Rural Areas the New Blacks?

Back in the day, in Vietnam, black Americans were disproportionately 11B's (the MOS for rifleman) and suffered casualties in excess of their proportion of the population.  Today it seems men and women from rural areas, especially upper Midwest and Great Plains, are suffering casualties in excess of their proportion of the population.

"The study does not look into reasons why soldiers from rural areas have experienced a higher death rate in the Iraq War"

My memory is the 1960's military, at least the Army, was draft-based.  People with the poorest scores on the test tended to end up as 11B's.  Blacks were drafted relatively equally with whites but had the poorer education and poorer scores, so ended up in the most dangerous positions.

When Nixon took us off the draft, blacks would enlist for the opportunity.I remember reading somewhere blacks now are more heavily concentrated in the Army's "tail"--the administrative support services.  As a result, although the current wars are dangerous for truck drivers, the casualty rate for blacks is probably less than their proportion, certainly less than for rural areas.  (Given the loss of black farms over 40 years, I assume without checking that the black population is disproportionately urban and suburban.)

I'm a bit amused by the quote. The illustrious Senator from Virginia, Jim Webb, has a book arguing that the South, particularly the Appalachians, is home to natural-born fighters, based on their Scots-Irish heritage.  Maybe the area has lost its edge, in favor of the German-Scandinavian Lutherans of the upper Midwest/Plains.  

I'd think in reality the key question is economic opportunity.  In the past blacks and the upcountry whites Webb writes about have had little opportunity, so ended up as fighters.  In the present the northern rural areas have little opportunity, so end up as fighters.  (In the remote past, Scots and Irish had little opportunity, so ended up as fighters.) And immigrants end up as fighters.

There's a more troubling possibility however. Blacks are disproportionately imprisoned. And, for those who watched The Wire, the prisoners include some of the most talented leaders.  I think that's a big change since the 1960's, so it's possible if academicians are using as their baseline the number of people 18 and over they're getting a different result than if they used the number of people not institutionalized and with no criminal record 18 and over.