This is, although a seemingly common view, utter nonsense. The typical 18-24 year old soldier in the US is wealthier and better educated than the average 18-24 year old citizen. 98 percent of enlistees join with high school diplomas or better, whereas among civilians the rate is 75 percent. 75.8 percent of the military is white (roughly the same as the US population as a whole).
From here:
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed112905a.cfm?RenderforPrint=1
It not being sufficient for you to disseminate all the neo-con propaganda 'justifying' an illegal war, you now wish to completely distort [with the help of one of the most right-wing lobbies on the planet - The Heritage Foundation] the widely-documented reality of why the US doesn't even need the draft (especially after its introduction during that other war in the late sixties helped bring about the end, both of the war and of the draft): because of the
poverty draft: economic conscription.
Half of all recruits to Army read at level of 11-year-olds
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent, The Telegraph
A confidential study into the educational standards of soldiers has revealed that half of all new infantry recruits only have the reading and writing skills of 11-year-olds.
The study commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, which the Telegraph has seen, also discloses that a fifth of recruits have the literacy and numeracy levels of seven-year-olds. Four per cent are at the standard of the average five-year-old.
Not only does the US target the poorest rural areas for most of its 'recruits' and also predominantly black urban areas, it goes to much further lengths, blackmailing those who are not even US citizens, from Puerto Ricans to 'illegal immigrants'.
To take a very simple and publicly documented specific example of how the contemporary administration-orchestrated US military machine routinely goes about recruiting its expendable, powerless cannon fodder: Puerto Rico (and an excellent example of how the US uses its empire of hundreds of foreign military bases for recruitment purposes). Still one of the poorest countries - by US design - in the world [despite having been violently annexed by the US long ago] where a massive 3,000 youths are forcibly "recruited" into the US armed forces every year, making Puerto Rico, a subjugated US colony with a total population of just 3.6 million, a tiny realm generating more military recruitment than any U.S. state, as well as being one of the most heavily US-militarised areas on the planet, for long-standing "reasons of state" vis-a-vis US foreign colonialist and neo-liberal corporatist policy in Central and South America.
Despite being denied either full United States citizenship [Puerto Ricans were not granted the "privilege" of voting for Bush or Kerry in November, 2004, for instance] or the right to full independence and self-determining political democracy, Puerto Ricans have been subject to conscription into the U.S. military and they have suffered massively disproportionate casualties in U.S. wars. Two hundred thousand Puerto Ricans served in the U.S. military during the 20th century (including World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the war in Vietnam). And these numbers do not even include the more than two million Puerto Ricans living in the United States who have served, or Puerto Rican troops who took part in U.S. military actions in Panama, Grenada and other Hollywood-exotic military playgrounds in the more recent past.
Some 348 Puerto Rican troops were killed in World War I, 743 were killed in Korea, and 1,300 died in Indochina. 17,855 Puerto Ricans served in the First World War. It has been estimated that 52% of the Puerto Rican troops who returned from the Vietnam War experienced some form of social or mental dis-functional problems as a result of war-related trauma.
Today, Puerto Rico is a glaring example of economic conscription, which primarily targets youth of colour from low-income areas, urban and rural [as well as, in poorer regions of US states, the likes of economically-compromised "white trash" Jessica Lynch and her now depraved-to-order female photo-opportunity compatriots so prominently featured in the Abu Ghraib unknowing snuff movie, "Iraqi holiday snapshots" montage, the military now preferring females (and indeed, males) from low-income areas in the US in combination with the requisite "psychologically androgynous" personality profile, as the personnel manuals penned by military shrinks now specify, oblivious to their own depraved cultural constructs]. With unemployment over twice the U.S. average and chronically-low non-unionised wages, the island of Puerto Rico is fertile ground for the military's deceptive recruiting practices and seductive propaganda campaigns. Again, some
three thousand young Puerto Ricans are recruited into the armed forces of the US each year, qualifying Puerto Rico as the largest single source of US military recruitment in the entire world. According to the
Army Times, "
The San Juan and Aguadilla [recruiting] companies averaged nearly 900 Regular Army and Army Reserve recruits in 1998, and nearly 800 in 1997." To offer perspective, the average annual intake for the Army's other recruiting companies was half of these totals.
... and then there's that other carefully media-censored scandal of both US Green Card holders and undocumented immigrants blackmailed into signing on to the military-recruitment dotted line, or face the deportation frog-march.
Interestingly, its now almost a truism that the first conscientious objectors [or AWOLs or deserters] in any war, illegal or immoral, are those forced to fight other people's wars, as with Camilo Mejia, a Costa Rican, a few years ago [May, 2004]:
Camilo Mejia Goes to Prison for His Stance Against the War in Iraq, While a Campaign to Free Camilo Begins
"The American soldier who tortured Iraqi prisoners was sentenced to one year in prison and my son, who denounced these abuses and followed his conscience, was also sentenced to one year in prison. Is that fair? Is that just?"
""What an incredible irony that we're prosecuting soldiers in Iraq for violations of international law and we're prosecuting a soldier here because he refused to do the same things," said former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a member of Camilo's defense team."