Alumni Perspective: U.S. forces in Iraq: Whose lives were on the line?
David R. Segal '62

The nature of modern warfare, and the diversity of our military, is reflected dramatically in who fights and dies in combat for the United States. The American military has evolved from a force that was predominantly composed of young white single men to one that is increasingly integrated on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender and age, and with more married personnel than in the past.

The diversity of the forces serving in Iraq reflects the major changes that have taken place in the American armed forces in the past three decades. In 1973, the United States stopped conscripting young men for military service in favor of a voluntarily enlisted military force. Although for most of our history we have had volunteer military forces, we depended on wartime conscription from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War and demobilized in inter-war periods.

Because of the Cold War, from the end of World War II until the 1980s, we kept at least 2 million people in active duty. As tensions with the Soviet Union declined in the late 1980s, we reduced the size of the active duty military force to somewhat fewer than 1.4 million soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and reserves. This downsizing paused during the first Gulf War.

We have since structured our military so that we cannot go to war without our reserve forces, both to help compensate for the smaller active force and to mend a gap between society and those who fight on its behalf that is perceived by some policy-makers, journalists and academics to be a threat to civilian control of the military in America. During the Vietnam War, serving in the reserves was one way of avoiding going to war, because we made little use of them. Military analysts decided that the ability of the middle class to escape active duty had undercut support for our armed forces among those segments of society whose sons were not serving.

Thirteen BU students were among the diverse forces that were called to serve during the war with Iraq, including Sgt. B. Alexander Finsel, a graduate student in the School of Education and Human Development, and Lance Corporal Tony Yong Hu, a junior in the School of Management, both activated by the Marines in January. Finsel meets up with a camel during his tour of duty in Iraq. (Left) Hu sits atop a piece of equipment in Kuwait (right).

A rise in military families

The social composition of the military has also changed. As was true under most periods of conscription, our military personnel under-represent the top and bottom quartiles of America's socio-economic strata and over-represent the middle 50 percent. However, where there was a 2 percent ceiling on women until the end of conscription (with the exceptions of World War II and the Korean War), they now comprise 14 percent of active forces, and even more in the reserves. While expected to be proportionally represented in the volunteer force, African Americans are significantly over-represented, particularly among senior enlisted women and administrative and medical jobs.

Americans who join the military today do so for a range of reasons: Pay, skill training, job security, family benefits, money for college, a desire to serve their country and family tradition stand out. In American society, public safety occupations such as police and firefighters, and professions such as medicine and law, tend to be passed from generation to generation. At the intersection of these two sets of occupations, we see multi-generation military families.

We also see more career military personnel who marry and have children. Since the armed forces assume some responsibility for the families of personnel, our military forces are responsible for more civilian family members (spouses, children and parents) than military personnel, and a range of family structures are found in the military, including dual military couples and sole parents, three quarters of whom are men.

Modern warfare places all at high risk

Based on changes in warfare itself, support troops are at greater risk than they once were. Our high technology, increasingly lethal, precise and long-range weaponry reduces the risk to front-line combat soldiers, but increases the likelihood of "friendly fire" casualties, because the speed of operations requires rapid, irreversible human decisions to fire. At the same time, we are increasingly likely to face forces that represent tribal, ethnic or religious interests, rather than nations. Lacking our sophisticated weapons, they use unconventional military tactics.

Of 108 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq between the beginning of hostilities on March 20, and the U.S. entry into Sadaam Hussein's birthplace of Tikrit on April 13, only 68 were due to enemy fire. The others were due to accidents, "friendly fire," and illness. Among those killed or captured were men and women, people of all races, reservists and active duty personnel. About 8 percent of those 108 fatalities were reservists. About 18 percent were black and 15 percent Hispanic.

Twenty-four enemy-fire fatalities on a single day of operations, March 23, account for a large proportion of the total and reflect the impact of unconventional tactics, the diversity of the force and the risk to soldiers in support specialties. On that day, in Nasiriyah, a group of Iraqi soldiers pretended to surrender and then opened fire on the Marines who approached to take them into custody. Twelve Marines were killed, two of whom were Hispanic. On the same day, an Army maintenance company moving through Iraq was ambushed. Ten soldiers were killed. Four of them were African American. Two were Hispanic. One was a Hopi woman. Five other members of the unit were captured, including two women: one white, the other African American.

The casualties, fatalities and prisoners taken in this unit reflect the fact that any distinction between combat and non-combat soldiers is a false one, and that when our nation goes to war, all of its uniformed personnel are combat soldiers.

Segal is a professor of sociology, government and politics, and public affairs, as well as director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. Author of Recruiting for Uncle Sam: Citizenship and Military Manpower Policy, Segal is also co-editor of Life in the Rank and File and The Social Psychology of Military Service, and co-author of The All-Volunteer Force. He said he became a sociologist at Harpur College, although he started college as a geology major. "But geologic processes take a long time (except for earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) and I'm not a patient person," he said. "The required social science courses attracted me, and my first sociology courses lit a fire in my belly that is still burning. The first paper I wrote on the military was an undergraduate term paper in [Professor Emeritus] Don Trow's industrial sociology course."