Justin Fox, Columnist

Why You Don't Know Anybody in the Military

Getting rid of the draft has something to do with it, but not everything.

October 20, 2017 at 6:50 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Times change.
Photographer: Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images

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There were a lot of complicated things going on in White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's statement Thursday about the combat deaths of servicemen and women and how the nation (and his boss) responds to them. But along the way he made one very simple assertion:

That sounds ... about right. Active-duty military now make up just 0.4 percent of the U.S. population, down from 1.8 percent in 1968 and 8.7 percent in 1945. Military personnel also tend to come from certain parts of the country more than others. Here, from the Defense Department's most recent annual report on population representation in the military services, are the states with the most military recruits in fiscal year 2015 as a percentage of the population aged 18 through 24: