For young Americans, the 9/11 attacks and subsequent wars are history, not memory

For Harper Cline, Sept. 11, 2001, is not a memory. It is a story she inherited.

“Everyone knows exactly what they were doing on that day, or where they were, but it’s weird too, because we don’t know what life was like before that,” the high school senior from Bradenton, Florida, explained.

She was born into a country already at war. By the time she was old enough to understand what war meant, American troops had been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq for years.

“I almost feel numb to all of the violence of it, because we were told about it so much when we were little … but we were too little to understand,” Cline said.

That distance is one of the defining legacies of 25 years of war. Millions of Americans came of age surrounded by its consequences without ever experiencing the wars themselves.

Now that generation is entering adulthood as the Pentagon confronts a different challenge: What happens when a generation comes of age during an era of war without being asked to participate in it? For most Americans who grew up after 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a constant presence, but military service was not. They inherited the consequences of those wars without necessarily inheriting a personal connection to the people who fought them.

A growing divide

The Defense Department has linked the growing divide to the military’s smaller footprint and declining numbers of Americans with family or personal connections to service.

In 1995, 40% of young people had a parent who had served in the military. By 2022, that figure had fallen to 12%, according to the Defense Department.

The change happened alongside the all-volunteer force and two decades of sustained military operations.

The Defense Department has also found that military service increasingly falls outside the range of careers young people consider. About 20 years ago, just over 25% of young people had never thought about serving. In recent years, more than half had never considered it.

A 2025 ThinkNow survey found that among Gen Z adults who had not served, 28% said they were very or somewhat likely to consider joining. Nearly half, 49%, said they were not very or not at all likely, while 23% were unsure.

For those who said they would consider joining, career opportunities were the leading motivation, followed by financial security and educational benefits. Family tradition ranked much lower.

Among those unlikely to join, about half cited a lack of interest in military service and cited concerns about physical or mental health risks. Others cited fear of combat or deployment.

Sherald Winans, a college freshman at Miami University of Ohio, said that when he pictures someone his age joining the military, he imagines boot camp, followed by deployment “somewhere in the desert to go to war.”

“I don’t know anyone who serves,” he said. “But I think that there’s more danger now than ever when going to fight in the military.”

Choosing to serve

Tiana Ramirez is an example of what that choice can look like today.

A recent high school graduate preparing to join the Marine Corps, Ramirez said she wanted purpose and the benefits that come with military service. She did not want to go to college immediately after high school and had heard positive things about the opportunities available to veterans.

Her grandfather served in Vietnam, and her older cousin serves in the Navy aboard the Freedom-class littoral combat ship USS Billings.

But 9/11 is not part of her personal history. She was not alive when the attacks occurred and has no direct memory of the wars that followed.

Ramirez said she thinks about Iraq and Afghanistan but does not spend much time worrying about whether she could experience a similar deployment. She wants to begin her military career with an open mind and see what comes next.

For her, the appeal is practical as well as personal: steady income, a career path, health care and education benefits.

She also described military service as a way to find her purpose and determine what she is meant to do.

What young Americans know about war

For young Americans who did not live through 9/11, the attacks are history, rather than memory.

Teachers who have watched those students encounter the subject in classrooms describe that difference.

Sarah Boyles, a Florida history teacher, said that during her first years teaching, she focused less on the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and more on their causes and consequences. At the time, the attacks were too emotional for some students to discuss.

Randall Faulks, a social studies teacher in Louisiana, said students do not always have an emotional response because they have no personal memory of the day.

For some students, the experience is more like learning about another major historical event.

Jerrica Santos, a junior in high school and daughter of an Army command sergeant major, said she does not believe people who did not experience 9/11 can feel the same pain as those who did.

“But we can understand their point of view,” she said.

Izzy Williams, another high school senior, compared that inherited experience with another event her generation did experience directly: the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We definitely understand how all of a sudden the world changed, just like how COVID changed everything we knew,” Williams said. “We started doing things differently and getting used to different ways.”

The civil-military gap persists

The Pentagon’s recruiting numbers have improved after several years of shortfalls.

By the end of fiscal 2025, all five active-duty services had met or exceeded their enlisted accession goals. The Army reached 101.72% of its goal; the Navy 108.61%; the Marine Corps 100%; the Air Force 100.22%; and the Space Force 102.89%.

Despite this, the DoD has cited a shrinking eligible population, declining birth rates, fewer family connections and lower willingness to serve among the challenges facing military recruiting and retention.

That disparity matters beyond who chooses to enlist. It also creates a widening gap between the generation that fought the post-9/11 wars and the generation now entering adulthood without a personal connection to them.

As the post-9/11 generation transitions out of the service, military historian Ben Connable shared his concerns about how much knowledge from Iraq and Afghanistan will carry forward.

Connable said the military has previously had to relearn lessons that were not successfully passed from one generation to the next — citing Vietnam as an example.

He said recent cases have often been poorly transmitted into modern military knowledge and warned that knowledge that was developed during years of counterinsurgency might not be passed down.

That transition is occurring alongside significant turnover among the Pentagon’s senior leadership.

At least 20 generals, admirals and civilian defense leaders have been fired or departed their positions since Hegseth became defense secretary, according to a Sept. 2 CBS News tally.

Hegseth directed a restructuring of the senior officer ranks in May 2025. His memorandum called for a minimum 20% reduction in four-star positions across the active component, a minimum 20% reduction in National Guard general officers and an additional minimum 10% reduction in general and flag officers tied to a realignment of the Unified Command Plan.

Inheriting a different military

The young Americans coming of age now are not the same young Americans who enlisted after Sept. 11.

They grew up watching the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down. They experienced a pandemic that disrupted daily life.

John Spencer, a military researcher and author who studies combat and military cohesion, cautioned against assuming that younger service members are inherently less capable than the generations before them.

Every generation, he said, has been told that it might not perform as well as the one before it when tested in war.

That is a recurring concern, not a judgment unique to today’s young troops.

What matters in combat, Spencer said, is not simply technology or individual ability.

“Cohesion remains critical to how units perform under pressure,” he said.

Ramirez is about to become part of the institution that shaped the world she grew up in, even though she has no memory of the event that set those wars in motion.

She leaves for boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina, later this month, without knowing what her military career will bring, or whether the wars she learned about in school will ever become a larger part of her own life.

“I signed up to serve because I want to do something different,” Ramirez says. “And something that makes a difference, too.”