What it means to serve a country that doesn't know its military

It is Veterans Day again, which means that, alongside the free red, white, and blue pancake specials and complimentary coffees, Americans will post tributes honoring the ultimate sacrifice of our soldiers. Just as predictably, on Memorial Day, veterans will receive well-intentioned messages thanking them for their service.

Of course, Memorial Day honors those who died while serving in the U.S. military, whereas Veterans Day recognizes all who have served. This confusion is hardly something to get worked up about in itself. But it is symptomatic of something more consequential: a nation detached from its military and the wars it fights.

In a sense, Americans are not wrong to conflate the two holidays. Service and sacrifice cannot be neatly separated, especially when the military has become an instrument of statecraft, diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, and lethal force whose deployment increasingly depends less on congressional authorization than on the decisions of a single president.

Less than 1% of Americans serve in the military. Although Selective Service registration remains mandatory for most young men, it has become little more than a bureaucratic ritual, about as consequential as updating one’s address at the DMV. In some ways, this is something to celebrate. It has been more than fifty years since young Americans faced the prospect of being drafted against their will to fight a foreign war.

Wars in the days of the draft were much bloodier for U.S. soldiers than today’s conflicts. During the roughly 40 days of the Battle of the Bulge, nearly 19,000 American service members were killed, an average of almost 500 per day, with some days considerably deadlier than others. The United States lost more than 405,000 service members in World War II, more than 36,000 in Korea, and more than 58,000 in Vietnam. By comparison, the combined American military death toll from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all related Global War on Terror operations never surpassed 10,000.

Our country is no longer accustomed to mass mobilization or staggering military casualties. A folded American flag is no longer a familiar feature of American living rooms. And whether Americans celebrated or condemned the deployment of National Guard troops to Washington and other cities, the reactions were unified in an underlying sense of novelty. Soldiers don’t belong here. They belong over there. And when they return home, unless you live near a military base, they melt back into the general population. To much of the civilian population, military personnel are almost exotic figures, representatives of a far-away institution.

The all-volunteer force frees the overwhelming majority of Americans from the obligation to serve. That freedom is an achievement, but it also creates a dangerous distance between those who decide when America goes to war, those who fight those wars, and the public in whose name they are fought. In a country where the average active-duty service member is just over 28 years old, and many enlist as teenagers straight out of high school, one might expect greater public interest in how these young Americans are used, where they are sent, and what they are asked to do.

One need only go online to see the varied reactions to U.S. service in this country. Veterans are sometimes elevated to an almost mythical status, their service valorized in ways that leave little room for complexity or criticism. Elsewhere, they are subjected to casual contempt and snide remarks. They knew what they were signing up for!

Perhaps that contempt would carry more weight if it came from a country with a genuine antiwar movement whose members were willing to make personal sacrifices for their convictions. But we do not live in such a country. Nor do we live, however, in one where ordinary Americans are clamoring for more wars, despite the seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm of some elected officials for military intervention.

Instead, we live in a country that is increasingly detached from war itself, where both reverence for the military and hostility toward it can become substitutes for seriously engaging with what it does. If the midterm elections are any indication, the comically yet tragically misguided war in Iran has temporarily awoken Americans from their daydream.

It is precisely this divide that motivated us to establish the Veterans in Foreign Policy Initiative at the Quincy Institute. We launched the initiative with The Weight, a short documentary following veterans of the Global War on Terror whose experiences range from special operations to being a JAG officer. Their stories are different, but together they illuminate the human consequences of decisions too often discussed in Washington as mere abstractions.

Our aim is not simply to honor veterans or elevate their voices for their own sake, but to bring their experiences into the debates that determine when, where, and why the United States uses military force. If Americans are to remain free from the obligation to fight their country’s wars, they should at least feel some obligation to understand them and have a say in them.