“Thank you for your service” is born as much of guilt as gratitude. Americans feel uncomfortable about the work done by our military men and women because the overwhelming majority of us will never know such burden, nor will anyone in our families. That disengagement makes it too easy to keep sending strangers to do our dirty work. (Would we have ever invaded Iraq for no good reason beyond enriching war contractors if the draft hadn’t been abolished?) There’s also a less-obvious price: Awkwardness about this grunt class we’ve created from other people’s children makes it difficult to speak critically and reform a military that often fails to achieve its goals. More skepticism about the purpose and priorities of our armed forces might be as good for those on the ground as the rest of us on the couch. An excerpt from James Fallows’ “The Tragedy of the American Military,” an Atlantic piece I’ll have to add to my “Great 2014 Nonfiction Articles” list:

“This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, he warned his troops, ‘Your task will not be an easy one,’ because ‘your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.’ As president, Eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked.

At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.

Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans ‘honor’ their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.”