Ben Alpers: A Memorial Day Thought on David M. Kennedy

Benjamin Alpers received his PhD in history from Princeton University in 1994. He joined the faculty of the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma in 1998.In today’s New York Times, retired Army Lieutenant General and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and the historian David Kennedy published an op-ed entitled “Americans and Their Military, Drifting Apart.” Eikenberry and Kennedy identify a very real problem: the increasing social distance between our increasingly high-tech, all-volunteer military and the rest of American society.   Today’s military, they argue, presents “a disurbingly novel spectacle”: