Who actually fights America’s wars?

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This is the script for my video posted on July 20, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

I’ve never talked about this before, but I’m a big music guy, and there’s a song I really like by this artist from Appalachia called Fey Fili, and she has a song called War Dog whose lyrics basically explore how working class families just like mine join the military for healthcare or school and in pursuit of greater opportunity, and what those people trade for it.

I was in the military because my dad and my grandfather were in the military. If you’ve spent time in the US, you’ve probably met someone like me. The US is notorious for its military operations in other countries, be it Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran. But how does the US military actually recruit people to support these wars, and how does this play into the country’s geopolitical dynamics?

I made a video recently about how Russia staffs its military, and it got me thinking about the problem underneath it. Every country that wants to project power runs into the same wall: it needs bodies, and it has to pull them from a population that would mostly rather stay home. There are basically three ways to solve that. You can compel people through a draft. You can pay or coerce the desperate. Or you can build a market.

In Ukraine, Russia mostly reaches for money and coercion, huge sign-on bonuses aimed at its poorest regions, prisoners, migrants, anyone but the sons of Moscow. The per-capita death rates tell you where the burden lands: in places like Tuva and Buryatia, remote and poor, while the big cities stay largely untouched.

The US made a different bet. In 1973 it ended the draft and built a market. And I know how that market works, because I'm one of the people who said yes to it.

I served in the Air National Guard for six years. I went through US Air Force basic training, and then intel school at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas before ending up in units in Tennessee and New York as an intelligence analyst.

And I did this because growing up my family didn’t have a lot of money, and I was terrified of taking on student loans. Because my dad had been in the Air Force and knew a lot about it, I saw it as an option to build a career and potentially go to school for free instead.

In the US, fewer than 1 in 200 people serve on active duty. Under a fifth of them were officers, people who went to college and then joined in a leadership role. The rest were enlisted, only a small percentage of which hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Today, about 83% of enlisted personnel in the US military are male. About 68% self-identify as white, while 32% identify with a minority group, with Black Americans over-represented at nearly 25% of US Army recruits while comprising only about 14% of the US population.

Diversity also thins out the higher up you go. The junior officer corps roughly mirrors the country, but the most senior ranks, the generals and admirals, skew notably white, a pattern researchers tie to who gets access to the commissioning pipeline in the first place.

The American South is also disproportionately represented in the military for similar reasons. In 2016, over 60% of enlistments came from neighborhoods with a median household income between roughly 38k and 81k dollars, meaning it skewed heavily toward the middle class and the functionally poor, though very poor people are often screened out due to lower high school completion rates and lower aptitude.

The fact is, people who lack economic opportunity are more likely to end up in the military due to the GI Bill and tuition assistance, low but steady wages, health insurance coverage for dependents, and other perceived financial advantages.

Military service is also passed down. A large majority of recruits have a family connection to service, and roughly a third of Army recruits had a parent in the military like me, though these numbers are shrinking. The US military has been leaning into this lately because only about 23% of 17 to 24-year-olds are eligible to serve to begin with due to health issues, drug use, criminal records, or aptitude, and people with a family member who served are far more likely to consider it, and to already know how the process works.

Here's why that matters beyond who shows up at the recruiter's office. A force this narrow is strategically thin. On top of eligibility, propensity to serve has fallen to around 9 or 10 percent, and the number of 18-year-olds is projected to shrink by roughly 13% between now and 2041. That's fine for the wars the US has actually fought lately. It is not fine for a big one. The all-volunteer force has never been tested by a protracted war against a peer, and the machinery to rapidly replace heavy losses has withered.

The Army's individual ready reserve, the pool of trained people it can recall after discharge, fell from around 450k in the 1990s to about 76,000. To put the stakes in scale, one wargame of a Taiwan conflict estimated the US could lose around 3200 troops in the first three weeks, close to half of what two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan cost. The real number could run higher or lower. But it points at the vulnerability, that a market optimized for peacetime recruiting is not the same thing as a system built to absorb massive casualties.

At the same time, military families are increasingly reluctant to recommend serving in the military. Only 32% of active duty family respondents to one survey would recommend service to a young person.

This comes after literally decades of US involvement in wars perceived to be unjust and unjustified, in which many thousands of young men and women have died.

All of this led the US military to face a recruitment crisis for several years in the early 2020s, though since 2024 those numbers have bounced back. Why is debated. The services point to recruiting reforms and a program that spends up to ninety days getting lower-scoring or less-fit applicants up to standard before they enlist. Critics argue the bar was lowered. The honest answer is probably some of both.

Interestingly, the US’s conservative population is far more likely to view military service as a net positive, not just due to the economic benefits but due to nationalist sentiments, despite many regions experiencing wildly disproportionate casualty rates during the US’s many wars. Appalachian and Southern communities have a deep military tradition dating to the American Revolution. These communities are still more likely to hold negative views of the government in general though, which creates a fascinating mixture.

The gap in who actually bears the casualties has only grown since WWII. The rate of combat deaths for people from rural counties fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan was 41% higher than in metropolitan areas.

So the US chose a market, which makes sense for a country that runs almost everything through markets. But markets sort by incentive, and the people most likely to say yes are the ones with the fewest other options and the deepest family ties to service. When fewer than one in 200 Americans serve, and the dying concentrates in a handful of rural counties, the cost of war becomes invisible to almost everyone who votes on it. Research on the casualty gap suggests that Americans insulated from the losses will tolerate more war, and that’s most people. Veterans have gone from over 70 percent of Congress in the 1970s to under 20 percent today.

Meanwhile, watching Russia, Europe is moving the other way, rebuilding the citizen-soldier link on purpose. Latvia brought back conscription in 2024. Germany's new service law took effect in 2026. The US is the outlier, doubling down on the market just as its allies hedge back toward compulsion. Which leaves the uncomfortable thought I keep landing on. How a country fills its ranks isn't only a question of fairness. It's a question of how easily that country can go to war. And America has handed that decision to the people with the least room to say no.

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