain states, then, are likely to have a higher number of combat casualties. 

[T]his inequality has deep ramifications, both symbolically in American political life and for policymaking. In an experiment conducted in 2007, Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen demonstrated that Americans who live in communities with higher casualty rates are disproportionately more likely to hold negative views of government and withdraw from political life. 

How likely is it, then, that this higher casualty rate produces greater patriotism?

Age, Race, Ethnicity, and Sex

The US military has deliberately tried to diversify its ranks in the decades since I was on active duty, especially given the pressures of an All-Volunteer Force, the plummeting propensity of young people to join, the increasing number of young people with obstacles to joining (like obesity, ADHD, or lack of at least a GED), and the declining US birthrate (See Posting #3).  These factors require that the services seek potential recruits among any and all groups, which has especially included women generally, Black and Hispanic women particularly, immigrants (who can expedite their US nationality by serving), and youths who want to earn college benefits.  What the services cannot diversify for significantly is age: they must be populated with mostly young people.

AGE  Each branch—the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps—have their own age limits for people enlisting for active duty. All four permit people to enlist—that is, join up to follow the orders of officers—as young as 17 (but only with the permission of parents or if emancipated).  (Until 1974, women under the age of 21 had to have permission of parents to enlist.) As of 2023, the Army permits first-time enlistees between the ages of 17 and 35; the Air Force, with a recent change to the upper limit, permits first-time enlistees between the ages of 17 and 42; the Navy permits first-time enlistees between the ages of 17 and 39; and the Marine Corps restricts first-time enlistment to ages between 17 and 28.

Consequently, more than 80% of the total US military is enlisted and between the ages of 17 and 34. The Army is at 83% enlisted, as is the Navy; the Air Force is at 82%; and the Marine Corps is at 90%.  Commissioned officers, the “managers” of the enlisted, comprise the other 20-ish percent of the military branches. Because they are required to have a college degree, they are older to start with. Fifty-eight percent of the Army’s officers are below the age of 34; fifty-seven percent of the Navy’s are; fifty-nine percent of the Air Force is below that age; and the Marine Corps has the largest number of officers under the age of 34 of all four branches: 62%.  Still, the military overall is a young bunch, requiring enlisted people to retire after 30 years or at the age of 62, and requiring officers to retire at the age of 64 (with some rare exceptions).  How likely is it that these young people are motivated primarily by patriotism?

RACE, ETHNICITY, and SEX  The entire US federal government distinguishes between race and ethnicity.  Race includes white, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.  Ethnicity is divided into two categories: Hispanic or Latino, and not Hispanic or Latino. The two—race and ethnicity—sometimes can overlap.

Despite concerted efforts since 1948 to diversify the military in all sorts of ways, white, non-Hispanic or Latino men still make up the majority of all military branches in all of the ranks. Still, enlisted Black (14.2% of US population) and Hispanic or Latino (19% of US population) men are overrepresented in relation to their proportion of the US population in the Army, and about proportional to their representation in the Navy and Air Force.  Black men are severely underrepresented in the Marine Corps, while Hispanic or Latino men are severely overrepresented. In all of the services, Black (14.2) and Hispanic or Latina (16.4) women are overrepresented, together constituting about 50% of the total enlisted women in the military.  How likely is it that these under- and overrepresented people are motivated primarily by patriotism?

RELIGION  Recent data on religious preferences among US military servicemembers is hard to come by in the public domain.  According to several recent studies, though, members of the US military are inclined to have a religious preference, which tends to be Christian. 

·      A 2019 study by the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers concludes that just over 66% of all US military members claim one of three versions: “General Christian,” “Evangelistic Christian,” and “Catholic Christian.”  The study also reports that 23% of servicemembers report “No Religious Preference,” a number that has grown in size. 

·      A 2019 Congressional Research Service report suggests that the military reflects the Christian profile of the United States: “Religious diversity in the military is broadly representative of the U.S. population. Approximately 70% of active-duty military personnel consider themselves to be of a Christian denomination.” The study finds that Americans who have non-Christian preferences are underrepresented in the military.  Moreover, the study does not address “No Preference,” though the graphic reflects “Other/Unclassified/Unknown” accounts for nearly 25% of religious diversity.

·      A 2021 RAND study for the US Army finds that among enlisted people in the Regular Army, the proportion of nondenominational Protestants has increased, Catholics has decreased, and “Nones,” or no religious preference, has remained steady.  “These patterns,” the study concludes, “are largely driven by the religious composition of soldiers coming from the southern United States, who make up nearly half the enlisted soldier population.”  At the same time, however, the enlisted US Army population differs from the US general population: Army enlisted are more Protestant, less Catholic, and about the same “Nones.”  Interestingly, the study finds that Army officers are less divided between Christian and “None”; 95% report having Christian preferences.

So the question is whether there is a connection between claiming Christianity and patriotism.  In a 2019 article entitled “How Religious is Our Military? 3 Ways Faith and Defending Freedom Go Hand-in-Hand,” the author says that “faith continues to be a force multiplier, a key element in mission and military preparedness.”  Like so much having to do with religion in the military, the author doesn’t explain further how faith is the “force multiplier” he alleges, except to insinuate that religiously faithful servicemembers—especially Christians—are more patriotic because of their faith: “Today, over 70% of the men and women who serve in uniform continue to draw strength, courage and inspiration from their [Christian] faith as they fight for the rights and freedoms that we cherish so dearly.”

So what?

Above I’ve outlined some demographics that might clue us in to the patriotism of servicemembers: the propensity of young people to join the US military, how the geographic starting places of the people who enlist influence them, plus the dominant age, race, ethnicity, sex and religions of the US military. 

These demographics prompt questions about the storied patriotism of our servicemembers, questions that may be impossible to answer.  Are the less than 1% of Americans who join the services more patriotic than those of us who don’t? Are men more patriotic than women?  Are Black and Latina women more patriotic than white women?  Are people from the South more patriotic than the rest of us?  Are people who grow up near military bases and posts more patriotic than those who don’t?  Are Christians more patriotic than non-Christians?  Are Americans who profess a religion more patriotic than those who don’t? Are enlisted people—largely from the working class—more patriotic than officers, who are largely from the middle class?  Are the upper middle class and upper class less patriotic because they tend not to enlist or become officers?

Without definitive answers, we ought to be skeptical about this story we tell ourselves. Why do we tell this story, that it is patriotically-driven people who populate the US military?  Especially when so few of us serve and know so little about war or who we send to fight on our behalf?

I think we who don’t serve tell this story as a salve, as a way to ease our discomfort with sending other people to war.  If we persuade ourselves that they are driven by patriotism, we can be assured that they are non-partisan and not ideologically motivated.  We can rest easy about their war-imposed traumas, their injuries, their separations from family, their deaths.  If we think they are driven by patriotism we can ignore the economic necessity that sends so many working-class kids to the military, retaining the happy story that anyone can make it in a capitalist system.  We can rest easy about not volunteering ourselves and we can imagine them as true volunteers, people who are not at all motivated by benefits and compensations and having employment.  If we tell ourselves those who join are motivated by patriotism, we can ignore the possibility of their behaving badly, of committing war crimes, of sexually assaulting their comrades, of practicing white supremacy, of their taking their own lives as an outcome of war’s injury. 

We can send them to war and then patch them up afterwards by saying “thank you for your service” rather than NOT sending them to war at all.