This page provides an overview of military recruitment in fiscal year 2004.

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The recruitment rate is the number of military recruits per 1,000 of the 18-24 year old population. Branches include Army, Navy and Air Force Active Duty and Army Reserves. Other branches did not provide data and the Marines did not provide adequate data by location of recruit. Numbers are for FY2004. In county-level rankings, only counties with at least 4 recruits were included.

Data and statistics are available at zip code, school, county and state level on the NPP Database.

Tables and Charts

Top 20 counties by recruitment rate
State military recruitment rates
Representation of recruits by income

Representation of Army recruits by income
Army recruitment rates by urban to rural range

Overview

• 14 states were represented in the top 20 counties: Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.
• 236 counties had a recruitment rate of at least 10 (meaning the three branches recruited approximately 1% of their young people).

Income

• Nearly two-thirds of all recruits (64%) were from counties with median household incomes below the US median. About one-third were from counties with a higher median household income.
  All of the top 20 counties had a median household income below the national median household income.
• 19 out of the top 20 counties had lower median household incomes than their respective state median household incomes. (As a whole, the county-level incomes averaged 70% of the state median income levels.)
• 15 of the top 20 counties had higher poverty rates than the national average.
• 11 of the top 20 counties had higher child poverty rates than the national average.
• 16 of the top 20 counties had higher child poverty rates than the state average.
• 18 of the top 20 had higher poverty rates than the state average.

Race/Ethnicity

• Blacks made up 18.5% of Navy recruits, 17.2% of Army recruits, and 14.2 % of Air Force recruits in 2004.
• Hispanics made up 17.2% of Navy recruits, 14% of Army recruits, and 11.3% of Air Force recruits in 2004.
• 22% of Black Army Recruits came from 3 states: Georgia, Texas, and Florida.
• 52% of Hispanic Army Recruits came from 3 states or territories: California (22%), Texas (20%), and Puerto Rico (8.8%).

Rural/Urban

• Recruits represented a similar mix of the general population distributed between rural and urban areas. 81.2% of recruits were living in a metropolitan area when recruited as compared to 82.6% of the population; 18.8% of recruits were living in a nonmetropolitan area as compared to 17.4% of the general population
• 18 of the top 20 counties were nonmetropolitan and 2 were metropolitan (in Kansas and Kentucky).
• 11 of the 20 counties are considered completely rural.
  
  

Data were obtained from the individual branches of the military through FOIA requests submitted by Peacework Magazine.