The last known living veteran of the Civil War died in 1956. The last living American veteran of World War I died in 2011. A 2020 report from the Census Bureau estimated that, as of 2018, there were only about 485,000 American veterans of World War II still alive.
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The story of the veteran population in the United States is, like so many other things, a story of an increasingly aging population. It is also a story of how military service has shifted and how it might shift again.
That Census Bureau report included an analysis of the size of the veteran population by decade. (The 2020 Census had not yet been completed, so data for 2018 were used.) It also looked forward, projecting a further decline in the number of veterans in the coming decades.
That decline is sharp — but it is also occurring as the population overall is growing. There were about 29 million veterans in 1980, when the population of the United States was just under 230 million. In 2018, there were about 18 million veterans in a population nearly 100 million larger.
In other words, the decline in the number of veterans is actually more subtle than the decline in the density of veterans in the American population. In 1980, about 13 percent of Americans had served in the military (down slightly from 1970). In 2018, the figure was just over 5 percent. By 2040, the Census Bureau’s data suggest that it will be around 3 percent.
On the graph above, you can see three points at which the density of veterans in the population jumped: during the conscription efforts that accompanied World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War. Those conflicts spurred the government to draft people into the military, swelling the number of service members. In 1973, the draft ended. Conflicts since have been conducted with a military made up mostly of volunteers — and have not been at nearly the scale of the world wars or the struggle in Vietnam.
Inexorably, the veterans who served as a result of those surges are growing older and dying. If we consider just the number of Americans who turned 18 the year each of those conflicts began (1917, 1941 and 1965), you can see how the density of the age group faded over time. In 1949, about 5.5 percent of the population fell into one of these three categories (though, of course, those who would turn 18 at the start of the Vietnam War did not yet know that fate awaited them). Now, well under 2 percent do.
There are implications here beyond simply population density. In April, for example, Pew Research Center noted that the density of veterans in Congress is at a low stretching back to at least the early 1950s.
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Of course, the projections of a further decline into 2030 and 2040 depend on one shaky assumption: that there will be no wide-scale conflict necessitating a broad effort to conscript soldiers. In the 1930s, the density of veterans in the population was lower than it is now and declining — and then that changed.
None of us celebrates the loss of our veterans as they age. But if the alternative to a decline in the veteran population is a global conflict in which hundreds of thousands of people are killed, those projected density declines seem like an acceptable trade-off.