Powered by 
Twenty-five years ago, a group of terrorists attacked America. Standing in the smoldering debris of the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush told onlookers, “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” Less than month later, the US military invaded Afghanistan and a new generation of veterans was born.
Approximately 4.4 million Americans served in the two decades after September 11, 2001. That Post-9/11 veteran generation now makes up almost 30 percent of American veterans, and by the end of the decade will overtake the Vietnam generation as the largest percentage of living American veterans.
And yet, despite their growing prominence within America’s veteran contingent, it is unclear who this generation is and what their legacy will be.
For the past few years, we listened to veterans tell their stories as part of the Hoover Institution’s post- 9/11 veteran fellowship and town hall program. We traveled the country and sat down with veterans in their communities—at their high schools, colleges, VFW outposts, churches, and community centers. We brought veterans to Hoover and conducted structured interviews to record their candid thoughts about service, America, and legacy.
What did we learn?
First, we found a generation that is diverse—both in its combat experience and service motivations. For many, military service was the ticket to economic stability: free college, a path out of homelessness, a way to escape generational poverty. Others knew they wanted to serve from early on, perhaps inspired by family members or an innate draw to military service. Our veterans described their service in relation to 9/11: Did they join before and the trajectory—and the meaning—of their service change on a single shocking morning? Or were the attacks themselves the motivation for their service?
That diversity led to that second take-away from our conversations: that this generation struggles to define itself. Many rejected simplified veteran archetypes of bearded special-operations soldiers or veterans missing a limb. But they were also unwilling to speak for their generation: They only served in the first two years. Or they weren’t injured. Or they didn’t give enough, despite years spent away from their children and spouses. They weren’t the “true veteran.”
They might not view themselves as an entity, but America sees them as special and different. They were willing to serve—knowing they would likely see combat—at a time when most Americans were not. Surveys consistently find that Americans have more confidence in the military than in any other US institution. Support for veterans is high among Democrats and Republicans, and spending on veterans’ benefits has increased by over $150 billion since 2001.
And yet: half the American population has no veteran in their immediate social circle. A quarter of Americans have never spoken to a veteran about their service. This juxtaposition of veneration and apathy can have dangerous implications for this generation.
As one veteran told us, “You get a lot of ‘thank you for your service’ . . . but when you actually kind of try to delve into that and talk to people about what that means and what’s their interaction with the military and veterans community, they don’t really have a good answer, and there’s the large disconnect.” Distinct and separate from the citizenry they returned home to, more post-9/11 military members and veterans have died by suicide than lost their lives in combat—a perplexing phenomenon in which the return home can be more dangerous than the deployment abroad.
This generation of veterans also has a complicated relationship with both democracy at home and America’s role abroad. For some, there is a direct relationship between their service abroad—defending elections, building communities, and supporting local leaders—and a meaningful investment in democracy at home. There is a surge in veterans running for office, supporting veteran candidates, staffing polling places, and advocating for electoral reform. But veterans are also disproportionally represented in militias and other personal-liberty movements, the most radical of which advocate violence against America’s democratic institutions.
Similarly, we saw a deep divide within veterans about the foreign policy and military lessons learned from twenty years of war. Many echoed critiques levied by prominent veterans like Secretary of War Pete Hegseth or Vice President J. D. Vance about effort wasted on nation-building. But veterans also asked, “Are we alienating our allies right now that we need, and when we do things like that, are we honoring our commitments to our allies when we say you serve with us and we will make sure that you have safe access to America, and then when we don’t do that, how is that going to impact future wars and things like that?”
Other veterans held firmly to the kind of American war that made their service meaningful, one that held its members to a higher standard than its adversaries, with strict ROEs and accountability. For many, the meaning of their service was intimately tied to doing good in the world. And yet, looking back, did the generation leave the world a better place? One veteran concluded, “I feel a lot of like moral whiplash around: am I an interventionist or am I an isolationist?”
In general, we found veterans proud of their service and yet unsure how it changed the world, America, or themselves. How that resolves for these veterans will shape whether the next generation signs up. We asked our veterans if they would recommend service to their children, nieces and nephews, and close friends. And we got a mixed response. For some, despite their concerns, military service was a way to find meaning, to support something bigger than themselves, and to become better people in the process.
But other veterans felt that the military (and sometimes America) broke their trust—so much so they no longer recommended service to their children. In other cases, children themselves rejected their parent’s experiences, keen not to recreate the years of absence, trauma, and pain they experienced as onlookers to their parent’s deployments, temporary duty assignments, and changes of station. As one veteran recounted, “I carry injuries and moral, physical, mental, you know, spiritual. That I know came as a result of me being in war. How I feel about war is different than when I went in, and I wrestled. You know, my daughter looked at me when she was sixteen and said, ‘Mom, I really respect your service and, you know, your service in this country, but I never, ever want to join the military.’ ”
During our town hall program, I had a conversation with a reporter I was trying to convince to attend one of our events. “What’s the story?” he asked. “This isn’t the Vietnam generation. We welcomed them home, gave them benefits. Why should the American people care?”
And yet: the story, it’s clear, is still to be written. This is a generation with the potential to do extraordinary things for America—even as it has complicated things to say. That difficult conversation is one worth having. Twenty-five years isn’t too late to begin.
Jacquelyn Schneider is the Hargrove Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, and an affiliate with Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is the author, with Julia Macdonald, of The Hand Behind Unmanned: Origins of the US Autonomous Military Arsenal (Oxford University Press, 2025).