President Eisenhower’s Commission on Veterans’ Pensions–the Bradley Commission—voiced concern in 1956 that if exclusive emphasis was placed on granting generous post-service benefits to prospective soldiers, then military service would become a mere negotiated economic relationship between the citizen and the state. On the eve of transitioning to the All-Volunteer Force nearly a decade later, the New York Times expressed a similar fear—that using postwar benefits as allurements for recruits shattered the concept of democratic civic virtue and civic duty embodied in military service. If unchecked, they feared the practice would create a “permanent privileged class of veterans, a postwar mercenary class uncongenial to the national heritage” that would “solidify…the concept of veteran versus citizen.”
Over the space of forty-two years, the last fourteen of which the United States has spent sending those military recruits to war, such fears have not materialized. Perhaps surprisingly, much the opposite has occurred. The Pew Research Center’s 2011 survey of the military, “War and Sacrifice in the Post-9/11 Era”, found that 58 percent of post 9/11 veterans say that the terrorist attacks were an important reason why they volunteered. In the “After the Wars: Survey of Iraq and Afghanistan Active Duty Soldiers and Veterans” conducted in 2013 by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family foundation, 89 percent of respondents declared that if they had the chance to make the decision again, they would choose to join the military, even considering everything they now knew about military service. And the comprehensive 2014 Annual Military Family Lifestyle Survey released by Blue Star Families showed 91 percent of its respondents believed in the importance of serving in the military or other national service.
When asked directly about their motivation for having joined, 95 percent of service members answered the Lifestyle Survey with “to serve my country,” while 74 percent colored that answer by responding that “they also joined to receive educational benefits,” and 63 percent joining also “to learn skills for civilian jobs.” But the motivation to serve the country does not end when those soldiers, sailors, and airmen replace their uniform with civvies. As the National Conference on Citizenship in partnership with Got Your 6 demonstrated earlier this year with their first-ever Veteran Civic Health Index, veterans of military service strengthen communities by volunteering, voting, engaging in local governments, helping neighbors, and participating in community organizations. And, their study shows, veterans do so at higher rates than their non-veteran counterparts.
This is not the least demonstrated by the amount of veterans currently holding public office. Reflecting their retracting numbers in the overall population, it is true that veterans are a decreasing presence in the halls of government. In 1971, veterans made up 72 percent of members in the House of Representatives, and 78 percent of the Senate. In 1991, the number of veterans in Congress dropped to 48 percent. The 114thCongress features a Senate with 20 percent of its members as veterans and a House with 18 percent, split 70 percent Republican and 30 percent Democratic in the former, 75 percent Republican and 25 percent Democratic in the latter. Across the 50 states, 7 governors and 4 lieutenant governors have military experience (Governors: Robert Bentley, AL-R; Rick Scott, FL-R; Nathan Deal, GA-R; Butch Otter, ID-R; Terry Branstad, IA-R; Steven Beshear, KY-D; Gary Herbert, UT-R; Lt. Governors: Tim Griffin, AK-R; Mike Stack, PA-D; Matt Michels, SD-R; Ralph Northam, VA-D); out of 1,957 state senators, 249 share military service. Even with these reduced numbers, however, our legislators are still more likely to be veterans than the general population.
Today’s veteran population stands somewhere near 21.3 million, 9.95 million of whom are 65 years of age or older. Veterans take up 9 percent of the adult population and just barely 7 percent of the U.S. population as a whole (meanwhile, only around 1 percent of the population today volunteers to serve in the armed forces). Within the veteran population, the youngest cohorts of Gulf War and post-9/11 veterans are on track to be the largest contingent, meeting, even overtaking this year the role the Vietnam-era veteran has played. For his part, the Vietnam veteran is in the midst of retiring from the workforce. But even with the generational shift occurring within the veteran population, there is not likely to be a corresponding drop in civic participation, as the Veteran Civic Health data indicates.
Nor is there likely to be an insurmountable rift forming between the veteran population and the general electorate in the immediate future, despite the minimal percentage of the population that has ever even had contact with a member of the military. Academic research concerned with just that phenomenon continues to find that there is no such thing as a “veteran’s vote”—the American warriors of today do note vote uniformly, but rather reflect the diversity of views of the population at large, even in the contemporary landscape of polarized politics. American veterans have consistently exhibited this behavior, bearing witness to the belief of that old observer of American political life, Alexis de Tocqueville, that American citizen-soldiers “bow to their military duties, but their souls remain attached to the interests and desires they were filled with in civil life;” and that thus their attachment to civilian life and values would forestall any desire to militarize the republic.
The great standards of social science research into the effects of military service on individuals’ social and political behavior confirm Tocqueville’s observation. In doing so, they also confirm General George Washington’s belief in the feasibility of turning citizens into soldiers, and returning those soldiers into citizen-veterans. Washington argued that it was neither reasonable nor just to expect that one set of men should sacrifice their property, domestic ease, and happiness to encounter the vicissitudes of war “to obtain those blessings which every citizen will enjoy, in common with them without some adequate compensation.” This, even though he also believed that military service is a civic virtue and a duty of democratic citizenship, and that “motives of public virtue” could animate many to defend their lives, their liberties, and their national honor. Washington trusted that citizen-veterans would strengthen the nation outside of the military sphere, as being active participants in its civic life. The history of the veteran in America appears to bear out his trust. As reflections of Americans at large, the citizen-soldier turned citizen-veteran has endured not as a threat to the American democratic nation, but perhaps as its greatest tribute.
