Just when did the wealthy/ruling elite stop fighting in the military?

[theHandpuppet]

I'm curious whether anyone out there has any insight about why/when the ruling classes excused themselves from serving in the military. Throughout most of our recorded history, leaders of nations personally led troops into battle and the landed elite were expected to serve, as were their sons, including and especially those from royal houses.

Just when did that change? How did this total divorce from military service come about among the upper classes?

This is something I've been curious about for some time. I'm just so sick of privileged chickenhawks, especially those born sucking on silver spoons, telling everyone else to go and die for their "noble causes". If it's so damned noble then give them a rifle and let them and their children personally lead the battle.

Anyway, who out there can shed some light on this subject?

[BlueEyedSon]

1. When did they ever?

[TomClash]

6. 1941

[ihaveaquestion]

2. It used to be the path to wealth and power, but no longer.

Corporations are now the wealthy's battlefield.

[90-percent]

7. When??

I think the trend of rich youth shirking their patriotic duty began after WW2.

Viet Nam escalated it, because the rich knew that was a pretty stupid War to sacrifice your own children.

WW2 was probably the last era of true shared sacrifice this country will see in hundreds of years.

Joe Kennedy Jr. comes to mind as a wealthy elite that lost his life in WW2. Joe Sr. was grooming him for politics and the Presidency, a role then given to JFK.

Bush Sr. made sure his plane mates lost THEIR lives when he prematurely bailed from his plane late in WW2.

-85%

[ihaveaquestion]

11. When? In pre-industrial times.

In post-industrial times it seems to have been a prerequisite for those with political ambitions. Now that seems to be going away as well.

[bluestateguy]

3. Also

I miss the days when generals personally led their men into battle, rather than sitting in an air-conditioned room playing their men like they are chess pieces.

[blindpig]

12. damned few of them

Last I can think of were George Patton and Erwin Rommel.

[geek tragedy]

4. Trick question--they never did. eom

[MountainLaurel]

5. A while back

In the Middle Ages, landed lords could send vassals in their place. During the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, plantation owners sent their slaves instead. In many conflicts, if you made a healthy financial contribution, you could get out of fighting, I believe.

[leesa]

14. I think it was $300 and you could send someone else during the Civil War

All the rich like the Rockefellars, Mellons, etc did this.

[napi21]

8. I suspect it was when the Draft ended.

Even when there was a draft, most "elite" sot out of it somehow, but not ALL.

[DFWdem]

9. Probably about the same time...

That students demanded military recruiters and ROTC programs be banned from their college campuses, especially the Ivy League scools. Don't want the reality of the armed forces to be too close to their insulated, privileged, snotty worlds, now do we?

[PATRICK]

10. A rude guess

After WWII when the younger generation felt obliged to cover over the pro-Hitler sins of their financial sires and empires. One would think WWI with its horrors and threatened anarchic aftermath would have back off from big wars altogether, certainly not to fight in them.

Also, using the Bushes as an example, the generational spoilage and decay from consistent amoral attitudes and privilege continues to breed each generation worse than the next talent wise.

To the extent that Junior was too looped to serve even if he wanted to, if one cares about his intent. In the British empire it was necessary for advancement especially for the needier inheritors similar to Rome. Officers routinely had to outfit and finance their own companies. Modern warfare increasingly made that really dumb and undesirable. Fitting into a public fodder machine even as an officer? Run by hoi poiloi professionals? It became much more a civic duty than rewarding to the ever fatter kittens. And we know about their current sense of civic duty. Something to be looted and destroyed. The logic of dominant chickenhawk capitalism says that such "obligation" is non-existent and not necessary.
We are at the foreign levy stage just about, the premature sunset of empire.

[China_cat]

13. During the Civil War, a man could buy a replacement

to serve for him for $300.

This is NOT something new.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

15. When they discovered they could get some poor sod to do it for them.

The bosses have been hiring mercenaries, instituting conscription, bamboozling the "patriots, since Cain whacked Abel.

[kenny blankenship]

16. After the US finally emerged out from under the shadow of Great Britain

following WWII.
It used to be a cultural marker of the upper class here, because it had always been one there. The origin is feudal obviously; the nobility of Europe were the nobility because they were the warrior class. Its carryover to the modern era reflects both the self-flattering conceit of the rich that no one else is capable of steering the country through the dangers of international conflict, and the insecurity they feel at the top of society. Without a privileged role and access to the warmaking powers of the state, they are soft juicy targets for the next upstart Cromwell or Napoleon. Anyway, no one knows better than they how the state is founded on acts of violence, and being the people with the most to lose from eruptions of civil disorder, they have a powerful incentive to keep close to the tools of real power. Or so it was throughout the modern period. After World War Two American elites stopped aping the British traditions so closely as it was now our century and our world. The bomb also made service in uniform less of a class marker. If there was ever a real war, we were all surely fucked --the rich right along with the poor. But more importantly the way to power in the American empire was changing. Empires were now created in more purely financial arenas of conflict. Empires created as in the past by charging across borders on horseback or in tanks under your own country's flag were fleeting and frequently unprofitable. And now, because of the bomb, there was only so much great powers could do to contest each other militarily without destroying everything. For once in human history those who started a big war stood a chance of being among the first to die in it, which took a lot of the shine off the whole idea for them. The decisions made by banks and companies were becoming more important to the accumulation of global power than military decisions as long as military stalemate lasted. This means that the prestige and importance elites crave for their exclusive benefit was concentrated in "ignoble" civilian arenas of commercial enterprise and away from glorious military exploits. The really important tools of state were becoming more abstract, less the symbolism and pageantry of national identity represented through military uniform. Today the main duties of a citizen are (in reverse order) to pay his taxes and to service his credit card debt rather than to be ready to serve his country in war. No point in trying to make a career in the military then for a son of a rich family. By becoming limited in this way, becoming less celebrated and symbolic and less of a way leading to greater status, the military was made absolutely practical, meritocratic and middle class.