Patriotism or Financial Stability--What Drives Young Men and Women to Join the United States Armed Forces

The purpose of this project is to determine why men and women continue to join the Armed Forces. I looked at different factors that may be associated with why people join the Armed Forces, and used an online survey to help determine what factor(s) had the most influence on the participants to join. This research focuses on patriotism and benefits. The benefits were then broken into different categories: education, healthcare, housing, and retirement. This research, if conducted on a much larger scale, theoretically could help the Armed Forces understand soldiers’ reasoning for joining so that they could put resources and funds into those incentives, if applicable, to allow our Armed Forces to have more personnel to choose from. By being more selective, the Armed Forces could choose the best of what this nation has to offer. This would mean the Armed Forces could choose the most intelligent, and the most qualified for each of their positions creating a military that would be better, faster, and stronger. The implications of this would mean more security for this nation to maintain the personal freedoms every civilian holds dear