COLORADO
SPRINGS — The sergeant in charge of one of the busiest Army recruiting centers
in Colorado, Sergeant First Class Dustin Comes, joined the Army, in part,
because his father served. Now two of his four children say they want to serve,
too. And he will not be surprised if the other two make the same decision once
they are a little older.
“Hey, if
that’s what your calling is, I encourage it, absolutely,” said Sergeant Comes,
who wore a dagger-shaped patch on
his camouflage uniform, signifying that he had been in combat.
Enlisting,
he said, enabled him to build a good life where, despite yearlong deployments
to Iraq and Afghanistan, he felt proud of his work, got generous benefits,
never worried about being laid off, and earned enough that his wife could stay
home to raise their children.
“Show me a
better deal for the common person,” he said.
Soldiers like him are increasingly making the United States
military a family business. The men and women who sign up overwhelmingly come
from counties in the South and a scattering of communities at the gates of
military bases like Colorado Springs, which sits next to Fort Carson and
several Air Force installations, and where the tradition of military service is
deeply ingrained.
More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits.
In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who
served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation
where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military.
For years,
military leaders have been sounding the alarm over the growing gulf between
communities that serve and those that do not, warning that relying on a small
number of counties that reliably produce soldiers is unsustainable,
particularly now amid escalating tensions with Iran.
“A
widening military-civilian divide increasingly impacts our ability to effectively
recruit and sustain the force,” Anthony M. Kurta, acting under secretary of
defense for personnel and readiness, told the National Commission on Military,
National and Public Service last year. “This disconnect is characterized by
misperceptions, a lack of knowledge and an inability to identify with those who
serve. It threatens our ability to recruit the number of quality youth with the
needed skill sets to maintain our advantage.”
To be sure, the idea of joining the military has lost much
of its luster in nearly two decades of grinding war. The patriotic rush to
enlist after the terrorist attacks of 2001 has faded. For a generation,
enlisting has produced reliable hardship for troops and families, but nothing that resembles victory. But
the military families who have borne nearly all of the burden, and are the most
cleareyed about the risks of war, are still the Americans who are most likely
to encourage their sons and daughters to join.
With the
goal of recruiting about 68,000 soldiers in 2020, the Army is now trying to
broaden its appeal beyond traditional recruitment pools. New marketing plays up
future careers in medicine and tech, as well as generous tuition benefits for a
generation crushed by student debt. The messaging often notes that most Army
jobs are not in combat fields.
But for
now, rates of military service remain far from equal in the United States, and
the gap may continue to widen because a driving decision to enlist is whether a
young person knows anyone who served in the military. In communities where
veterans are plentiful, teachers, coaches, mothers, uncles and other mentors
often steer youths toward military service. In communities where veterans are
scarce, influential adults are more wary.
That has created a broad gap, easily seen on a map. The
South, where the culture of military service runs deep and military
installations are plentiful, produces 20 percent more recruits than would be
expected, based on its youth population. The states in the Northeast, which
have very few military bases and a lower percentage of veterans, produce 20
percent fewer.
Top Counties for Army
Recruitment
Each map shows the 500 counties with the
highest recruitment rates in a given year as a percentage of population,
excluding counties with fewer than five recruits.
By Matthew Bloch | Source:
U.S. Army
The main
predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly
evenly through middle-class and “downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns
out not to be the prime factor. And the racial makeup of the force is more or
less in line with that of young Americans as a whole, though African-Americans
are slightly more likely to serve. Instead, the best predictor is a person’s
familiarity with the military.
“Those who
understand military life are more likely to consider it as a career option than
those who do not,” said Kelli Bland, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Recruiting
Command.
That distinction has created glaring disparities across the
country. In 2019, Fayetteville, N.C., which is home to Fort Bragg, provided
more than twice as many military enlistment contracts as Manhattan, even though
Manhattan has eight times as many people. Many of the new contracts in
Fayetteville were soldiers signing up for second and third enlistments.
This was
not always the case. Military service was once spread fairly evenly — at least
geographically — throughout the nation because of the draft. But after the
draft ended in 1973, enlistments shifted steadily south of the Mason-Dixon line. The military’s
decision to close many bases in Northern states where long winters limited
training only hastened the trend.
Today,
students growing up in military communities are constantly exposed to the
people who serve. Moms pick up their sons from day care in flight suits. Dads
attend the fourth-grade holiday party in camouflage. High schools often have
Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs in which students wear uniforms
to class once a week and can earn credit for learning about science, leadership
and fitness through a military framework.
Many
schools encourage students to take the military’s aptitude exam, the ASVAB, in the way students
nationwide are pushed to take the SAT.
That
exposure during school is one of the strongest predictors of enlistment rates,
according to a 2018 report by
the Institute for Defense Analyses.
In
Colorado Springs, the high schools with the highest number of military families
are also the biggest producers of recruits, Sergeant Comes said, adding that
parents aware of the military’s camaraderie, stability and generous health,
education and retirement benefits often march their children into his office
and encourage them to join.
“We just
tell them our story: ‘This is where I was, one of six kids living in a trailer.
This is where I am today.’ Good pay check. Great benefits,” he said, adding
that even in good economic times, it is an easy sell. His recruiting station
made its goals handily this month.
His biggest challenge is finding recruits before they are
scooped up by recruiters from the Air Force, Navy and Marines, who work the
same fertile neighborhoods.
The
situation is markedly different in regions where few people traditionally join.
In Los
Angeles, a region defined by liberal politics where many families are
suspicious of the military, the Army has struggled to even gain access to high
schools. By law, schools have to allow recruiters on campus once a semester,
but administrators tightly control when and how recruiters can interact with
students. Access is “very minimal,” said Lt. Col. Tameka Wilson, the commander
of the Los Angeles Recruiting Battalion.
Predictably,
enlistment rates are low.
In 2019
the Army made a push to increase recruiting efforts in 22 liberal-leaning
cities like Los Angeles. As part of that, Army Secretary Ryan
D. McCarthy visited officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District in
December to push for greater access.
“He was
doing a sort of listening tour,” said Patricia Heideman, who is in charge of
high school instruction for the school district and said there was a perception
the military preys on disadvantaged students. “I told him from the educator
perspective, we sometimes feel they are targeting our black and brown students
and students of poverty,” she said. And therefore they are less likely to push
enlistment.
Recognizing it cannot sustain recruitment numbers by relying
only on the South and military communities, the Army has tried to broaden its
appeal. Slick ads on social media offer less of the guns-and-grunts messaging of decades past. Instead
they play up college benefits and career training in medical and tech fields.
“I’d always had an itch to serve in the
military and be useful,” said Brett Dollar, a police officer in Colorado who is
joining the Army.Credit...Theo Stroomer for The New York Times
Even
within one state there are striking differences in how communities view
military service. Colorado Springs produced 29 times as many enlistments in
2019 as nearby Boulder, a liberal university town.
“I grew up in Boulder, and the military appealed to me but
it was just not in the culture, or my family,” said Brett Dollar, who now lives
in Fort Collins, Colo. “The conversation was not ‘What do you want to do after
high school?’ but ‘Which college are you going to go to?’”
She
attended Middlebury College in Vermont before becoming a police officer in Fort
Collins and, eventually, a law enforcement dog handler.
This fall,
at age 32, she decided to enlist in the Army, drawn by the chance to work with
dogs in security, bomb-sniffing and rescue missions around the world. She ships
to basic training in about a week.
“I’d
always had an itch to serve in the military and be useful,” she said. “I think
it took me being on my own for a while to realize it was a possibility.”
She said
she was going into the work knowing she could soon end up deployed to a combat
zone.
“The Army
is ultimately a war-fighting organization — you go in knowing that,” she said.
“I guess I really didn’t see that as a downside. It’s a core value of mine to
try to be of service.”
Dave Philipps reported from Colorado
Springs and Tim Arango from Los Angeles.
Dave Philipps covers veterans and the military, and is a winner
of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Since joining the Times in 2014,
he has covered the military community from the ground up. @David_Philipps • Facebook
Tim Arango is a Los Angeles correspondent. Before moving to
California, he spent seven years as Baghdad bureau chief and also reported on
Turkey. He joined The Times in 2007 as a media reporter. @tarangoNYT
A version of this
article appears in print on Jan. 11, 2020, Section A,
Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: The Call
to Serve Is Being Unevenly Embraced. Order Reprints | Today’s
Paper | Subscribe