Why military enlistment is down?

A current discussion on the news is the declining recruitment numbers for the military. The unquestioned premise on one radio show was that people are seeing the US military deaths and injuries in Iraq and people do not want to get killed, blown up or injured. But that misdirects the path from true discovery before the debate really begins; who wants to defend the recruitment needs for enlisting those who play the odds of not actually going to battle. We have major recruitment problems if the bulk of all those who signed up before the war only did so because the odds favored not going to war, and that now only because the odds have gone bad, we can mostly only gather those who failed math or are in desparate need.

Since the need to defend from large warrior hordes and on into the colonial age, armies have been raised on self-preservation and/or forced duty. Self-preservation in the sense that it was better to fight for even your monarch and risk one's life than to lose it at the hands of the enemy. Of course, with increasing liberal constitutional governments and the rise of democracy, self-preservation became a preferred theme to recruit volunteer armies and drafts only applied when armies are needed fast or the cause does not lead many to a self-preservation state-of-mind. Vietnam would be that latter case for many.

For the right cause noble men (or women) will die. Have we suddenly run low on noble people, or has the war been ignoble and self-serving with a questionable future? Have people seen that there is a disconnect between fighting in Iraq and the threat on our country's self-preservation? Was the war sold on such a connection and now latter we discover that the imminent threat theory vaporized as we arrived in Baghdad?

Maybe there are fewer recruits not because they fear for their lives, but simply because they have come to reject the cause as one worthy of dying for.