According to new research, today’s veterans are clustering in a collection of rural communities.

That data seems to confirm former Defense secretary Robert Gates’s worry that the military was getting more and more isolated from the day to day lives of the citizens it’s supposed to defend.

Jay Teachman is a sociology professor at Western Washington University. His paper, due for publication later this year in the journal Armed Forces & Society, finds that the veteran population is getting smaller, but it’s also becoming more and more concentrated in a relative handful of geographic locations. He discussed the findings and their implications with Federal News Radio’s Jared Serbu.

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