Billmon: Be All You Can Be

Last year, despite NASCAR, professional bull-riding, and Arena Football sponsorships; popular video games that doubled as recruiting tools; TV commercials dripping with seductive scenes of military glory; a "joint marketing communications and market research and studies" program actively engaged in measures to target for military service Hispanics, drop outs, and those with criminal records; and at least $16,000 in promotional costs for each soldier it managed to sign up, the U.S. military failed to meet its recruiting goals.

TomDispatch
Dirty Dozen: The Pentagon's 12-Step Program to Create a Military of Misfits
September 2006

In the various states of society armies are recruited from very different motiveds. Barbarians are urged by their love of war; the citizens of a free republic may be prompted by a principle of duty . . . but the timid and luxurious inhabitants of a declining empire must be allured into the service by hopes of profit, or compelled by the dread of punishment.

Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
1776