America's Military Population

As with blacks, the commissioning of Hispanics as officers has lagged well behind their recruitment into enlisted ranks and falls below their share of civilian college graduates. Four percent of officers are Hispanic, compared with 6 percent of college graduates ages 21 to 35 and 10 percent of enlisted personnel.

Hispanics are more likely than blacks to be in combat specialties, and less likely than blacks to be in administrative or supply occupations (see Table 3). Hispanic officers in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps are more likely than either white or black officers to be at the lowest officer grades (see Table 4).

Age

The military labor force is significantly younger than the civilian labor force: The armed forces place a premium on youth over experience, albeit with significant differences among the branches of service.26 More than half the enlisted women in the armed forces are below age 25, as are almost half the enlisted men. Women leave the service at younger ages than men, however, and few enlisted men or women remain in the service after age 50. The military work force is highly concentrated in the younger age groups, in sharp contrast to the civilian labor force, which includes a large share over age 50 (see Figure 9, page 24).

Enlisted personnel tend to enter the military after high school or a year of college, and they leave the service after just a few years, accentuating the young age structure among enlistees. Most officers complete at least four years of college before entering the service, and they remain in service longer-giving them an older age profile.

Marines are the youngest service and the Air Force the oldest. Almost, 60 percent of Marines are younger than 25 years of age, compared with about 42 percent of Army and Navy personnel, and about 35 percent of Air Force personnel. By contrast, more than 30 percent of Air Force personnel are age 35 or older, compared with about 15 percent of Marines.

In the civilian labor force, men and women below age 25 make up only 15 percent of the labor force; labor force participation increases with age, and the broad age distribution of workers does not differ much by gender. Also, men and women over age 50 make up a large group of employed civilians, some of whom had military service prior to entering the civilian work force.

Socioeconomic Status

A long-standing myth about the American armed forces was that military conscription functioned as a social leveler, distributing the burden of military service equitably across all sectors of society.27 In fact, the various systems of selective conscription used to staff the military, from the first days of the American Republic, have privileged the wealthy and politically powerful and have placed the burden of defending the nation on the less wealthy and less powerful, although not necessarily on the lowest income groups. A corollary myth during the 1960s and early 1970s was that if the United States abandoned the system of selective conscription it had used since World War II, it would place the burden of national defense on the shoulders of the American underclass.28