Loonerinoes said:
While it is true that most middle-class people would not be more attracted to joining armed forces after playing videogames, problem is that the middle-class never is the army's target.
It's always the uninformed poor, who try to escape whatever misery they're already in and when they see something as fun as videogames right next to promotionals for signing up to the military, they tend to subconsciously connect the two.
That is a complete falsehood. To quote a Washington Post article:
"'"The new excuse is, I'd never send my son to fight in Iraq," says Schaeffer. An author with no military background who lives in an affluent area near Boston, Schaeffer also blames the lingering priorities of the Me Generation. "My class are dismissive of anything other than the glittering fast track of money.'
Statistically, recruits are less likely to come from affluent Zip codes such as those in many Washington area suburbs. Some claim this is because military recruiters target the poor. But recruiters are not welcome in most affluent neighborhoods...
Civilian and military researchers have confirmed that recruiters are not targeting the very rich, but neither are they aiming at the very poor -- the privileged aren't interested, and the disadvantaged can't handle the increasingly technical training. It's the middle they're after.
Studies by organizations ranging from the University of Maryland's Center for Research on Military Organization to think tanks to the Department of Defense indicate that members of the military are actually better educated on average than their peers. As many as 98 percent earned a high school diploma or equivalency degree, compared with 75 percent to 84 percent of young civilians
Until Vietnam, the military broke down along the same political lines as the rest of the country, about one-third independent, one-third Democratic, one-third Republican. The enlisted ranks still do. But in the past 30 years, the officer corps has undergone a revolution. In the most recent comprehensive study, conducted in the late 1990s by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, Republican officers outnumbered Democrats 8 to 1. In 2006, only 16 percent of Army Times active-duty readers, who are mostly senior in rank, declared themselves Democrats.
Contrary to a common misperception, minorities are only slightly overrepresented in the military, making up 35 percent of service personnel compared to about 33 percent of the general population.
Overall, recruits tend to come from small towns. And, while these small towns often have a boarded-up factory, family incomes indicate that those joining the military are the upwardly mobile working middle class.
There's clearly some self-selection going on, too, because nearly half of all Army recruits are following in the footsteps of a parent who has served. We seem to be creating an American warrior class."
The link to the article is here. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/18/AR2007071802785.html]
In short, the military is not made up of uninformed lower class drones, like you suggest. In fact, the opposite is true; the military is better educated, and just a diverse as the civilian population at large. They are middle class, and it's more to do with family history than any sort of "brain-washing."
