The United States has been at war for more than a decade. Yet as war has become normalized, a yawning gap has opened between America's soldiers and the society in whose name they fight. For ordinary citizens, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates has acknowledged, armed conflict has become an 'abstraction' and military service 'something for other people to do'. Andrew Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era.
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