Creative Class

Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave an elegant, sweeping speech at Duke University where he commented on the growing divide between America’s armed forces and its civilian population.

The social divisions of class and inequality have always run through the military. Fighting forces have long been drawn disproportionately from lower-income, lower-skilled, and more economically disadvantaged populations. But what is new, according to my colleague Patrick Adler at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), is the degree to which those class divisions are underpinned by geography.

The map above, compiled by MPI’s Zara Matheson, shows the concentration of military personnel across the 50 states.

In the early 1990s, researchers chronicled the rise of the “Gunbelt” – the concentration of military assets and personnel in a strip of states on the coasts and across the Sunbelt. Gates reminds us that base closures and realignment efforts are leading to even greater geographic concentration.

“Basing changes in recent years have moved a significant percentage of the Army to posts in just five states: Texas, Washington, Georgia, Kentucky and here in North Carolina. The state of Alabama, with a population of less than 5 million, has 10 Army ROTC host programs.  The Los Angeles metro area, population over 12 million, has four host ROTC programs.  And the Chicago metro area, population 9 million, has 3.”

While the U.S. is engaged in two wars, the military makes up a smaller percentage of the American population than it ever has. As Gates himself notes:

“There is a risk over time of developing a cadre of military leaders that politically, culturally and geographically have less and less in common with the people they have sworn to defend…”

The military’s growing geographic divide adds to the increasingly uneven, spiky, and fractured reality of America’s economic, political, and cultural life.

UPDATE:

Based on the number of intriguing issues raised by the commenters who read this post at The Atlantic, we have added some additional details.

The data for the map are based on where the service member is based. A number of commenters requested a map that controls for population size. Here it is (below) via our ever-efficient Martin Prosperity Institute team of Patrick Adler on data and uber-cartographer Zara Matheson.

Our original map took up Defense Secretary Gates’ comment that the military is increasingly concentrated geographically and thus less and less in contact with and in touch with America generally. When we look at the overall share of the military by states, we see a pattern that follows population size only to a point. Yes, two big states – California and Texas – have large military shares. But this is less the case in Illinois and New York and much less the case in Michigan and Pennsylvania. And several much smaller states – like New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Mississippi – have higher shares of the total military than these last two big places.

It’s always useful to control for population and look at figures on a per-capita basis. This changes the landscape in subtle ways which seem to reinforce Secretary Gates’ point and our own initial analysis. The geographic concentration of the military becomes even more pronounced. The variance across states is quite substantial: 13 states are home to fewer than 10 military personnel per 10,000 people, while six states have more than 10 times as much and three have more than 200 military personnel per 10,000 people.

Aside from relatively high concentrations in Alaska, Hawaii, Washington state, and North Dakota, the military is overwhelmingly concentrated in two distinctive areas of the Sunbelt: the southeast running from Virginia and North Carolina through Kentucky and down through South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi; and the corridor from Texas through Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming. Texas and California now drop out. The upper mid-west and the northeast, especially New England, which tend to be more liberal and left-leaning than the rest of the nation, have very low concentrations of military personnel.

All in all, this further reinforces Secretary Gates’ point about the military becoming more distant and isolated from the American population broadly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.