Consider the other side of that equation. Idle hands are the devil's playground. Too many men with no future and nothing to do are known to start revolutions.
The conspiracy theory angle I would go with is a little different.
Low interests rates fueled a startup boom into the 2010s, capturing that emerging industry within the U.S. economy. AI looks promising, but the best is yet to come, so there’s a chance to reprise the earlier success that we saw into the early 2010s.
High interest rates currently mean that failed startups (those established pre-LLMs) will more easily die off, and bad conditions for software engineering employment will re-align the tech workforce toward AI. If this is a strategy that is being enacted, then I’d expect to see favorable startup funding conditions again, such as low interest rates, within a few years, to make sure the U.S. captures the AI startup market. It’s just not time to do that yet, since we need to wait for a re-skilled workforce and for a better-developed picture of what a typical successful AI startup would look like in the late 2020s.
An economist might say that no conspiracy is required, that this is simply the invisible hand at work.
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.
