Imagine if Veterans Day Became Obsolete
NOV 11, 2025
Today is Veterans Day, though of course November 11th was originally Armistice Day to mark the end of World War I on the 11th hour of the 11th day in 1918. Back then, it was hoped that the World War would inaugurate an era of lasting peace. Tragically, instead it inaugurated a state of more or less permanent war.
When I think of Veterans Day, I recall a grizzled veteran who spoke to me and a group of other young men (we didn’t want to be called “boys”) at Boys State in Massachusetts in 1980. I told the story 16 years ago at Huff Post, and I think it bears repeating today in 2025.
One Grizzled Veteran’s Dream
On this Veterans Day [in 2009], what if we began to measure our national success and power not by our military arsenal or number of recruits, but rather by the very opposite of that?
By William Astore, Contributor
Writer, History Professor, Retired Lieutenant Colonel (USAF)
Thirty years ago [Now, 45 years ago], I attended Boys State. Run by the American Legion, Boys State introduces high school students to civics and government in a climate that bears a passing resemblance to military basic training. Arranged in “companies,” we students did our share of hurrying up, lining up, and waiting (sound preparation, in fact, for my career in the military). I recall that one morning a “company” of students got to eat first because they launched into a lusty rendition of the Marine Corps hymn. I wasn’t angry at them: I was angry at myself for not thinking of the ruse first.
Today, most of my Boys State experience is a blur, but one event looms large: the remarks made by a grizzled veteran to us assembled boys. Standing humbly before us, he confessed that he hoped organizations like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars would soon wither away. And he said that he hoped none of us would ever become a member of his post.
At first, we didn’t get it. Didn’t he like us? Weren’t we tough enough? (Indeed, I recall that one of our adolescent complaints was that the name “Boys State” didn’t seem manly enough.)
Then it dawned on us what the withering away of organizations like the American Legion and the VFW would mean. That in our future young Americans would no longer be fighting and dying in foreign wars. That our world would be both saner and safer, and only members of an “old guard” like this unnamed veteran would be able to swap true war stories. Our role would simply be to listen with unmeasured awe and undisguised thanks, grateful that our own sons and daughters no longer had to risk life or limb to enemy bullets and bombs.
It pains me that we as a country have allowed this veteran’s dream to die. We as a country continue to enlarge our military, expand our foreign commitments, and fight seemingly endless wars, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in other far-off realms of less-than-vital interest to us.
As a result of these wars, we continue to churn out so many new veterans, including so many wounded veterans, not forgetting those who never made it back.
Collectively, we Americans tend to suppress whatever doubts we have about the wisdom of our wars with unequivocal statements of support for our troops. And on days like Veterans Day, we honor those who served, and especially those who paid the ultimate price on the battlefield.
Yet, wouldn’t the best support for our troops be the achievement of the dream of that grizzled vet who cut through a young man’s fog thirty years ago? Shouldn’t we be working to achieve a new age in which the rosters of our local VFWs and Legion posts are no longer renewed with the broken bodies and shattered minds of American combat veterans?
Sadly, as we raise more troops and fight more wars, we seem committed to the opposite. Our military just enjoyed its best recruiting class in years. This “success” is not entirely surprising. It’s no longer that difficult to fill our military’s expanding ranks because many of our young men and women simply have little choice but to enlist, whether for economic opportunity, money for college, or benefits like free health care.
Many of course enlist for patriotic reasons as well. Yet the ease of expanding our military ranks during a shooting war is also a painful reminder of the impoverishment of opportunities for young, able-bodied Americans – the bitter fruit of manufacturing jobs sent overseas, of farming jobs eliminated by our own version of corporate collectivization, of a real national unemployment rate that is approaching twenty percent.
On this Veterans Day, what if we began to measure our national success and power, not by our military arsenal or by the number of new recruits in the ranks, but rather by the gradual shrinking of our military ranks, the decline of our spending on defense, perhaps even by the growing quiet of our legion posts and VFW halls?
Wouldn’t that be a truer measure of national success: fewer American combat veterans?
Wouldn’t that give us something to celebrate this Veterans Day?
I know one old grizzled veteran who would quietly nod his agreement.
Bracing Views 
[From my entry on the Substack version]
Another exceptional piece, this time from a younger WJA. A few reactions…
1) WWI. So traumatic to Western civilization, which just prior to its outbreak was enjoying all manner of peace, scientific discovery, technological wonders, freedom of movement across borders. Then it all went to such depths of hell that they had to call it “The War to End All Wars.” Of course, so they thought, Sept. 1, 1939 was a mere twenty years after the Versailles Treaty (itself fraught with the portents to come, not only in Europe, but the Middle East as well).
2) Kennan kinda spoke to this, eschewing the military buildup against Russia and instead maintaining that while the military side of things needs attention, the main thrust of our effort to contain Russia would be to demonstrate to them and the world we offer a better, more free, more prosperous society. There were those cultural exchanges to illustrate that, Louis Armstrong in effect being an “ambassador.”
That type of rational, non-confrontational thinking lasted until John Foster Dulles, one of the two paranoid sociopath brothers in US government at the time and long beforehand – and after, too – fired Kennan. As James Reston said of Dulles in his autobiography, he had a “remarkable talent for getting rid of many of the most qualified men in the State Department when he thought they disagreed with him or embarrassed him politically.” In steps Paul Nitze, the NSC-68, and the “off to the (arms) race.”
3) Related to Kennan is this line from MLK, Jr.’s August 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” A little poetic license and we can come up with “a nation not judged by the number of kilotons in its arsenal to kill others but the character of its society to nurture its own citizens.”
4) I majored in economics in college, requisite in that was understanding measurement in terms economic, e.g., GNP, or GDP (to be honest, I don’t know what the big difference is). In any event, I was also introduced to alternative measures of “output,” and the related field of welfare or normative economics, basically not basing matters of the distribution of society’s resources solely on what the market says, but what should be done to have a just, moral, equitable society. As such measures for evaluating the success or wealth of society, other than the sum dollar total of all goods and services were gaining some conceptual attention. How about a measure incorporating longevity? infant mortality? poverty? educational attainment? social mobility? racial equality? and more.
Well now we have supposedly the world’s largest economy valued at what, $23 trillion? What’s to be pointed at with pride in that number given that among seventeen comparable economies and societies we spend twice as much on health care yet rank at the bottom in nearly every relevant measure of health status? That speaks to tremendous economic waste to me, not even calculating the social waste in debility and relatively short life span.
I could go on – but won’t, having some regard for the reader’s patience – but yeah, we could stand for a different mindset, along the lines of what the grizzled veteran was saying.
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You mention the recruitment benefit of having people with little hope for the future and low income. We are seeing the ease with which ICE can recruit and I think with little in the way of commitment that the military requires plus anonymity to do as one wishes, with abusive behavior against fellow Americans.
Boys State’s effect on the minds of kids should remind us of how malleable are young minds though Boys State was, I assume, voluntary. Zionism has achieved astounding results as seen in the joyful slaughter and destruction by IDF soldiers, male and female, who went into Gaza with gusto, no hesitation in destroying the people they had been taught to hate in concert with the idea that they are victims, righteousness no matter what they do.
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