This week’s Economist had a terrific article on the geographic makeup of the US armed forces. It’s only available to print subscribers, but I’m furnishing a commented excerpt (my comments are in italics):
WHO are the young men and women now going to war? A look at where America’s armed forces come from reveals the continuing variety of the country. Two states, Texas and Florida, account for nearly a quarter of the total (Well, that explains the tans): Texans alone make up 18% of the army. (Let’s see: 18% of 750,000 is 135,000; that means according to page 11 of this report Texas has more troops than Australia, Libya, or Saudi Arabia, and nearly as many as Israel and Greece), California (which provides 12% of the navy and 11% of the marines), New Jersey and Pennsylvania round out the top five states. In general, the navy gets a surprising number of recruits from the mid-west (I don’t know why this is surprising; the cliché about farmboys joining the Navy has been with us at least since before WW II); the air force hails, on the whole, from the west (The west, or California?), and from Alaska; marines come from all over. Soldiers– the people who do the hard work on the ground– tend to come from the obvious places. The harder-jawed a region, the likelier it is to put its young into the army. The generally Republican, pro-gun south contributes a lot more soldiers than the Democratic north-east, both in absolute numbers and percentages of the regional population. A Texan is eight times more likely to be in uniform than a New Yorker. (Again, this is perfectly unsurprising, except that I might have guessed it to be ten or more times more likely to find a Texan in uniform…) The presence of military bases and arms-making firms also has an effect. Again, the south leads the way. Virginia has five army bases, Georgia four; Texas has eight air-force bases, Florida five, South Carolina and Georgia two each. Seven (actually, there are nine by my count, including reserve units) southern states have marines stationed on their soil (OOH RAH! Conquering from within, that’s the USMC way!), including at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Camp Albany in Georgia and Quantico, in Virginia (which is shared with the FBI, the Presidential helicopter detail, and a number of other functions). The arms-industry factor may help to explain why Washington state, which in politics leans to the Democrats but until recently was the home of Boeing, a huge defence contractor, offers many of its young people to the armed forces. (Doubtful; after all, look at Grumman (Bethpage, LI, NY) or the various California-based contractors for counterexamples. Arms factories ended up in the South for two reasons: political patronage and the availability of cheap land and labor.) The number of troops a state provides is not always a clue to its political opinions(not least because the political opinions of those who volunteer for the military are often quite different than those of the “average” American): New Jersey’s contribution, large for its size, has not prevented President Bush’s approval-rating there from sinking back to pre-September 11th levels. But Mr Bush can take comfort from the fact that most of his men (and women) at arms come from, or are based in, friendly states, not least his own, almost-a-fifth-of-the-whole-army Texas. And he does not have to rely entirely on native-born Americans. The air force says it has more men born in Britain than in admittedly tiny Delaware. (Wow. Does that mean that low-population, low-growth states like Delaware are in danger of being delisted?) |
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