Agreed..... but I wonder if today's wars are fought by an even larger percentage of the poor, no other opportunity population.. Fair amount written about recruiting centers being located in poor areas..

Another aspect that has been clearly documented.. back in my day when many from a larger cross section of the population had to serve, employers (many having experienced military service themselves) saw value in returning vets in terms of their maturity and leadership training.. but there has been some documentation of today's employers havingreluctance in hiring returning vets over concerns about PTSD, brain injurys from IEDs, etc.. and general view that some employers having little to no military experience themselves don't know how to relate to vets.

I guess the $64 question is does today's "voluntary" system tend to concentrate more irreparable damage to those who do serve (repeated, near back to back deployments) than under the old draft system?

I guess it would take some serious research to know for sure.

In my day, there seemed to be more of a sense of you will have to spend your time in harms way, and then you will get an r&r assignment or two to recuperate. One exception area that has been researched was that in the Vietnam era, Navy carrier pilots.. were in short supply and there is no way to fast path the training and qualification of pilots for carrier landings.. My brother had a long period of back to back deployments as a F8 carrier pilot.

I researched how one of his friends was killed in a carrier landing attempt.. trying to land a shot up aircraft that normal procedure would have been to punch out and ditch it at sea.. As to why he didn't divert to Da Nang wasn't explained.. that was the normal procedure for a carrier aircraft that had hung ordinance (released, but didn't detach from the aircraft situation) The shortage of aircraft led to trying to land damaged aircraft when procedure would have been to ditch it.

I found all this info in a thesis written by a career Navy officer as part of his graduate degree work. It may not be generally known but all career officers at the appropriate point must obtain advanced degrees (e.g. at least a masters degree which involves doing research in their chosen field and writing a thesis on the subject.) Have read a few major court marshall proceedings also. Can be some pretty amazing reading of the candor and open critique of lessons learns when things go bad, wrong decisions made. It overall does come across that military leadership in general really does try to learn from their mistakes. Fort Leavenworth (Army), and the Monterey Post Graduate School (Navy) web sites can offer some very interesting reading..