POOR AND UNEDUCATED, LIKE WE THOUGHT
Wed Jul 25, 10:40 AM ET

Debunking the Military Debunkers
 

SAN DIEGO--"The typical recruit in the all-volunteer force is wealthier, more educated and more rural than the average 18- to 24-year-old citizen is," claimed the authors of an oft-cited 2005 "comprehensive study" of the U.S. military commissioned by the Heritage Foundation.

"A pillar of conventional wisdom about the U.S. military is that the quality of volunteers has been degraded after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq," said the conservative think tank. "Some insist that minorities and the underprivileged are over-represented in the military. Others accuse the U.S. Army of accepting unqualified enlistees in a futile attempt to meet its recruiting goals in the midst of an unpopular war." These myths, insisted Heritage and its media allies, were propagated by antiwar liberals out to demoralize the country by attacking its troops.

Two years later, right-wingers trot out the Heritage troop survey as evidence that America is sending its best and brightest, rather than its down and out, to win Afghan and Iraqi hearts and minds. The GOP blog Newsbusters used it to rebut Rosie O'Donnell's statement that most recruits enlist in the army to get an education: "Of course, facts don't matter to Rosie O'Donnell." But are these "facts" true?

The claim that U.S. combat troops come from richer families and enjoy higher levels of educational attainment than the average American defies both conventional wisdom and everyday observation. Active-duty soldiers earn less than their civilian counterparts. In a capitalist society low-paying jobs seldom attract people with higher educational credentials. A disproportionate share of blogs by soldiers serving on the frontlines are poorly written. High-ranking officers, even generals, come off as hick bureaucrats on television. Many troops believe they're in Iraq to fight those responsible for 9/11 or to prevent them from invading the U.S. And a majority of soldiers are conservative Republicans, voting for Bush over Kerry by a 4-to-1 margin in 2004. (The most educated group of voters are liberal Democrats, 50 percent of whom have bachelor's degrees or higher. Republicans tend to be less educated.)

Curious about anything that challenges my assumptions, I looked into the Heritage Foundation study. As it turns out, military personnel are poorer and less educated than the average American civilian. Moreover, they're also a lot more likely to be African-American. (State-controlled media continues to repeat Heritage's claim that the military reflects American racial demographics.)

There are lies, damned lies, and Republican statistics. The Heritage study relies on apples-to-oranges comparisons and factual omissions.

Poorer

No one tracks how much soldiers earned the year before they enlist. The Department of Defense estimates that its employees take a $20,000-per-year pay-and-benefits hit relative to civilians the same age throughout their careers. There is, however, a nifty study by the non-partisan National Priorities Project that compares home ZIP codes of new recruits to tax return data for those areas. "Neighborhoods with low- to middle-median household incomes are over-represented," finds the NPP. "Neighborhoods with high-median household incomes are under-represented.

A closer look shows that the socioeconomic distance between America at home and American troops abroad is a gaping chasm. Young men and women from affluent neighborhoods--those with average household incomes of $100,000 or more--are three to four times less likely as those from poor and lower middle class areas (under $50,000) to serve in the military. This ratio is increasing.

Heritage obtained different results by "comparing these wartime recruits (2003�2005) to the resident population ages 18�24" in each ZIP code (as opposed to the overall population, all ages included). Many recruits are college dropouts who list their last address--their college dorm--when they sign up. College ZIP codes, populated by disproportionately high numbers of 18-to-24-year-olds who are full-time students and/or work low-paying and part-time jobs. Though imperfect, NPP gets much closer to comparing apples to apples by looking at the overall income picture of recruits' hometowns or communities surrounding a college, not just college-aid kids who earn a pittance.

Nothing says that poor people can't make good soldiers. But let's not kid ourselves. There's a reason so many of the dead come from high-unemployment, low-wage states like West Virginia. They're desperate. And desperate people are more tempted to accept a job that could cost them their lives.

Poorly Educated

"Many enlisted personnel are drawn to the benefits offered by the armed forces that allow them to obtain funding for college," the Heritage study's authors allows. (Hi, Rosie.) On the broader point of education levels among U.S. troops, however, they again resort to pomegranate-to-rutabaga comparisons.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office's "1999 Survey of Active Duty Personnel" (the last year for which such data is available) found that "about 60 percent of enlisted personnel surveyed...reported having no more than a high school-level education when they began their military service." (Heritage jacks up the total to 83 percent by including GEDs.) 90 percent of employed Americans over age 25 have a high school diploma.

As they age, military personnel eventually obtain additional educational credentials during their years in the service. Even so, the March 2003 U.S. Census finds that 32 percent of employed Americans have a bachelors or advanced degree. Just seven percent of soldiers do.

You don't need a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies to fire a rifle. But higher education generally leads to greater worldliness--which would come in handy in the post-9/11 era.

Blacker Grunts, Whiter Officers

"Allegations that recruiters are disproportionately targeting blacks also don't hold water," says the Heritage Foundation. "First, whites make up 77.4% of the nation's population and 75.8% of its military volunteers, according to our analysis of Department of Defense data."

Which is "true"--but not True.

The key word here is "volunteers," which here means "new recruits." A new CBO study released this July states: "Because black personnel have been a larger share of recruits in the past and because they have relatively high retention rates, however, they account for a larger share of the active enlisted force as a whole: 19 percent, compared with 14 percent of the civilian population of 17- to 49- year-olds. Black service members make up a smaller percentage of the active officer corps: 9 percent."

You're more than 35 percent more likely to be in the military if you're black than if you're white. But you're 35 percent less likely to become an officer. Ignore the propaganda--the military is a reflection of, rather than a cure for, racism.

Hard Times for Recruiters

With Afghanistan joining Iraq as a war considered an unwinnable mistake in the minds of the public, military recruiters are being forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

In 2005 the Army promoted 97 percent of all eligible captains to major, an increase from the prewar norm of 70-to-80 percent. A Department official told The Los Angeles Times: "Basically, if you haven't been court-martialed, you're going to be promoted to major."

It may be too much to assert that, as Asia Times did recently, that "U.S. ground forces are increasingly made up of a motley mix of under-age teens, old-timers, foreign fighters, gang-bangers, neo-Nazis, ex-cons, inferior officers and a host of near-mercenary troops, lured in or kept in uniform through big payouts and promises." Or is it?

"Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members," Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator told the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Citing the "toughest recruiting climate ever faced by the all-volunteer army," Major General Michael Rochelle, head of army recruitment promises: "If you have excessively prominent and vulgar tattoos they will not take you right now, but that is about to change."

"824 felons were allowed to sign up in 2004 as opposed to 1,605 in 2006 under the moral waivers scheme," reports the UK Guardian. "Almost 59,000 drug abusers entered the military in the same period."

There are, of course, intelligent, well-educated children of wealthy parents serving in the military. But they are the exception, not the rule. If Afghanistan and Iraq are, as the Bush Administration argues, central fronts in the war on terror, which is a war for hearts and minds, we ought to be sending our best-prepared, most presentable representatives of American society abroad as personal ambassadors. Our decision not to pay the higher salaries and benefits that would lure those men and women out of the civilian workforce belies those claims.

It took a few seconds for an Iraqi roadside bomb to rattle Sergeant Steve Edwards' head in December 2004. But it took 14 months for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to compensate him for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). During one stretch, Edwards called the VA weekly to plead for assistance. "I was saying we're about to be homeless," he says, "and all I got was some schmuck on the other line who says they're trying their best."
 

Now Edwards, along with hundreds of thousands of other veterans, is part of class action lawsuit against the VA asserting that that just isn't good enough. Filed Monday by a California public interest group and law firm on behalf of vets diagnosed with PTSD, the suit is the first to accuse the federal department of constitutional violations and to seek sweeping changes in its processing of disability claims. The VA is charged with "shameful failures ... to meet our nation's legal and moral obligations to honor and care for our wounded veterans" who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without systematic reform, the suit contends, "the costs to these veterans, their families and our nation will be incalculable," and will contribute to a new generation of unemployed and homeless veterans and a burden on local social services.

Melissa Kaznitz, managing attorney for Disability Rights Advocates, a Berkeley nonprofit organization that is representing the vets, says the suit focuses on PTSD as a signature wound of ongoing wars. No court has previously been asked to order a systematic restructuring of the claims process at the VA, Kaznitz says, adding, "The VA has a culture of fighting the claims of veterans instead of fixing problems for the veteran. We're trying to fix the system."

The VA has seen its backlog of disability claims swell to 600,000 as soldiers return from ongoing wars, a logjam blamed for financial dislocation, despair and even suicides of vets. The suit says the claims system is "riddled with inconsistent and irrational procedures" that violate the due process rights of injured vets seeking care and compensation. For example, the VA employs the same officials both to challenge and judge claims.

According to the suit, the biggest casualties of this bureaucratic morass are the unprecedented number of troops returning with PTSD, a mental disorder especially prevalent in soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they're faced with multiple tours of duty, invisible battle lines and the "moral ambiguity of killing combatants dressed as civilians." The military says more than a third of the 1.6 million men and women who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan report mental health issues ranging from PTSD to brain injuries, yet only 27 of the nation's 1,400 VA hospitals have programs dedicated to treating PTSD. Worse yet, the complex process of applying for disability payments is especially daunting for these patients, who often experience memory lapses and disorientation.

VA Secretary Jim Nicholson, who is named in the suit, recently ordered the hiring of new mental health personnel, amid criticism that he dropped the ball on soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq; he also directed all VA hospitals to screen for PTSD among vets from those wars. Last week, however, he announced his resignation from the VA. The department declined to comment on the suit, saying only that it is "committed to meeting the special needs of our latest generation of heroes" and that it has given "priority" to disability claims.

Edwards, 41, an Army National Guardsman from San Jose, Ca., began suffering migraine headaches soon after the December 29, 2004, attack in central Iraq left him stunned and nauseous. He returned home in February 2005 and continued to have other PTSD symptoms, including nightmares, rage, sleeplessness and anxiety. Unable to return to his work as an audiovisual technician, he lived for several months on state unemployment compensation and the paycheck his wife brought home as an executive assistant for a software company. For months, Edwards didn't know he could qualify for disability payments until another vet suggested it.

He submitted a claim to the VA in June 2005, as his family struggled to make rent, student loans, car payments and clothing bills for his 10-year-old daughter. He waited for a response for 14 months. In August, 2006, Edwards received a rating of 80% disability and a monthly payment of $2,711. Frustrated by the year-plus delay, he says, "It didn't take me more than a week to get into the military. It shouldn't be that way" for the military getting compensation to its injured.

The lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco federal court, challenges the constitutionality of the claims system, citing a lack of neutral judges and prohibitions on vets' hiring lawyers at the initial phase of a case or demanding that the VA produce documents and witnesses that might shore up their claims. The plaintiffs seek no monetary damages, only an order requiring the VA to stop "illegal policies and practices," such as the months-long delays in reviewing claims and providing care to PTSD victims.

To bomb or not to bomb al-Qaeda's new bases in Pakistan? That, increasingly, seems to be the question the administration is contemplating. On Sunday, White House national security adviser Frances Townsend confirmed as much. The reason the question is front and center is that a new report compiled by the nation's 16 intelligence agencies concluded that the wild region on Pakistan's northwestern frontier has become as much of a haven for al-Qaeda's leadership as Afghanistan was before 9/11.
 

The logic for military strikes, on one simple level, is overwhelming. Had the United States obliterated Osama bin Laden and his camps in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001, the plot might have been foiled. But the United States held back in part for fear of civilian casualties and a global backlash.

So, why not learn from the Afghanistan mistake? After all, bin Laden is determined to devise ways to kill thousands or millions of Americans.

The problem is that military action in the mountainous region bordering Afghanistan carries a significant risk of backfiring. A brief list of the dangers:

* Pakistan is a Muslim state with nuclear weapons. If attacks were to ignite anti-U.S. fervor and cause the government, now an ally, to fall into extremist hands, the terrorist threat would become much worse. Pakistan's leading nuclear scientist, now under house arrest, has already tried to export nuclear technology to Libya and Iran. Further, elements of the army and the intelligence services are believed to have links to the Taliban. Those threats are suppressed by President Perez Musharraf, and moderate parties dominate Pakistani politics. That situation must not be destabilized.

* The targets might prove hard to hit. The United States relies mostly on intelligence from Pakistan and its Taliban-linked spy services.

* An anti-U.S. backlash would surely follow if the United States were to attack a third Muslim country (after Afghanistan and Iraq). That happened on a small scale after the United States bombed a village in January last year.

The problem is that al-Qaeda camps are growing because Musharraf's plan for closing them has failed. He has cut deals with the tribal leaders who control the largely autonomous region under which his forces would leave them alone if they stopped sheltering extremists. Musharraf is trying to revive those deals. At the same time, his military is stepping up action on the ground, with fierce fighting in recent days.

If those efforts fail, there might be no option but to strike at al-Qaeda, which should not be allowed to enjoy any haven. But given the risks, rushing that judgment would be foolish. If there's one obvious lesson from Iraq, it's that war should be the last option, not the first.

MONTEREY, Calif. - Jumbo squid that can grow up to 7 feet long and weigh more than 110 pounds are invading central California waters and preying on local anchovy, hake and other commercial fish populations, according to a study published Tuesday.
 

An aggressive predator, the Humboldt squid — or Dosidicus gigas — can change its eating habits to consume the food supply favored by tuna and sharks, its closest competitors, according to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

"Having a new, voracious predator set up shop here in California may be yet another thing for fishermen to compete with," said the study's co-author, Stanford University researcher Louis Zeidberg. "That said, if a squid saw a human they would jet the other way."

The jumbo squid used to be found only in the Pacific Ocean's warmest stretches near the equator. In the last 16 years, it has expanded its territory throughout California waters, and squid have even been found in the icy waters off Alaska, Zeidberg said.

Zeidberg's co-author, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute senior scientist Bruce Robison, first spotted the jumbo squid here in 1997, when one swam past the lens of a camera mounted on a submersible thousands of feet below the ocean's surface.

More were observed through 1999, but the squid weren't seen again locally until the fall of 2002. Since their return, scientists have noted a corresponding drop in the population of Pacific hake, a whitefish the squid feeds on that is often used in fish sticks, Zeidberg said.

"As they've come and gone, the hake have dropped off," Zeidberg said. "We're just beginning to figure out how the pieces fit together, but this is most likely going to shake things up."

Before the 1970s, the giant squid were typically found in the Eastern Pacific, and in coastal waters spanning from Peru to Costa Rica. But as the populations of its natural predators — like large tuna, sharks and swordfish — declined because of fishing, the squids moved northward and started eating different species that thrive in colder waters.

Local marine mammals needn't worry about the squid's arrival since they're higher up on the food chain, but lanternfish, krill, anchovies and rockfish are all fair game, Zeidberg said.

A fishermen's organization said Tuesday they were monitoring the squid's impact on commercial fisheries.

"In years of high upwellings, when the ocean is just bountiful, it probably wouldn't do anything," Zeke Grader, the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "But in bad years it could be a problem to have a new predator competing at the top of the food chain."