TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112690/1126103.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 124 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 34

Why No Blue Blood Will Flow


On the front lines, a disproportionate number of troops hail
from minorities and the working class


    The nation's capital has always had its share of hawks and
doves. But as the possibility of war with Iraq looms ever
larger, what powerful figures in official Washington do not
have is a direct personal stake in the fate of the troops. No
one in the President's Cabinet has a child serving in Saudi
Arabia. Of the 535 members of Congress, just two -- Democratic
Representatives Kika de la Garza of Texas and Jerry Costello
of Illinois -- are known to have sons involved in Operation
Desert Shield. By comparison, in 1970 there were 74
congressional children serving in Vietnam or elsewhere. But the
White House and Congress these days are largely insulated from
the familial consequences of their decisions about how to
confront Saddam. It's one thing to be concerned about the men
and women you might send into battle. It's another to be
related to them.

    Yet government officials are no different in that respect
from most other middle-class and wealthy Americans. Today the
armed forces are filled mainly by recruits from the
lower-middle range of the economic scale, regardless of their
race. Blacks and other minorities also make up a
disproportionate share of the ranks, especially in the Army,
the branch of the service likely to face the heaviest casualties
in a protracted ground war. Thus the prospect of fighting is
causing the fairness question, which dominated the
congressional debate on taxes last month, to return in a new
form: Will the U.S. be asking its poor and working classes to
do most of its fighting and dying?

    The creation of the all-volunteer army in 1973 made the
present imbalance inevitable. The Vietnam-era draft was full
of inequities that allowed middle-class youths to duck into
college and professional deferments. But once conscription
ended, the proportion of soldiers from more educated and
affluent backgrounds dwindled even further. Though Congress
approved a military pay hike of more than 60% in 1972, most
people with college degrees could find better jobs in civilian
life. By the late 1970s, as military pay scales began to lag
further behind those in the outside world, even high school
graduates were in no hurry to sign up. They accounted for just
54% of enlistees in 1979; the Army fell 17,000 short of its
manpower goals that year because not enough qualified recruits
could be found.

    A turnaround began in the early 1980s, when a combination
of increased military pay and economic recession made joining
the armed forces an attractive option again for high school
graduates. The Army also woke up to the importance of its
educational benefits, which it increased after years of
decline, and stepped up its advertising. By last year the
percentage of Army recruits who were high school graduates had
increased to about 94%, compared with a 75% graduation rate
among Americans generally. But college-educated men and women
and those from higher-income families are still sharply
underrepresented.

    That social and economic imbalance is compounded by a racial
one. Though blacks make up 12.4% of the nation's population,
they account for about 20% of the more than 2 million U.S.
servicemen and -women. For them, the Army represents not only
a job and a training opportunity but also a better chance to
rise to positions of authority than they usually find in the
civilian world. Colin Powell, the African-American Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stands at the apex of a military
hierarchy in which 26 of the Army's 407 generals are black --
including two of its three female generals.

    As long as the U.S. was involved in relatively small
operations with few casualties, like the invasions of Grenada
and Panama, it did not seem to matter much that the armed
forces were an imperfect mirror of society. The prospect of
sizable bloodshed in the gulf, however, has led some to ask
whether the current imbalance makes it too easy for the
President and Congress to send forces into battle. "If the U.S.
military were truly representative of the country, you would
have people going through the roof right now," said former Navy
Secretary James Webb two weeks ago in the Washington Post.

    Webb is one of a small but growing number of critics who say
the only way to ensure fairness is to reinstate the draft,
preferably without exemptions for college students. "Unless you
have universal national service or universal military service,
you will always have this problem," says Lawrence Korb, a
former Assistant Secretary of Defense for manpower in the
Reagan Administration. But Congress and the President are in
no mood to deal with the political uproar that would surely
follow any move in that direction. The Defense Department said
last week it has no contingency plans to revive the draft as a
way to provide replacements if a gulf war results in high
numbers of casualties.

    Meanwhile, the President's decision to call up some reserve
and National Guard units, which tend to have a larger
proportion of white and middle-class recruits, will make the
gulf force more representative. And many would agree with
General Powell when he says that, for now, questions of equity
can't be allowed to stand in the way of the gulf mission. "When
we decide to send the 82nd Airborne division or the First
Cavalry division, they go," he explains. "We don't start saying,

too many blacks.'" If bloodshed begins, however, there is sure
to be a much louder debate over whose blood is shed.


By Richard Lacayo. Reported by Julie Johnson/Washington.