If you don't know this already, please try and internalize it: the idea that people join the US military primarily because they are young people at a disadvantage in life coerced into believing it is the most accessible path to upward mobility is not true.
if you're parroting this talking point, you are doing propaganda for the US military and you just need to stop saying it. here's an article from the Military Times that breaks the finding of various studies like this one from 2020 and this one from 2018 that analyze motivations for joining the military and popular conceptions of motivations for joining the military. Here's a pretty important excerpt:
Further, they hypothesized that some of this possible misconception about poorer Americans joining the military was a geographical issue. While the Defense Department tracks the zip codes of recruits ― and historically, many of them come from more rural areas in the southeast ― it doesn’t track their incomes or their parents’ incomes, which leads to assumptions that the poorer their communities, the poorer the recruits. [...] Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 1997 to 2008, they found that the services have recruited primarily from the middle class, America’s largest socio-economic demographic. “We show that recent recruits tend to have higher than average socioeconomic background: they disproportionally come from the middle of the family income, family wealth, and cognitive skill distributions, with both tails under-represented,” they found.
Here's from the army times:
Surveyed troops said these were the top five reasons for staying in the Army. The percentages indicate how many troops felt the factors were “extremely important” to them:
- Opportunity to serve my country — 53.5% - How well my retirement pay or benefits will meet my future needs — 45.1% - Opportunities to lead or train soldiers — 43.5% - My sense of purpose — 38.1% -How well my pay or benefits meet my present needs — 37%
Also mentioned in other sources but here from the NY times in 2020 as well, army enlistment is becoming increasingly skewed towards being the children of people who have previously served.
The main predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly evenly through middle-class and “downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns out not to be the prime factor.
'Joining the army to lift yourself out of poverty' is not the reality for military service, it is the narrative used by the military in it's marketing and recruitment. if you go around repeating it i hope for your sake you're at least on their payroll! if you're going to bootlick don't do it for free!
I think a lot of this misconception also comes from residual ideas about US military service from when there was a draft. In the mid-20th century, there actually was a bias toward poorer people ending up in the military, not because they needed the money or wanted to escape poverty, but because they were less likely able to avoid getting drafted than wealthier people. Lots of anti-war rhetoric in the US during the war with Vietnam talked about poor men sent to fight a rich man's war. In point of fact, one of the motives for the US to switch to an all-volunteer army was to get a military population more likely to be ideologically aligned with the US's imperial interests.
However, like a lot of ideas that emerged as anti-war/establishment/imperialist/capitalist/etc. sentiment during the '60s and '70s in the US, the idea of the poor US soldier who is the victim of injustice got captured by the dominant cultural narrative. With the shift to an all-volunteer army the preponderance of anti-war vets dissipated. Thus the image of the sympathetic poor soldier transformed from a depiction of reality and one of many reasons to oppose imperialistic wars into a myth serving as a tool to cajole people into supporting imperialistic wars.