Only 1% of Americans serving in military is ‘problematic’, says Democrat Pat Ryan

New York Democratic representative Pat Ryan said that having only 1% of Americans serving in the US military is “deeply problematic as a democracy”.

In an interview with CBS’s Face The Nation ahead of Memorial Day, Ryan, who is a veteran of the US army, said: “When you lose touch between those that are fighting our wars and their families and everyone else, that’s something so essential that we have to figure out how to bring folks together, and get more folks serving.”

Ryan, who did two tours in Iraq, said that he is working on recruiting more Americans to serve in the military.

Speaking alongside Florida’s Republican representative and army veteran Mike Waltz, Ryan said: “A lot of the work we did … on the defense bill is recruiting. Every service has been challenged on recruiting numbers and we’ve been pushing a bunch of directions to say that is not acceptable to the department of defense. And we’re starting to see the numbers come up.”

To Waltz, “service doesn’t just have to be in the military,” as he said that both he and Ryan are advocates of “getting us back to national service as a country”.

“That’s not a draft, that doesn’t necessarily have to be in uniform,” he said, adding: “It could be with the national park, inner-city tutoring, elderly care. But how do we get young people out in an environment where they’re learning leadership, discipline, followership, serving a cause bigger than themselves and with fellow Americans who may not look or come from the same backgrounds as them.”

The two representatives also spoke of the need for bipartisanship when it comes to supporting veterans. For Ryan, the “most powerful thing” he has done in his time in Congress since he assumed office in 2023 was cleaning the Vietnam