TIME's Cover

In this week’s cover story, TIME’s Mark Thompson reports: “Never has the U.S. public been so separate, so removed, so isolated from the people it pays to protect it….. Most Americans have not served in uniform, no longer have a parent who did and are unlikely to encourage their children to enlist…. Over the past generation, the world’s lone superpower has created—and grown accustomed to—a permanent military caste, increasingly disconnected from U.S. society, waging decade-long wars in its name, no longer representative of or drawn from the citizenry as a whole.