There's no doubt that the "economically disadvantaged to military pipeline" is as old as history itself, but... No. No for a lot of reasons. There's no short

There's no doubt that the "economically disadvantaged to military pipeline" is as old as history itself, but... No. No for a lot of reasons. There's no shortage of poor people in this country even when employment is high. I mean, the max enlistment age in the US Army is theoretically 35 years old, but realistically they are not looking for anybody much past 25 from anything I have ever seen. Even from a machiavellian standpoint leaving a whole bunch of unemployed people from 18 to 75 just so you can scoop up the youngest 10% of them or whatever just makes no sense. Lastly, the next war between major powers is probably not going to involve massive numbers of infantry troops from America. We fight proxy wars (Ukraine, etc) generally and if we fight another peer/near-peer country directly it's going to be missiles and drones and what-have-you, not 10 million American infantrymen marching through China.