US military could not enlist the majority of young Americans in 2010.

Evidence

Several generations later, in 2010, the U.S. Secretary of Education reported that “75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.” When a nation can no longer generate enough young people who are fit for military service, that nation has two choices: it can, as a number of prominent retired generals are currently advocating, reinvest in its “human capital,” especially the health and education of the poor, or it can seriously re-evaluate its approach to war… . An alternative approach is to eliminate or drastically reduce the military’s dependence on human beings of any kind. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 604

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the earlier point about welfare being paid for cannon fodder — here the social body is too degraded to supply soldiers.