POLITICS: We must treat veterans as the civic assets they are

America’s military has a criminally inane reinvestment strategy.

Despite being 250 years in the business of molding civilians into soldiers, our services seem unaware their most valuable asset for the future fighting force is the veteran.

Grand military parades in the nation’s capital for the Army, iconic Fleet Weeks for its seagoing forces and rousing 250th birthday galas for the US Marine Corps are all well and good touchpoints along the ongoing democratic civil-military-relations journey, but without a deep consideration of the civic and national-security roles the veteran plays, the armed forces and the nation are doomed to relive severe recruitment crises they’ve only recently crawled out of.

The country has never formally acknowledged these crucial roles.

For 250 years, America’s citizens have been shedding their civvies for the nation’s uniform.

And for 250 years, soldiers, sailors and Marines have similarly shed their uniforms to reclaim their civvies.

For two and a half centuries, each branch of the armed forces has yielded one consistent civic output, the citizen-veteran.

America’s lack of a national veterans’ strategy stands as the most obvious mark of its failure to study the true symbiotic nature of its social civil-military relationship.

The root causes are structural but also involve longstanding policy decisions.

Both reveal a root presumption that veterans not only don’t play an inalienable role in the national security ecosystem but also that they’re nonessential actors within American democratic civil society.

Unlike in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Singapore and elsewhere, America has a Department of Veterans Affairs that’s an executive agency, independent in every meaningful way from the Department of War (formerly Defense) — from physical buildings to budgets, from personnel to programs.

This structural separation seems to have resulted in a mental separation, especially among those employed at the Pentagon, of treating active-duty military as their only personnel concern while dismissing veterans as someone else’s policy concern.

But neither do domestic policymakers treat veterans as serious subjects of serious policy.

Despite the now-hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars allocated to the VA, veterans are broadly treated rather as human-interest stories to stir the heartstrings and open pocketbooks of either Congress or a public empathetic to soldiers needing assistance because of the wounds of war.

On the policymaking side, when the United States decided to return to its volunteer military roots in 1973, it failed to recognize fully that an all-volunteer military is an all-recruited military, and the most visible brand ambassador of military service is the veteran.

As alumni are to a college or university, so veterans are to the US military.

How we publicly treat veterans, talk about them, legislate about them directly relates to how society conceptualizes service.

Yet in the heavily economics-laden debates that coalesced in the Gates Commission’s plan for creating the all-volunteer force, forgotten were considerations of the social dynamics necessary in a democracy to sustain a non-conscript military.

Zero thought was paid to the importance of the well-transitioned veteran for the sustained success of that force, especially its ability consistently to recruit and retain young civilians for its various service branches.

For better or worse, the veteran is the unacknowledged but permanent ambassador of national service.

Any failed reintegration of a veteran is a discouragement against joining the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force or Coast Guard; every successful reintegration is equally an incentive to serve. That is a direct national-security concern.

But for too long, policymakers have ignored that there’s a life cycle to military recruitment that begins and ends with the veteran.

Despite never having a formally designated role in that society, since the Revolutionary War and the Founding generation, the American military man or woman active or retired has been the visible expression of American public spiritedness.

John Adams argued that “there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty,” without “a positive passion for the public good, the public interest.”

Citizenship implies the necessity of some measure of public spiritedness. As the late constitutional scholar Walter Berns reminded us in his book “Making Patriots,” citizenship means an awareness of sharing an identity with others.

Belonging to a community implies that “one bears some responsibility” to that community.

This doesn’t always translate into military service per se, of course — but military service remains the most tangible expression of that underlying duty.

Two-hundred and fifty years removed from the birth of our Army, Navy and Marine Corps, the several service branches and their secretaries and the Defense Department at large must recognize they have a vested interest in the successful reintegration of each veteran after their active or reserve duty is completed and in the nation having a coherent, modernized, effective and efficient suite of programs and services to make up that transition process.

Establishing a national veterans’ strategy, the broad outlines of which acknowledge the veteran as the beginning and endpoint of the citizen-soldier, soldier-citizen life cycle, is the appropriate way to recognize the American veteran’s national-security and civil-society role.

It’s time to celebrate our veterans not only by well-meaning lip service but by taking them seriously as fundamental fabric of the ongoing American experiment.

Rebecca Burgess is a Yorktown Institute senior fellow and Independent Women’s Forum visiting fellow.