Many people used to sign up for military service since their ancestors fought on American soil for American interests, and were actually raised under the presumption that this is the main purpose of the American army (or protecting American interests abroad, such as protecting American vessels on international waters). As it's become ever-more-apparent to the group most likely to enroll in the military (conservatives) that this is no longer the case, military enlistment has gone way down.
I honestly have concluded that the HN crowd is so far removed from normal America that they cannot understand it. If you think people sign up for the military due to poverty and not pride, you are deluded. The vast majority of recruits into the military do so out of sense of duty and pride in the country. Remove either of those, and it's no shock military enrollment has gone down. America has had much poorer times and has experienced periods of much stronger growth than today, and had not had the same recruitment crisis as it does today.
> 1815 ignoring the civil war and fights against native Americans.
Why would you ignore those?
Also WWII was fought on American soil in the pacific. The various guano atolls, as well as the islands of the Phillipines.
> Over 60 percent of 2016 enlistments came from neighborhoods with a median household income between $38,345 and $80,912. The quintiles below and above that band were underrepresented, with the poorest quintile providing 19 percent of the force and the richest Americans enlisting at a rate of 17 percent. The modern force comes predominantly from the middle-class households highlighted in Reeves’ article.
I can personally tell you that minorities don’t join the military because they think the country has been so great to them. This goes back to how the military treated Black Americans during WWII (The Tuskegee experiment) and when they came back they were still subjected to Jim Crow laws and how White upper class Americans avoided the draft at a much higher percentage.
The idea that “no Vietcong ever called me ni%%%” was pervasive.
All of the recruiters who come to minority majority high schools and colleges don’t mention “patriotism”. They mention job and education opportunities.
