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If this report is accurate it should cause some unease in some quarters:
"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."Ignoring that "We saw the most precipitous drop immediately after Sept. 11" the editors chose to lead with this: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.
WASHINGTON ? The Iraq war is drying up at least part of a pool of recruits the Army has relied upon for decades: black Americans.Army authorized end strength has been increased by 30k this year, contributing significantly to numerical recruiting woes. But if raw numbers of recruits are actually up then a concurrent increase in non-black recruits over the past several years is implied.
More from the link:
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 provocative story - the response (or lack thereof) in the media and from various concerned organizations should be notable."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.
