Wow. This is a great article. James Fallows has been writing about these issues since the 1980s and knows them well. I was astonished by this paragraph in the

Wow. This is a great article. James Fallows has been writing about these issues since the 1980s and knows them well. I was astonished by this paragraph in the article, having many relatives who are farmers, and knowing in a general sense how rare farming is as an occupation in the United States: "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." I know some veterans of the recent long-term war too, but indeed the United States doesn't feel at all like a country in which the public is preoccupied with the ongoing war. I have been an American who studied abroad for three years. I had no idea that that is now more commonplace than enlisting in the United States armed forces.