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This is definitely a big component. I'm from a key recruiting demographic area (southern borderer whites and similar culture blacks, not a lot of jobs around) and over the 2000s and into the early 2010s a huge portion of the young men enlisted. Due to the massive amount of civilian contractor work available for people with a security clearance, bad job market, and lowered standards for the troop surge everybody and their dog enlisted.
It started seriously reducing in the early-mid 2010s, at first with the fracking boom when sitting in a company truck or hauling pipes in Texas or the Dakotas would make triple or quadruple in a season what a soldier makes in a year. Also there was a glut of 11B infantrymen coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with no real job skills stuck working as mall cops, bouncers and corrections officers and telling all their younger siblings to do something else for a career.
Most subsequent cohorts of 18 y/os are going for learning a trade like pipefitting or electrical work and following plant shutdowns and startups around the country, doing a couple months insanely intensive work then just hanging out for a few months, on and off. Same story for seasonal tourist work waiting tables and guiding rich people that want to LARP as outdoorsmen in Alaska and Colorado.
If you're not planning to go to college anyway and think you're probably dying in your sixties, it's much more attractive to go with the higher paying job where you have some level of choice in where you work and what you do versus being Uncle Sam's bitch for years and getting paid peanuts at that.
I think the "troop surge" also did some damage. It was like a lite version of "McNamara's Morons" and all the meth tweakers, biker gang members, serial DUI offenders and Jerry Springer guest stars wandering around loudly crowing about their military status and still being general fuckups in life afterwards made it seem like less of a guarantee of a successful career than local civilian jobs, and did a real number on the amount of automatic respect one would get for having been in the military.
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