COLUMN ONE : Volunteer Force: Is It Truly Fair? : Minorities and poor whites are a high percentage of the recruits. Casualties would not hit home among the affluent and influential, critics say.

In the escalating national debate over President Bush’s course in the Persian Gulf, incendiary questions of class and race that seared the nation during the Vietnam War are smoldering again.

The underlying issue is as old as war itself: Who will die if fighting starts?

But the old dilemma has a new twist. For the first time in this century, the United States is preparing for a possibly major war not with an army raised through broad conscription, but an all-volunteer force composed largely of minorities and low-income whites.

That worries a growing chorus of critics, who fear that with the soldiers at risk so heavily drawn from the least influential segments of society, an important political tripwire against the precipitous use of force has been eliminated.

“There are too many communities across this country where people can sit across the table and say: ‘That’s too bad (about the gulf), but I don’t know anybody affected,’ ” said Alex Molnar, the father of a Marine deployed to Saudi Arabia and co-chairman of the Military Families Support Network in Milwaukee.

“Casualties will be much easier to sell to the public using volunteers rather than people conscripted out of families they (in the Administration) don’t want to see serving,” agreed Jim Coats of Red Lodge, Mont., whose son recently enlisted in the Army.

And, these critics ask, if the stakes in the gulf are no less than our “way of life,” as President Bush has maintained, is it fair to ask for sacrifice primarily from those who have shared just modestly in its rewards?

Blacks and other racial minorities now make up one-third of all U.S. military enlisted personnel and nearly 40% of the Army, which will do much of the fighting--and dying--if shooting starts. Studies have shown that their white colleagues are drawn largely from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds.

“If the President decides to commit this country to war, it cannot be left just to those who volunteered,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said. “It has to be a broader base.”

But others say any attempt to spread the burden of military service--most likely by reinstating the draft--would come too late to change the complexion of the troops in the Persian Gulf and would only compound the existing inequities.

“It would be worse to have a draft where we take in blacks who don’t want to serve and whites who don’t want to serve,” said Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, who has extensively studied the volunteer force. “Whatever the moral qualms we have about the current situation, a draft would be worse on any measure.”

In a Congress that spent much of October fighting a rhetorical class war over the federal budget deficit, the class implications of a real war in the gulf are only now emerging. So far, minority members of Congress, uneasy about the high percentage of blacks on the front lines, have expressed the most concern.

But many observers believe that a war in the Middle East could spark the broadest evaluation of the all-volunteer force since its formation nearly 20 years ago.

Issue Gains Visibility

Spurred by political and military considerations, discussion of a return to the draft--though still a remote possibility--has already reached a level of visibility unimaginable only months ago.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, former Navy Secretary James H. Webb Jr. said that, to provide for necessary replacements, President Bush would need “an immediate resumption of the draft” if he plans a ground offensive against Iraq. Those sentiments could be strengthened if the armed forces continue to have problems attracting new recruits: The military has failed to meet its recruitment goals in two of the past three months.

“This will surface the whole issue of what Americans’ obligations are to their nation,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a longtime proponent of imposing a national service requirement on young people.

Charges of inequity are as much a part of American military history as muskets and C-rations. The United States did not systematically conscript soldiers until the Civil War, and from the start the children of privilege have found it easiest to avoid serving.

In the Civil War, Northern draftees could provide a substitute to serve their term--or simply buy their way out for $300. With its bias so blatantly displayed, the draft set off a virtual civil war within the larger one: Attacks on draft enrolling officers and draft records in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Vermont were capped by four days of bloody riots in New York City in 1863.

During World War I, those with skills deemed most “valuable” to the war effort at home were declared the least eligible for conscription; predictably, that meant that blacks and new immigrants were drafted in disproportionate numbers.

In World War II, with near total mobilization of the society, these problems were avoided. But the fairness issue returned in the Vietnam era, when only a relatively small percentage of the huge pool of available young men were drafted. For many Americans, the Vietnam War became a poor man’s war in which upper-income young people were sheltered with college deferments and National Guard service, while the less affluent traded overalls for fatigues.

Even after reforms to limit these disparities were imposed, one study concluded that from 1970 to 1972 young men from neighborhoods with the highest family income stood only half the chance of being called as middle-income youths, and just one-quarter the chance of the poor.

Anger over the draft’s unfairness was one factor that led to its replacement with the all-volunteer force in 1973. At the time, some critics predicted that minorities and those with the most meager economic prospects would dominate the volunteer armed forces. But the presidential commission that recommended the shift maintained that the military’s demographics would not significantly change, and the volunteer force was adopted with relatively little debate by a nation exhausted with the war and the draft.

Now, though, those questions of equity have resurfaced. Over the past 20 years, the volunteer military, offering college tuition assistance and practical job training, has become widely viewed as a powerful agent of upward mobility--now, for men and women. Surveys have shown that economic considerations are paramount for many of those enlisting. Molnar’s son, for example, after knocking around at various jobs, enlisted in the Marines largely to receive training as a mechanic.

With these incentives driving recruitment, the armed forces now appear to be even more heavily weighted toward minorities and less-affluent whites than during the Vietnam era, some experts believe. Today blacks, who make up slightly more than 12% of the overall population, are 29% of Army enlisted personnel and 23% of the enlisted forces in all four services. Latinos, who make up more than 8% of the population, are only 5% of the overall force; other minorities represent another 4.4% of the military.

In 1969, blacks made up 11.4% of enlisted Army forces in Southeast Asia and 10.5% of all U.S. enlisted forces there. That essentially equaled the 11% of total U.S. population blacks represented at the time.

Recruits Not Affluent

Precise data on the current class composition of the armed forces is not available. One recent study, by Sue E. Berryman at Columbia University, calculated that as of 1979 the military recruited primarily from “less enfranchised” segments of the society--blacks and Latinos from the middle-income range of those groups, and lower-middle-class whites.

Other experts say the military has maintained a distinctly blue-collar hue since then. Although they are not the poorest of the poor, “they are not the children of the affluent,” said Charles C. Moskos, a sociologist at Northwestern University who has extensively studied the military. “Whites from the suburbs--you just don’t find them.”

Statistics on educational achievement for recruits tell the same story. The armed forces’ dramatic recruitment success in the 1980s has produced a military with many more high school graduates than in the past: more than 90% today, contrasted with roughly half just before Vietnam. That means fewer high school dropouts with the bleakest economic prospects are at risk today than in Vietnam.

But only 3% of today’s soldiers have any college experience, contrasted with about 15% in the early 1960s. “The college-educated enlisted man,” Moskos has written, “has all but vanished from the ranks.”

Moskos and such other critics of the Administration’s policy as former Navy Secretary Webb maintain that the opposition to the President would be more widespread and public protest more intense if the force deployed to the Middle East included more young people drawn from the higher rungs on the income ladder.

Even with all of its inequities, the Vietnam draft did guarantee that the war reached into some homes where the lawns were long and green. Though the wealthy were under-represented relative to their share of the population, 28% of those drafted from 1970 to 1972 came from the top fourth of most-affluent neighborhoods, one study found.

And even for those who avoided service with extended study, the threat of conscription remained keen. These strains personalized the war for some of the most influential families in every community, not to mention some policy-makers themselves.

That intimate pressure has been virtually eliminated with the institution of the volunteer force. One recent survey found that only two of the 535 members of Congress have children serving in the gulf.

“You have a situation where people who decide to go to war aren’t affected by the consequences of that in a personal sense, so a natural restraint is removed,” said Al From, executive director of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of centrist Democrats.

Supporters of the volunteer force dismiss the contention that the government is more willing to risk this army than a military with conscripts.

To Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and former domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, the argument that Congress and the Administration will behave prudently only if their own children are at risk amounts to “making the sons of congressmen hostages. This is the same kind of thinking Saddam Hussein engages in.”

Others argue that it is hypocritical to worry about the heavy proportion of minorities now on the front line in Saudi Arabia after long applauding the military as an engine of economic opportunity. “We cannot expect minorities and low-income Americans not to be subject to casualties in conflict when we encourage them to join the military to better themselves,” McCain said.

Similarly, Sen. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) argues that whatever their motivation, anyone enlisting in the Armed Forces “has to understand that (war) is a possible consequence of their service and accepts that risk.”

Effect of Reservists

Moreover, the call-up in the crisis of more than 96,000 reservists--more of whom, experts believe, are drawn from the middle class than the regular forces--has already diffused its social impact much as a draft would, the Cato Institute’s Bandow argues.

Still, few disagree that public concern would be sharpened if the war effort depended on the conscription of young people who did not want to fight. “The issue of compulsion would be far more important than whether the children of policy-makers are involved,” said Robb, who served in Vietnam as a Marine officer while married to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s daughter, Lynda Bird.

Families of men and women who have voluntarily chosen to serve in the military seem torn about the threat. In a recent Los Angeles Times survey, Americans with relatives deployed in Saudi Arabia were actually more willing to support war with Iraq than those without any family in the military. But overall, they were divided evenly on their willingness to go to war, and military families have generated many of the most intense opponents to President Bush’s policies--such as those active in Molnar’s group.

“It cannot be as vivid (a threat) unless it is one of your own,” said Marilyn Harrison of Salisbury, N.C., whose son Nicholas serves in the Army. “That’s just human nature.”

To a considerable extent, talk of a draft in response to the gulf crisis is symbolic, raised by opponents to dramatize the potential stakes of war to Americans who do not now feel them. Unless the conflict drags on much longer than most analysts now consider likely, it would be difficult to reactivate the mechanisms for selecting, classifying, inducting and training young Americans--much less winning congressional approval for such an enterprise--in time to put new soldiers on the sand in Saudi Arabia. Pentagon officials say they have no plans to request reactivation of the draft.

“For the current situation the issue is moot,” said Martin Binkin, an expert on the volunteer force at the Brookings Institution.

And even in the unlikely event the President and Congress accepted a new draft, questions of equity would remain. As Binkin notes, a draft might mean the induction of low-income high school dropouts now rejected by the services.

“Trying to get a perfectly fair draft would be like trying to get a perfectly fair tax system,” said Lawrence J. Korb, assistant secretary of defense for manpower in the Ronald Reagan Administration.

In fact, some argue the real issue raised by the composition of the armed forces is not whether more whites should be serving in Saudi Arabia, but why so many young blacks believe that they have no better economic alternative than the military.

“That goes to equal opportunity,” said Clifford L. Alexander Jr., who served as the first black Army secretary under President Jimmy Carter. “If anyone out there is worried about inequity, they ought to begin right here at home with corporate America.”

ENLISTED PERSONNEL: A RACIAL MIX

Here is the racial makeup of the U.S. military services as of June, 1990.

U.S. POPULATION* AND MILITARY OVERALL RACIAL MAKEUP

Latino Overall U.S. population: 8.3% Overall military: 4.9%

Black Overall U.S. population: 12.1% Overall military: 23.0%

Other minority Overall U.S. population: 6.0% Overall military: 4.4%

Total minority Overall U.S. population: 26.4% Overall military: 32.3%

White Overall U.S. population: 81.9% Overall military: 67.7% * Totals are more than 100% because the U.S. Census Bureau lists Latinos as a sub-category of either black or white. MARINES Latino: 7.2% Black: 20.7% Other minority: 3.1% Total minority: 31.0% White: 69.0% AIR FORCE Latino: 3.8% Black: 17.6% Other minority: 3.3% Total minority: 24.7% White: 75.3% ARMY Latino: 4.3% Black: 28.9% Other minority: 4.6% Total minority: 37.8% White: 62.2% NAVY Latino: 5.9% Black: 16.7% Other minority: 5.6% Total minority: 28.2% White: 71.8% Source: Department of Defense; U.S. Census Bureau