War & Peace Quote by Bob Schieffer

Schieffer’s line lands like a quiet indictment delivered in a broadcast cadence: plain words, devastating math. “One-half of one percent” isn’t just a statistic; it’s a moral ratio. By shrinking the war down to a sliver of the population, he reframes Iraq not as a national undertaking but as a privatized burden, outsourced to a volunteer force and the families tethered to it.

The sentence structure does the heavy lifting. He stacks the comforts of the home front in a clipped trio - “no draft, no new taxes, no changes” - the rhythm of a checklist, as if the country audited the war and found it required nothing of most citizens. That’s the subtext: Iraq was politically possible precisely because it was socially optional. Schieffer isn’t arguing battlefield strategy; he’s interrogating the bargain that made prolonged conflict compatible with everyday normalcy.

Context matters. Coming from a career journalist, the authority here is observational rather than ideological. He’s pointing at the post-9/11 shift to an all-volunteer military, and at a government that avoided the traditional signals of shared sacrifice. In earlier wars, leaders deliberately made the public feel the cost through conscription and taxation; those mechanisms created accountability, but also friction. Removing them dulled both resistance and responsibility.

The final turn - “Not so for the small group” - is less sympathy than separation. It underscores a civic fracture: a nation at war and a nation at brunch, living in parallel timelines, connected only by televised updates and yellow ribbons.