US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned on Wednesday that nearly a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has heightened trends that could ultimately alienate the all-volunteer military from the society it defends.
Gates, in a speech at Duke University, said US military officers and recruits are increasingly drawn from rural and small-town areas of the South and Mountain West, a shift that could divide them politically and culturally from largely urban America.
He also noted that fewer than 1 percent of the US population had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan during America's longest period of continuous combat, leaving the wars largely an abstraction for most and further exacerbating the divide between the military and the rest of society.
"With each passing decade, fewer and fewer Americans know someone with military experience in their family or social circle," Gates said, citing a study showing that the share of 18-year-olds with a veteran parent had fallen from 40 percent in 1988 to 18 percent by 2000.
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