COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Youth of Color
Army battling decline in black recruits
RICHARD WHITTLE, The Dallas Morning News
August 2, 2005
WASHINGTON The Iraq war is drying up at least part of a pool of recruits the Army has relied upon for decades: black Americans.DeTorrian Rhone, 18, playing basketball with brother Xzavious, says he talked to Army recruiters but decided to enroll in college instead.
The Army has long enjoyed a special relationship with black Americans, who have filled its ranks at rates far beyond their share of the population since the draft was abolished in 1973.
But in a trend compounding the Army's recruiting woes, those days may be over.
"A lot of black kids, they don't want to be in it," said DeTorrian Rhone, 18, a 2005 graduate of Bryan Adams High School in East Dallas. He talked to Army recruiters but decided to go to Texas Southern University instead.
"Most of the kids say they don't want to fight for a country that's pickin' on other countries," he said. "I don't want to fight because this [Iraq] war was stupid, it wasted money. Army people are getting killed for nothing, and we should have stayed in our own business."
Mr. Rhone represents a trend that began before the war in Iraq but has worsened since: a steep drop in the percentage of black Army recruits.
"We saw the most precipitous drop immediately after Sept. 11," Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, commander of Army recruiting, said at the Pentagon this year.
In fiscal 2001, which ended 19 days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, nearly 23 percent of all new Army recruits were black – as in each of the previous five years. So far in fiscal 2005, which ends Sept. 30, only about 14 percent are.
That's a decline of nearly 40 percent in the proportion of black recruits – when the Army never needed them more.
The Army exceeded its total recruiting goal for June, enlisting 507 more soldiers than its target of 5,650. But that followed four months in which it badly missed its goals, leaving it more than 7,800 short for the fiscal year.
To hit its annual target of 80,000 new enlistees in fiscal 2005, the Army will have to recruit nearly 11,000 soldiers a month in July, August and September – more than double its monthly average this fiscal year. July figures will be released Aug. 10.
Yet Gen. Rochelle said he was "not overly concerned" with the decline because its effect has been to bring the proportion of blacks among enlistees into line with their share of the population.
Historical perspective
Ever since the Army became an all-volunteer force in the 1970s, it has relied on blacks for roughly a quarter of its soldiers, though they constituted less than 15 percent of the population. And for historical and economic reasons, they have answered the call.
One reason: the Army was one of the first U.S. institutions to integrate – a step taken in 1947 by order of President Harry Truman. And while racial tensions within the service took years to overcome, after the Vietnam War the Army became known for offering equal opportunity.
"The Army's played a huge role in giving African-Americans opportunities to excel based on their merits and talents," said Lt. Col. Reggie Allen, who just completed his 20th year in the Army. "I grew up in inner-city New York, and I grew up with a lot of guys who, frankly, had limited life choices."
Two years ago in Iraq, Col. Allen became the first black soldier to command the 1st Squadron of the 10th Cavalry Regiment in combat. The Fort Hood-based regiment was originally part of the Buffalo Soldiers – units created in 1866 that were "all-Negro" but had white officers.
Commanding the 1-10 was an honor, he said, but "there's nothing unusual about having minorities, blacks, in charge and running things and being in command of units in the Army."
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who rose through the ranks to become a four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989-93 – the nation's top military officer – is only the most prominent example.
Today, 29 of 307 generals in the active Army – including Gen. Rochelle – are black.
"Because we are almost colorblind and are focused on merit, we don't highlight it that much," said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, chief of Army public affairs and another of the 29 – as is his brother, Brig. Gen. Leo Brooks Jr. Their father was a brigadier general, too.
And even with the recruiting decline, about 25 percent of Army enlisted personnel are black, the Army reports.
Fair organization
Pollster David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank that focuses on black issues, found out why when he conducted a poll for the Army in 1998.
"A large percentage of African-Americans thought the Army was one of the most racially integrated and fair organizations or institutions in the country," he said.
"African-Americans always had a much, much higher propensity to serve" in the Army than did whites, he added, largely because it gave them "a chance to get training, pay for education, a variety of things like that."
But blacks also have strong negative views about the war and President Bush that Mr. Bositis and others say have cooled their ardor for the Army.
A poll Mr. Bositis did last October of 850 blacks and an equal sample from the general population that included 58 blacks found only half as much approval for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq among blacks as among the general population. The poll's margin of error was 3.5 percent.
"True or not, African-Americans often think that when there's a war, African-Americans disproportionately get killed," he added.
The numbers disprove that assumption, which came to life during the Vietnam War. Military sociologist Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, who with University of Texas professor John Sibley Butler co-wrote a book on blacks in the Army, said that in Vietnam, blacks accounted for 12.1 percent of U.S. troop deaths – about their proportion of the population then.
Army figures show that as of February – the latest ethnic breakdown of casualties available – blacks accounted for 12.11 percent of Army troops killed in action and 12.74 percent of those wounded in Iraq, even though nearly 23 percent of troops deployed to the conflict are black.
Whites have accounted for about 72 percent of soldiers killed and wounded in action, while 10.28 percent of those killed in combat and 7.31 percent of those wounded were Hispanic, according to Army figures.
'Not a good place'
"I have looked at it and this war is an equal opportunity war," said David Segal, head of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland.
But even so, he said, "I think that young blacks are hearing from their parents, their teachers and their peers that the military right now is not a good place for young black men."
Mr. Butler, who is black and was an Army medic in the Vietnam War, discounts the Iraq war as the cause of the decline in black enlistments. The trend began in 2000, he noted, three years before the war.
"I think it is because of the opportunity structure," the UT professor said. "The percentage of blacks going to college has increased significantly over the past 20 years. The number of blacks starting their own enterprises is way up."
But Spc. Jeramie Jackson, 26, of Ventura County, Calif., a 1-10 Cavalry scout who is black, said "a lot of family and friends" tried to talk him out of joining last fall because of the war. He went ahead because he couldn't find a job that would support his young family, even with a criminal justice degree from Long Beach State College.
Where he lived, he said, "A lot of black individuals were debating on going into the service but they had others come up to them and say, 'Now is not the time. If you were going to join, you should have done it a few years ago before these wars.' "
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