The following quote is from the book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachael Maddow.

“While America has been fighting two of its longest ever boots-on-the-ground wars in the decade following 9/11, and fighting them simultaneously, less than one percent of the adult US population has been called upon to strap on those boots. ‘Not since the peace time years between World War I and World War II,’ according to a 2011 Pew Research Center study, ‘has a smaller share of Americans served in the armed forces.’ Half of the American public says it has not been even marginally affected by ten years of constant war. We’ve never in our long history been further from the ideal of the citizen-soldier, from the idea that America would find it impossible to go to war without disrupting domestic civilian life.”

Senator Joe Lieberman on March 22, 2007 made this insightful comment. "Our military is fully engaged in this war, but most of the rest of America is not. Five years after September 11, very little has been asked of the American people. Instead of mobilizing as a nation, the burden of this war has fallen disproportionately on the few... on our soldiers, our brave men and women in uniform.

They are the ones who have put their lives on the line so that freedom may prevail. In this chamber, and across our land, there have been great differences of opinion about how we should pursue the war in Iraq, but there has been great unity of opinion that our troops there should be honored. We must support them."

"Larry Diamond of Stanford’s Hoover Institution said, “America is not at war. The US Army is at war. The rest of us are just watching, or just ignoring, while the whole fight is carried on by 150,000 soldiers and their families.”