Recently, I participated in a regional Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu tournament as one of the assistant coaches of the US Naval Academy’s extracurricular Brazilian Jiu Jitsu team. Due to unforeseen travel restrictions brought on by the government shutdown, I, the 45-year-old Army veteran, ironically ended up being the lone competitor representing the Navy team that day.
It was a great day of competition at all ages and levels. Beginners, intermediates, advanced. Younger, older. Male, female. Competitors from nearby towns and from faraway states; and even a few from overseas. Families, friends, coaches, and teammates all came to show support, to test themselves, and to chase that peculiar blend of grit, perseverance, and excellence that only combat sports can bring out. In the struggle between two opponents engaged in fair, vigorous competition, simultaneously trying to twist or break one another’s limbs or choke their opponent unconscious, there in that maelstrom, I saw something noble; what philosopher William James referred to as the martial virtues: courage, self-discipline, perseverance, and the ability to face fear and adversity head-on. For a brief moment, I felt as if I’d stepped into a kind of modern-day Sparta; where struggle, respect, and the pursuit of excellence were all intertwined, and where adversity, hardship, and the deliberate resistance against it, were all seen as something good for the soul; both individually and collectively.
However, as I exited Sparta, reality hit me hard. The tournament had been held at a local civilian college, and as I stepped outside onto the busy street, I found myself suddenly engulfed in hundreds of college students, all dressed in giant banana costumes, roaming the streets in large packs and gangs. The air was full of drunken merriment and laughter. Apparently, it was the college town’s annual banana-themed pub crawl.
The sharp and sudden contrast of moving between these two worlds; the ennobling crucible of the jiu jitsu tournament, and the frivolous chaos of the banana people, hit me on an existential level, as did the absurdity of the entire situation and my unique predicament within it. Here I was, a lone Global War on Terror veteran, now walking through this bizarre carnival of carefree hedonism; mat burn on my face, backpack slung over my shoulder, I waded through the crowd of drunken bananas back to my car, just trying to get home. In that moment, thoughts of Odysseus amongst the lotus eaters came to mind, only that the situation seemed far worse. For these drunken revelers were not just random inhabitants of some distant and foreign island that I happened to stumble upon, rather, they were fellow countrymen of my own homeland who both I and my veteran peers had sworn to give our lives to fight for, defend, and protect. As I weaved through the frenzied crowd, a singular question kept repeating in my head: ‘Did my friends, troops, and fellow comrades at arms sacrifice, bleed, and die, over the last two decades, all for this?’
At that moment, it also struck me that this strange juxtaposition of worlds, identities, and values was also a microcosm of America itself; one small island of shared hardship and discipline floating in an ocean of self-indulgent comfort; a nation where less than one percent of the populous shoulders the physical, emotional, and moral weight of war, while the other ninety-nine percent carries on, almost completely untouched. As I made it back to my car, I kept wondering if it was time, long past time in fact, for America to have a renewed conversation about what service to country actually means. Hence the focus of this article.
The Civil–Military Divide
Since the end of the Vietnam War, the United States has relied upon an all-volunteer, professional military force. The transition away from conscription was, at the time, widely celebrated. It promised efficiency, professionalism, and freedom; freedom for citizens from forced service, and freedom for the military to recruit those who truly wanted to serve. And for a while, it worked remarkably well. America fielded the most skilled, capable, and professional fighting force in its history.
But this system also came with profound unintended consequences. It allowed the vast majority of Americans to outsource both the labor and the moral burdens of national defense to a very small minority of their fellow citizens. Fewer than one percent of Americans currently serve in uniform. For most, war has become something that happens somewhere else, to someone else; a faint refrigerator hum in the background of the American social imagination.
Over time, and particularly over the last two decades of GWOT, this arrangement has bred a widening civil–military divide: geographically, economically, culturally, and morally. The sons and daughters of military families continue to serve, generation after generation, while many elite circles in politics, academia, and business have become increasingly detached from the realities, long-term effects, and costs of war and with no skin in the game whatsoever. As a result, the military has grown ever more professional, and yet ever more isolated; a warrior caste of selfless service fighting on behalf of a country increasingly allergic to hardship or sacrifice of any kind whatsoever.
The Moral Exploitation of Soldiers
This brings us to what I have called moral exploitation: the unfair or disproportionate distribution of moral burdens between persons or among members of a given group or political community.1
In the context of America’s post-9/11 wars, moral exploitation occurs when soldiers, often from working-class or rural backgrounds, end up bearing the moral weight of wars whose justifications, strategies, or objectives are increasingly opaque to the citizenry they serve. These men and women are the ones who must carry the moral residue of killing, the haunting ambiguities of counterinsurgency, and the lifelong costs of physical and psychological injury. They are, in a very real sense, moral surrogates for the rest of us.
Since Vietnam, and especially in the past two decades, this outsourcing of warfighting responsibilities has become completely normalized. The American public cheers from a safe distance and “supports the troops” with bumper stickers, hashtags, and 10% off veteran discounts but rarely questions whether the distribution of sacrifice itself is fair or just. The volunteer model, while convenient, allows the nation to wage war indefinitely without demanding anything from the public; no taxes, no drafts, no moral reckoning. The few who fight are thanked and then quickly forgotten.
Moral exploitation, then, is not just about the dangers of war; it’s about the injustice of a system where the weight of citizenship is selectively imposed. A republic cannot long survive when one small fraction bears the costs, both materially and morally, of policies that the majority passively authorizes.
Fairness, Legitimacy, and the Erosion of Shared Sacrifice
A fair society does not simply distribute rights and privileges; it also distributes responsibilities. When the vast majority of citizens can live their entire lives without ever being touched by the wars fought in their name, something fundamental in the social contract has gone wrong. In the present situation, those who fight seem to bear increasing responsibility and yet waning authority, while those exerting increasing authority seem to bear less and less responsibility. Taken together, this state of affairs and its trajectory makes political legitimacy increasingly tenuous.
Legitimacy in war requires not only that wars be justly fought, but that they be collectively owned. When the burdens of fighting, dying, and moral injury are exclusively borne by a self-selecting professional minority, war becomes something less than a public act; it becomes a private enterprise managed by specialists. In such a context, the phrase “we are at war” becomes misleading. We are not at war. They are.
This imbalance in responsibility both undermines fairness toward soldiers and weakens the moral credibility of the state itself. It allows politicians to deploy troops without serious public scrutiny, and it tempts citizens to consume the fruits of security indefinitely without ever feeling its costs. It’s an arrangement that flatters our comfort while eroding our civic character.
As I reflected more upon the current state of affairs of my banana-clad compatriots, I also couldn’t help thinking to myself that such a present institutional arrangement within society was also exceptionally bad for them as well. Here these young American men and women were, dancing and frolicking in this weightless bubble of decadence, hyper-individualism, and perpetual adolescence when their great grandparents at their age or younger were storming the beaches of Normandy, tending to mass casualty events in hospitals, or doing all they possibly could to hold the social fabric together back home. In so doing, such shared duty and sacrifice brought that generation of Americans together and ennobled the character and virtue of each.
In the absence of being asked to shoulder such duties or anything halfway approaching them, actually or even just potentially, we, in effect, seem to now be fast generating an entire society of Nietzschean ‘last men’; pacified, hollow consumers of comfort and safety, bereft of all conviction, grateful and appreciative of nothing, and hence, incapable of seeing anything worth sacrificing for or defending.
Let me very clear here though, for I am not condemning this younger generation for their present predicament since none of it is really their fault. Rather, they have simply been the innocent and blameless inheritors of such weightlessness, as we as a society have never really asked much of anything of them at all. If there has been an atrophying of the soul within the civilian body politic, we have only ourselves to blame. And if this is the case, which I believe that it is, then, as odd as it might sound, we in fact owe it to our fellow citizens that they be allowed to carry a greater share of the load once again for their own sake. For one of the goods of a flourishing life are the goods of meaningful service to others beyond just the self.
Reimagining National Service
If a dysfunctional civil-military divide is the disease, if only partially, then some form of renewed citizen-soldier model may be part of the cure. This need not mean a return to the exact same draft of the mid-twentieth century, nor does it mean universal conscription into combat. But it does call for a broader cultural and institutional recognition that citizenship entails service; military or otherwise. I am not alone in advocating for such a prescription. War journalist, Sebastian Junger, political theorist, Andrew Bacevich, former JSOC commander, Gen. (ret) Stanley McChrystal, and Catholic political philosopher, Patrick Deneen2, have all made similar arguments for a return to some form of mandatory national service.
Imagine a system in which every American, upon reaching adulthood, owes one or two years of national service: military, environmental, humanitarian, or infrastructural. Such a model would not only spread the burdens of defense more fairly, but would also cultivate civic virtue, shared sacrifice and shared cultural understanding, and a deeper appreciation for the costs of freedom. Such shared sacrifice and contribution amongst the citizenry at large, could likewise significantly mitigate the growing epidemic of veteran mental health crises, depression, suicide, and alienation since Vietnam.
Military service, specifically, should also not be seen as a punishment or a last resort, but as one among many noble expressions of citizenship. The point is not to militarize all of society but to remind its citizenry that peace, prosperity, order, and moral legitimacy are anything but free. Rather, such shared goods must be maintained by a people willing to shoulder their share of the load.
Conclusion: Leaving Sparta, Entering Babylon
That day, as I left the jiu jitsu tournament and walked through the sea of dancing bananas, I couldn’t help but feel that I was walking from one moral universe into another, from Sparta into Babylon. The scene was absurd, yes, but also informative. For it sharply highlighted, in microcosm, the lopsided and disproportionate moral division of labor in modern America: a handful of citizens sweating, struggling, and sacrificing, surrounded by a vast multitude content to spectate, celebrate, and consume.
If we are to remain a republic worth defending, this division cannot continue for much longer. The burdens and moral responsibilities of citizenship must once again be shared. We need not all become warriors, but we must, in some very real sense, all become servants again; servants to one another, servants to something higher, and servants to something beyond just our individual selves.
Until this happens, the civil–military gap will continue to widen, legitimacy will continue to wane, and the nihilistic banana parade will continue to march on towards nowhere; cheerful, oblivious, and free, at least for now, because an exceedingly small minority have paid and continue to pay the price.3
1 See also Robillard, Michael. “Skin in the Game: Moral Exploitation and the Case for Mandatory Military Service.” Journal of Military Ethics, vol. 22, no. 3–4, 2023, pp. 200-213.
2 Deneen, Patrick J. Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Sentinel, 2023.
3 The author used ChatGPT to revise portions of this essay.