COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Recruiting in Rural Areas
The Whole Story on Military Recruiting?
Deborah Howell, Washington Post
January 7, 2006
Numbers aren’t just facts. They can be interpreted in many ways, even if they come from the same or similar sources.
Ann Scott Tyson, a respected Washington Post military reporter
just back from Iraq, wrote in a front-page story Nov. 4 that
“newly released Pentagon demographic data show that the military
is leaning heavily for recruits on economically depressed rural areas
where youths’ need for jobs may outweigh the risks of going to
war.”
The story said that more than 44 percent of military recruits
come from rural areas, most from the South and West. “Many ...
are financially strapped, with nearly half coming from
lower-middle-class to poor households, according to new Pentagon data
based on Zip codes and census estimates of mean household income.”
The story, which was largely based on Pentagon data, included
some analysis done by the National Priorities Project (NPP), a
liberal-leaning think tank that questions the war in Iraq. The NPP also
used Pentagon, census and Zip code data. A different analysis, released
by the conservative Heritage Foundation a few days later, was reported
by other media outlets.
In looking at the story, I talked to Curt Gilroy, who, as
director of accession policy for the secretary of defense, has
oversight of all active-duty recruiting; Tim Kane, a Heritage
researcher; Betty Maxfield, demographer of the Army; Bruce Orvis,
director of the Manpower and Training Program at the Rand Corp.’s
Arroyo Center, and Robert Brandewei, director of the Defense Manpower
Data Center in Monterey, Calif.
All said the story and NPP analysis lacked context because they
did not report trends over the past several years and did not look at
“nationally representative data” or the entire recruit
population. A statement from Gilroy and Maxfield said that
“incomes and socioeconomic status of recruits’ families
closely mirror the U.S. population. These findings are contrary to
those” in Tyson’s article.
Kane agreed that a higher proportion of recruits come from rural
areas and the South, which is historically true. “But the key
word is proportion. The data in the Post article are accurate, but the
inferences are not,” he said. “The percentage of recruits
coming from poorer areas has declined every year since 2001 and the
percentage coming from richer areas has increased.”
The Pentagon statement said the Post article used
“anecdotal evidence and ... data compiled by the NPP that were
incomplete. The Department of Defense does not know whether the data
are right or wrong, but the data are clearly not representative or even
appropriate for part of its analysis.”
In particular, the Pentagon said the NPP considered “the
Army’s top 20 counties for recruiting.” Though those
counties produced an above-average number of recruits, the counties
“account for a minuscule number and proportion of total recruits
... 275 out of 180,000 recruits (less than 0.2 percent). One would be
hard-pressed to conclude much about income levels from such a small
sample size.”
Rand Corp.’s Orvis said, “You just can’t look
at the top 20 or the bottom 20. You have to look at the entire
distribution.” Data for 1999-2004, he said, show that the income
of recruits’ families is close to the national average for homes
of youths 17 to 21, and family income among recruits has increased
every year since 1999. He also said that half or more of recruits come
from urban or suburban areas and that there has been little change in
where recruits come from since 1999.
Post National Editor Michael Abramowitz said, “Ann set out
to tell the story of what kind of young people are joining
today’s military. Obviously the armed services draw from a range
of demographic, income and ethnic groups. The Pentagon’s own
numbers indicate that that the military is drawing disproportionally
from rural and Southern communities, and from families with slightly
lower incomes than the population in general.
“The numbers also show a close correlation between the
unemployment rate and recruiting. These are the phenomena that Ann
accurately described in her story. While we did note some trends, such
as the growth in wealthier recruits, we probably could have done a
better job highlighting some of the nuances in recruiting patterns and
providing more context. But the overall thrust of the story still seems
accurate and sound to us.”
Brandewei took the NPP analysis off the group’s Web site
and tried to match it with the same data from his agency. He said he
could only duplicate two counties, and in the other 18, his numbers and
the NPP’s diverged by as much as 20 percent.
Anita Dancs, research director for the NPP, said the survey was
the first the organization has done on military recruiting and that it
included Army Reserve figures but not Marine Corps data. “The
armed services gave us reasonably raw data and it varied from branch to
branch. I can’t comment on what the Army provided; it may be
different from what we were working with.”
She said that while the NPP did not have access to family income
data, “we did base our analysis on Zip code data of all of the
recruits. We didn’t do a comparison over time. We just wanted to
put the latest data on our Web site (at www.nationalpriorities.org) so
that people could retrieve the number of recruits by Zip code, county
or state and decide for themselves whether the proportion is right. We
continue to believe that the lower- and middle-class is
overrepresented” in recruiting.
My bottom line on polls and surveys, no matter what kind: Look
for the widest context. Ask as many experts as possible what the
numbers mean. Numbers can be right but not tell the full story, and
that’s the case with the article on recruiting.
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