Public Employee Press

Afghanistan war
Working-class communities suffer greatest wartime casualities

More than the impoverished youth of city slums or the privileged young of the suburbs, the U.S. soldiers dying in Afghanistan are the sons and daughters of working-class families.

According to a new study of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan, the casualties come disproportionately from counties where income levels are somewhat below the median - typical of solidly working-class communities.

Issued Oct. 7, the 10th anniversary of the war, the study examines who is actually going to war and what communities suffer the losses. It was written by economics professor Michael Zweig and graduate students Michael Porter and Yuxiang Huang of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

In a picture that hasn't been captured before, the study shows that working-class whites and Native Americans with only high school education figure disproportionately among those who died from 2001-2010 and that other minorities are underrepresented on the casualty rolls compared with their shares of the population.

The study is based on information from obituaries and tribute pages for all 1,446 soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who perished in the Afghan War through Dec. 31, 2010, and census and other government data on their communities.

The highest casualty rates were in northeastern rural and "micropolitan" counties centered on towns and small cities of between 10,000 and 50,000.

Contrary to the concept of an "economic draft" of poor people forced to volunteer for the military to make a living, the authors found that the casualties' counties have unemployment and poverty rates no higher than the rest of country.

Almost 75 percent of the obituaries and tributes said the fallen heroes were motivated by a desire to serve their country and similar patriotic reasons, but these sources typically glorify the dead and are certainly inadequate to deny that economic motives were important factors in many people's decisions to join the military. The full study is at www.stonybrook.edu/workingclass/publications/afghan_casualties.shtml