It's actually very difficult for the poorest Americans to enlist in the military

[Hekate]

49. Whole categories of young black and brown men get stopped by cops for behavior that no white...

...would ever be found liable for. Like driving. Walking around the suburbs. Walking in the city. Driving a "good" car. Hanging out in a public park. Having a birthday party or bbq in a public park. Hanging out in front of your own house.

You know the drill by now if you are a DUer. It is really easy to get a record started -- if you are black or brown.

As for schools: we've known for generations in this country that schools in poor neighborhoods are notoriously wretched, with a high dropout rate. Many kids are hungry -- they now call it "food insecurity," Jesus what a euphemism. Many kids are holding down a job to help out their families with rent and groceries. Homelessness among families is rising.

It is easy to miss classes when your family is that poor.

Being in good physical condition depends on good nutrition and the opportunity to exercise -- see above.

Sure, the Army wants better cannon-fodder. But as this country slides backward, it might be instructive to look at what the Draft had to deal with at the end of the Great Depression and before there was a middle class after WWII.

Health: so many young men were given a 4-F for nutritional diseases (ricketts, blindness, rotten teeth, heart disease) alone that the free school lunch program got its start. (This continued in my generation (in my home state, I don't know about elsewhere) in a modified form: our school lunches cost 25 cents, and were 1/3 of a growing kid's daily needs. Even my penny pinching mother could not brown-bag a lunch cheaper than that, altho I still knew kids who went without.) Think about that: school nutrition programs for healthy future soldiers, whatever you may think of that motive.

Literacy/education: during WWII the Army had education programs for recruits that got down to the absolute basics of personal hygiene and I don't know what-all. I'm sure the old training manuals are online for your edification; everything else is.

What I'm saying is, the Army and other military branches may have been relying on a robust miiddle class and the spillover of that into the rest of society to produce the kind of recruits they wanted -- and thanks to GOP policies for the last 2 generations, that no longer exists. If I am right, they are going to have to return to an earlier model for recruitment and training.