Notes on Today's Military

Excerpt from aspeninstitute: Transcript_Nation_of_Immigrants

The total Defense Department budget today, including the expenditures for Afghanistan and Iraq, is less than 4 percent of GDP—one-tenth of what this economy had to deliver to win World War II. Now what this means in effect is that our society can now deploy history’s most lethal military force without breaking a sweat, without making any very deep demands on our manpower pool or the size of our economy. And this, to me, raises very, very serious questions about political accountability and [the] lowering of the threshold for the executive to employ military force without having to engage the deep and durable engagement and agreement of the citizenry at large …

Another asymmetry of very troubling proportions, it seems to me, is [in] the nature of today’s armed forces; 42 percent of today’s Army enlistees are ethnic or racial minorities—42 percent. In the general population in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old age cohort, nearly 50 percent of people … have had some exposure to college education. In that same cohort in the U.S. military today … the percentage of people who’ve had some kind [of] exposure to college education is 6.5 percent. So … the vast majority of our society … has in effect hired some of the least advantaged of our fellow citizens to conduct some of our most dangerous business. And I think that is an unstable situation, and one that does threaten, in the long run, the health of our democracy.