RECRUITMENT.

RECRUITMENT. The Times has an interesting article on African-American recruitment into the armed services:

That kind of rejection of military service as an option of young blacks throughout the country has resulted in a sharp drop in black recruitment figures since the war began. Defense Department reports show that the share of blacks among active-duty recruits declined to 13 percent in 2006 from 20 percent in 2001, the last year before the invasion of Iraq began to seem inevitable.And while blacks continue to account for a larger share of the existing troop level than their share of the general population, as has been the case throughout the 34 years of the all-volunteer force, that margin is shrinking.The sharpest decline in black recruitment has been experienced by the Army, which has the most troops deployed in Iraq; black recruits dropped to 13 percent of the Army’s total in 2006 from 23 percent in 2001. In the Marines, with the second-largest force in Iraq, the share of black recruits decreased to 8 percent from 12 percent in the same period.

As the article notes, there are a couple of things going on here. First, African-Americans as a group really hate the war, and disapprove of it at an 83 percent clip. It's much harder to recruit from a population that believes the war to be either stupid, fundamentally immoral, or both. Second, African-Americans have traditionally been concentrated in branches that focus on marketable skills, rather than in combat-oriented branches. As the focus of the Army and Marine Corps increasingly turns to combat, service becomes economically less attractive, not to mention more dangerous. I'm kind of interested in the long term impact this will have on politics within the armed forces. We've learned over the past six years that, although military personnel lean right, there's more of a diversity of opinion than we might have expected. As recruitment continues to draw more from historically conservative populations and less from progressive ones (like African-Americans), I have to wonder if the political profile of the military will move to the right. This may not be manifested in support for the Bush administration or its anointed Republican successors, but could nevertheless prove problematic down the road.--Robert Farley