According to Today’s Military Kids Often Say Bye to Dad — and Mom, our modern, professional military has shifted quite a bit from its former 18-year-old-male demographics:
Today’s soldiers are older and more likely to be married with children than those who fought in Vietnam, Korea and World War II.They are also better educated — about 20% of the active force has a college degree, compared with about 12% of the force in 1982 and less than 15% in the Gulf War. And they are far more likely to be female. Today about 15% of all active-duty troops are women, up from about 8% in 1980, although women aren’t allowed in front-line combat units in either the Army or the Marine Corps.
Obviously the Vietnam War shaped our modern military in many ways, but I wasn’t familiar with this particular side-effect of ‘Nam:
The role of reservists has changed dramatically, too, since the early 1970s. After Vietnam, a handful of senior military officers decided to make it harder for the president to take the country to war without public support. So they shifted several critical specialties, such as medical and military-police brigades, into the reserves, making it almost impossible for the president to send even a small force abroad without calling up reservists. The result is that the reserve forces have been used with greater frequency in places such as Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.
This stat seems to point to a problem with the system:
More and more, those troops being sent abroad include significant numbers of married couples with children. In all there are about 125,000 active and reserve troops with a spouse also in the service.
In peace time, I’m sure that works fine. When we go to send troops overseas though, haven’t these couples put themselves between a rock and a hard place?