In the fiscal year of 2019, 21.39 percent of active-duty enlisted women were of Hispanic origin. The total number of active duty military personnel in 2019 amounted to 1.3 million people.

Ethnicities in the United States The United States is known around the world for the diversity of its population. The Census recognizes six different racial and ethnic categories: White American, Native American and Alaska Native, Asian American, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander. People of Hispanic or Latino origin are classified as a racially diverse ethnicity.

The largest part of the population, about 61.3 percent, is composed of White Americans. The largest minority in the country are Hispanics with a share of 17.8 percent of the population, followed by Black or African Americans with 13.3 percent. Life in the U.S. and ethnicity However, life in the United States seems to be rather different depending on the race or ethnicity that you belong to. For instance: In 2019, native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders had the highest birth rate of 58 per 1,000 women, while the birth rae of white alone, non Hispanic women was 49 children per 1,000 women.

The Black population living in the United States has the highest poverty rate with of all Census races and ethnicities in the United States. About 19.5 percent of the Black population was living with an income lower than the 2020 poverty threshold. The Asian population has the smallest poverty rate in the United States, with about 8.1 percent living in poverty.

The median annual family income in the United States in 2020 earned by Black families was about 57,476 U.S. dollars, while the average family income earned by the Asian population was about 109,448 U.S. dollars. This is more than 25,000 U.S. dollars higher than the U.S. average family income, which was 84,008 U.S. dollars.

In 2023, there were almost *********** Black or African American veterans in the United States, representing around ** percent of the total veteran population.

This dataset contains demographic information on every member of the US armed forces including gender, race, and rank.

Acknowlegement

Original Data

Foto von israel palacio auf Unsplash

In 2022, approximately ******* active duty personnel in the United States Department of Defense were Black or African American. Furthermore, another ******* active duty DoD personnel were white in that year, making up around **** percent of the total number.

The graph illustrates the number of personnel in each branch of the U.S. Military for the year 2025. The x-axis lists the military branches: Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard. The y-axis represents the number of personnel, ranging from 41,689 to 452,823. Among the branches, the Army has the highest number of personnel with 452,823, followed by the Navy with 337,209 and the Air Force with 321,211. The Marine Corps and Coast Guard have 170,201 and 41,689 personnel, respectively. The data is displayed in a bar graph format, effectively highlighting the distribution of military personnel across the different branches.

The United States military has a long history of ethnic minorities serving in its ranks, with black Americans having served as far back as the Revolutionary War. The Vietnam War took place during a period of changing race relations in the United States, with the Civil Rights Movement reaching its peak in the mid-1960s, and this too was reflected in the military. The Vietnam War was the first major conflict in which black and white troops were not formally segregated, however, discrimination did still occur with black soldiers reporting being subject to overt racism, being unjustly punished, and having fewer promotion opportunities than their white counterparts.

In the early phases of the war, black casualty rates were much higher than for other races and ethnicities, with some reports showing that black soldiers accounted for 25 percent of the casualties recorded in 1965. This declined substantially as the war progressed, however, the proportion of black service personnel among those fallen during the war was still disproportionately high, as black personnel comprised only 11 percent of the military during this era. A smaller number of other ethnic minorities were killed during the war, comprising two percent of the total.

In April 2024, 13.1% of people in non-officer roles in the armed forces were from ethnic minorities, compared with 7.9% in April 2012.

This statistic shows the number of Army National Guard members in the United States from 1995 to 2010 by ethnic group. The Army National Guard had 291,000 white and 48,000 black members in 2010.

In 2023, around 21.3 percent of active duty officers in the United States Navy were women. Additionally, approximately 19.4 percent of officers in the Space Force were women.

The U.S. Army remains the largest branch of the American military, with 449,344 active duty personnel in 2023. While the Army leads in numbers, the newly established Space Force had just 8,879 active duty members, highlighting the evolving nature of modern warfare and the increasing importance of space-based capabilities. Confidence in military remains high Despite fluctuations in force size, public trust in the U.S. military remains strong. In 2024, 61 percent of Americans expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the armed forces, a slight increase from the previous year. While a slightly higher share of Republicans have shown more confidence in the military, trust in the institution remains high across party lines. Global commitments The United States continues to invest heavily in its military capabilities, with defense spending reaching 916.02 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. This substantial budget supports not only domestic defense needs but also enables the U.S. to respond to global crises, as evidenced by the over 40 billion euros in military aid provided to Ukraine following Russia's invasion. The high level of spending, which translates to about 2,220 U.S. dollars per capita.

Although the value of diversity—in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status—to the U.S. military has been subject to debate, preferences for diversity at educational institutions for the military officers are rarely examined systematically. To address this, we investigate whether midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy favor prioritizing diversity in student admissions and faculty recruitment using conjoint analysis, a method suited for estimating attitudes on sensitive and politicized issues. The results show strong preferences in favor of applicants from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and moderate but still positive preferences for members of traditionally underrepresented racial/ethnic groups in both admissions and faculty recruitment. Midshipmen’s preferences with respect to gender are, however, less straightforward. In particular, we find a strong negative preference against gender non-binary applicants and candidates. Our findings suggest that midshipmen’s attitudes reflect both resolved and unresolved debates that resonate throughout the armed forces.

Context

Veteran Employment Outcomes (VEO) are new experimental U.S. Census Bureau statistics on labor market outcomes for recently discharged Army veterans. These statistics are tabulated by military specialization, service characteristics, employer industry (if employed), and veteran demographics. They are generated by matching service member information with a national database of jobs, using state-of-the-art confidentiality protection mechanisms to protect the underlying data.

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/veo_experimental.html

Content

"The VEO are made possible through data sharing partnerships between the U.S. Army, State Labor Market Information offices, and the U.S. Census Bureau. VEO data are currently available at the state and national level."

"Veteran Employment Outcomes (VEO) are experimental tabulations developed by the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program in collaboration with the U.S. Army and state agencies. VEO data provides earnings and employment outcomes for Army veterans by rank and military occupation, as well as veteran and employer characteristics. VEO are currently released as a research data product in "experimental" form."

"The source of veteran information in the VEO is administrative record data from the Department of the Army, Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis. This personnel data contains fields on service member characteristics, such as service start and end dates, occupation, pay grade, characteristics at entry (e.g. education and test scores), and demographic characteristics (e.g. sex, race, and ethnicity). Once service member records are transferred to the Census Bureau, personally-identifying information is stripped and veterans are assigned a Protected Identification Key (PIK) that allows for them to be matched with their employment outcomes in Census Bureau jobs data."

Earnings, and Employment Concepts

Earnings "Earnings are total annual earnings for attached workers from all jobs, converted to 2018 dollars using the CPI-U. For the annual earnings tabulations, we impose two labor force attachment restrictions. First, we drop veterans who earn less than the annual equivalent of full-time work at the prevailing federal minimum wage. Additionally, we drop veterans with two or more quarters with no earnings in the reference year. These workers are likely to be either marginally attached to the labor force or employed in non-covered employment."

Employment

"While most VEO tabulations include earnings from all jobs, tabulations by employer characteristics only consider the veteran's main job for that year. Main jobs are defined as the job for which veterans had the highest earnings in the reference year. To attach employer characteristics to that job, we assign industry and geography from the highest earnings quarter with that employer in the year. For multi-establishment firms, we use LEHD unit-to-worker imputations to assign workers to establishments, and then assign industry and geography."

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/veo_experimental.html

Acknowledgements

United States Census Bureau

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/veo_experimental.html

Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

Inspiration

U.S. Veterans.

In the United States, active duty Armed Forces personnel tended to be young, with the majority under the age of 30 years old. In 2023, there were 546,361 U.S. Defense Armed personnel aged 25 and under. In the age group 26 to 30, there were 275,756 Armed Forces personnel.

This report presents findings from the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) with a focus on comparing estimates related to substance use and mental health for military family members (spouses and children) with general population estimates. The numbers of military family members included in the 2015 NSDUH were relatively small. As a consequence, the report focuses on wives aged 18 to 49 and children aged 12 to 17. In the general area of substance use, the report includes estimates for past year use of any illicit substances (marijuana, cocaine in any form including crack, heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants, and methamphetamine and misuse of four categories of prescription drugs -- pain relievers, tranquilizers, stimulants and sedatives), past year cigarette use, past year alcohol use (both any use and binge use), and past year treatment for substance use, including alcohol use. In the general area of mental health, the report includes estimates for any mental illness (AMI) in the past year for wives. For both wives and children, the report includes estimates for past year major depressive episode (MDE) and mental health service use. For children, estimates of mental health service are reported by general treatment setting (e.g., mental health, educational, medical). As additional years of data become available, it will be possible in future reports to include both male and female spouses and to make more detailed comparisons -- for example for more specific types of illicit substances used and for treatment received by setting, by race/ethnicity and for spouses, by employment and educational background.

How does the design of military institutions affect who bears the costs of war? We answer this question by studying the transformative shift from segregated to integrated US military units during the Korean War. Combining new micro-level data on combat fatalities with archival data on the deployment and racial composition of military battalions, we show that Black and white soldiers died at similar rates under segregation. Qualitative and quantitative evidence provides one potential explanation for this counter-intuitive null finding: acute battlefield concerns necessitated deploying military units wherever soldiers were needed, regardless of their race. We next argue that the mid-war racial integration of units, which tied the fates of soldiers more closely together, should not alter the relative fatality rates. The evidence is consistent with this expectation. We finally demonstrate that, while aggregate fatality rates were equal across races, segregation enabled short-term casualty discrepancies. Under segregation there were high casualty periods for white units followed by high casualty periods for Black units. Integration eliminated this variability. The research note highlights how enshrining segregationist policies within militaries creates permissive conditions for either commander’s choices, or the dictates and variability of conflict, to shape who bears war’s costs.

Comprehensive demographic dataset for Military Reservation, Buckeye, AZ, US including population statistics, household income, housing units, education levels, employment data, and transportation with year-over-year changes.

• = p < 0.05** = p < 0.01Prevalence (% ± SE) of reported use of number and type dietary supplements (DS) at least once per week or more often over the six months prior to the survey by demographic and lifestyle characteristics among Active Duty U.S. Coast Guard Personnel1.

The Military Health and Well-Being Project (MHWBP) is an online survey study conducted through Qualtrics Panels. United States military veterans were recruited from various online survey sites from May 2020 through June 2020. The purpose of the study was to collect information regarding psychosocial antecedents of health and wellness, including military identity, self-stigma, daily stress, combat exposure, purpose and value, substance use, traumatic brain injury, moral injury, suicide risk, social integration and contribution, and six of eight Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) dimensions of wellness (social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical, and environmental components for this study). Participant demographics were also collected, including age, race, gender, marital status, region of residence, duration of military service, employment status, current occupation, income, and housing status. Respondents must have been 18 years of age, veterans of the United States military post-Vietnam era, and residing in the United States. Data collection was funded by the North Carolina State University 2019 Non-Laboratory Research Scholarship Program.

This dataverse contains the data and supporting documents for the CCES 2014 Yale University. This project was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant Number SES-1430505.

This dataset encompasses deterministic consumer demographics, collected from over 150,000 triple-opt-in first-party US Daily Active Users (DAU). Included are age, gender, ethnicity, location, employment, education, income, pet ownership, having kids/children, relationship, military status and more.