In the fiscal year of 2019, 21.39 percent of active-duty enlisted women were of Hispanic origin. The total number of active duty military personnel in 2019 amounted to 1.3 million people.

Ethnicities in the United States The United States is known around the world for the diversity of its population. The Census recognizes six different racial and ethnic categories: White American, Native American and Alaska Native, Asian American, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander. People of Hispanic or Latino origin are classified as a racially diverse ethnicity.

The largest part of the population, about 61.3 percent, is composed of White Americans. The largest minority in the country are Hispanics with a share of 17.8 percent of the population, followed by Black or African Americans with 13.3 percent. Life in the U.S. and ethnicity However, life in the United States seems to be rather different depending on the race or ethnicity that you belong to. For instance: In 2019, native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders had the highest birth rate of 58 per 1,000 women, while the birth rae of white alone, non Hispanic women was 49 children per 1,000 women.

The Black population living in the United States has the highest poverty rate with of all Census races and ethnicities in the United States. About 19.5 percent of the Black population was living with an income lower than the 2020 poverty threshold. The Asian population has the smallest poverty rate in the United States, with about 8.1 percent living in poverty.

The median annual family income in the United States in 2020 earned by Black families was about 57,476 U.S. dollars, while the average family income earned by the Asian population was about 109,448 U.S. dollars. This is more than 25,000 U.S. dollars higher than the U.S. average family income, which was 84,008 U.S. dollars.

In 2023, there were almost two million Black or African American veterans in the United States, representing around 12 percent of the total veteran population.

The graph illustrates the number of personnel in each branch of the U.S. Military for the year 2025. The x-axis lists the military branches: Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. The y-axis represents the number of personnel, ranging from 41,477 to 449,265. Among the branches, the Army has the highest number of personnel with 449,265, followed by the Navy with 333,794 and the Air Force with 317,675. The Marine Corps and Coast Guard have 168,628 and 41,477 personnel, respectively. The data is displayed in a bar graph format, effectively highlighting the distribution of military personnel across the different branches.

The U.S. Army remains the largest branch of the American military, with 449,344 active duty personnel in 2023. While the Army leads in numbers, the newly established Space Force had just 8,879 active duty members, highlighting the evolving nature of modern warfare and the increasing importance of space-based capabilities. Confidence in military remains high Despite fluctuations in force size, public trust in the U.S. military remains strong. In 2024, 61 percent of Americans expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the armed forces, a slight increase from the previous year. While a slightly higher share of Republicans have shown more confidence in the military, trust in the institution remains high across party lines. Global commitments The United States continues to invest heavily in its military capabilities, with defense spending reaching 916.02 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. This substantial budget supports not only domestic defense needs but also enables the U.S. to respond to global crises, as evidenced by the over 40 billion euros in military aid provided to Ukraine following Russia's invasion. The high level of spending, which translates to about 2,220 U.S. dollars per capita.

This comprehensive report chronicles the history of women in the military and as Veterans, profiles the characteristics of women Veterans in 2009, illustrates how women Veterans in 2009 utilized some of the major benefits and services offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and discusses the future of women Veterans in relation to VA. The goal of this report is to gain an understanding of who our women Veterans are, how their military service affects their post-military lives, and how they can be better served based on these insights.

Historical chart and dataset showing U.S. military size by year from 1985 to 2020.

In 2023, around 21.3 percent of active duty officers in the United States Navy were women. Additionally, approximately 19.4 percent of officers in the Space Force were women.

Military expenditure (% of GDP) in United States was reported at 3.3618 % in 2023, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. United States - Military expenditure (% of GDP) - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on July of 2025.

In 2022, approximately 226,293 active duty personnel in the United States Department of Defense were Black or African American. Furthermore, another 897,340 active duty DoD personnel were white in that year, making up around 68.8 percent of the total number.

The Military Bases dataset was last updated on October 23, 2024 and are defined by Fiscal Year 2023 data, from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment and is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD). The dataset depicts the authoritative locations of the most commonly known Department of Defense (DoD) sites, installations, ranges, and training areas world-wide. These sites encompass land which is federally owned or otherwise managed. This dataset was created from source data provided by the four Military Service Component headquarters and was compiled by the Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure (DISDI) Program within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment. Only sites reported in the BSR or released in a map supplementing the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018 (FIRRMA) Real Estate Regulation (31 CFR Part 802) were considered for inclusion. This list does not necessarily represent a comprehensive collection of all Department of Defense facilities. For inventory purposes, installations are comprised of sites, where a site is defined as a specific geographic location of federally owned or managed land and is assigned to military installation. DoD installations are commonly referred to as a base, camp, post, station, yard, center, homeport facility for any ship, or other activity under the jurisdiction, custody, control of the DoD. While every attempt has been made to provide the best available data quality, this data set is intended for use at mapping scales between 1:50,000 and 1:3,000,000. For this reason, boundaries in this data set may not perfectly align with DoD site boundaries depicted in other federal data sources. Maps produced at a scale of 1:50,000 or smaller which otherwise comply with National Map Accuracy Standards, will remain compliant when this data is incorporated. Boundary data is most suitable for larger scale maps; point locations are better suited for mapping scales between 1:250,000 and 1:3,000,000. If a site is part of a Joint Base (effective/designated on 1 October, 2010) as established under the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure process, it is attributed with the name of the Joint Base. All sites comprising a Joint Base are also attributed to the responsible DoD Component, which is not necessarily the pre-2005 Component responsible for the site.

In the United States, active duty Armed Forces personnel tended to be young, with the majority under the age of 30 years old. In 2023, there were 546,361 U.S. Defense Armed personnel aged 25 and under. In the age group 26 to 30, there were 275,756 Armed Forces personnel.

Context

Veteran Employment Outcomes (VEO) are new experimental U.S. Census Bureau statistics on labor market outcomes for recently discharged Army veterans. These statistics are tabulated by military specialization, service characteristics, employer industry (if employed), and veteran demographics. They are generated by matching service member information with a national database of jobs, using state-of-the-art confidentiality protection mechanisms to protect the underlying data.

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/veo_experimental.html

Content

"The VEO are made possible through data sharing partnerships between the U.S. Army, State Labor Market Information offices, and the U.S. Census Bureau. VEO data are currently available at the state and national level."

"Veteran Employment Outcomes (VEO) are experimental tabulations developed by the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program in collaboration with the U.S. Army and state agencies. VEO data provides earnings and employment outcomes for Army veterans by rank and military occupation, as well as veteran and employer characteristics. VEO are currently released as a research data product in "experimental" form."

"The source of veteran information in the VEO is administrative record data from the Department of the Army, Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis. This personnel data contains fields on service member characteristics, such as service start and end dates, occupation, pay grade, characteristics at entry (e.g. education and test scores), and demographic characteristics (e.g. sex, race, and ethnicity). Once service member records are transferred to the Census Bureau, personally-identifying information is stripped and veterans are assigned a Protected Identification Key (PIK) that allows for them to be matched with their employment outcomes in Census Bureau jobs data."

Earnings, and Employment Concepts

Earnings "Earnings are total annual earnings for attached workers from all jobs, converted to 2018 dollars using the CPI-U. For the annual earnings tabulations, we impose two labor force attachment restrictions. First, we drop veterans who earn less than the annual equivalent of full-time work at the prevailing federal minimum wage. Additionally, we drop veterans with two or more quarters with no earnings in the reference year. These workers are likely to be either marginally attached to the labor force or employed in non-covered employment."

Employment

"While most VEO tabulations include earnings from all jobs, tabulations by employer characteristics only consider the veteran's main job for that year. Main jobs are defined as the job for which veterans had the highest earnings in the reference year. To attach employer characteristics to that job, we assign industry and geography from the highest earnings quarter with that employer in the year. For multi-establishment firms, we use LEHD unit-to-worker imputations to assign workers to establishments, and then assign industry and geography."

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/veo_experimental.html

Acknowledgements

United States Census Bureau

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/veo_experimental.html

Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

Inspiration

U.S. Veterans.

The 2012 US Army Anthropometric Survey (ANSUR II) was executed by the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) from October 2010 to April 2012 and is comprised of personnel representing the total US Army force to include the US Army Active Duty, Reserves, and National Guard. The data was made publicly available in 2017. In addition to the anthropometric and demographic data described below, the ANSUR II database also consists of 3D whole body, foot, and head scans of Soldier participants. These 3D data are not publicly available out of respect for the privacy of ANSUR II participants. The data from this survey are used for a wide range of equipment design, sizing, and tariffing applications within the military and has many potential commercial, industrial, and academic applications.These data have replaced ANSUR I as the most comprehensive publicly accessible dataset on body size and shape. The ANSUR II dataset includes 93 measurements from over 6,000 adult US military personnel, comprising 4,082 men (ANSUR_II_MALE_Public.csv) and 1,986 women (ANSUR_II_FEMALE_Public.csv).

The ANSUR II working databases contain 93 anthropometric measurements which were directly measured, and 15 demographic/administrative variables.

Much more information about the data collection methodology and content of the ANSUR II Working Databases may be found in the following Technical Reports, available from theDefense Technical Information Center (www.dtic.mil) through:

a. 2010-2012 Anthropometric Survey of U.S. Army Personnel: Methods and Summary
Statistics. (NATICK/TR-15/007)
b. Measurer’s Handbook: US Army and Marine Corps Anthropometric Surveys,
2010-2011 (NATICK/TR-11/017)

This statistic shows the share of women and men in the U.S. Military in 2010 by branch. In 2010, 37 percent of all active-duty enlisted women were part of the Army. The total number of military personnel in the U.S. Army can be found here.

Graph and download economic data for Contributions to percent change in real exports of services: Transfers under U.S. military agency sales contracts (DISCONTINUED) (B267RZ2Q224SBEA) from Q2 1967 to Q1 2014 about contracts, military, transfers, agency, contributions, exports, percent, sales, services, real, GDP, and USA.

Analysis of ‘Veteran Employment Outcomes’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/mpwolke/cusersmarildownloadsvetcsv on 28 January 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

Context

Veteran Employment Outcomes (VEO) are new experimental U.S. Census Bureau statistics on labor market outcomes for recently discharged Army veterans. These statistics are tabulated by military specialization, service characteristics, employer industry (if employed), and veteran demographics. They are generated by matching service member information with a national database of jobs, using state-of-the-art confidentiality protection mechanisms to protect the underlying data.

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/veo_experimental.html

Content

"The VEO are made possible through data sharing partnerships between the U.S. Army, State Labor Market Information offices, and the U.S. Census Bureau. VEO data are currently available at the state and national level."

"Veteran Employment Outcomes (VEO) are experimental tabulations developed by the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program in collaboration with the U.S. Army and state agencies. VEO data provides earnings and employment outcomes for Army veterans by rank and military occupation, as well as veteran and employer characteristics. VEO are currently released as a research data product in "experimental" form."

"The source of veteran information in the VEO is administrative record data from the Department of the Army, Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis. This personnel data contains fields on service member characteristics, such as service start and end dates, occupation, pay grade, characteristics at entry (e.g. education and test scores), and demographic characteristics (e.g. sex, race, and ethnicity). Once service member records are transferred to the Census Bureau, personally-identifying information is stripped and veterans are assigned a Protected Identification Key (PIK) that allows for them to be matched with their employment outcomes in Census Bureau jobs data."

Earnings, and Employment Concepts

Earnings "Earnings are total annual earnings for attached workers from all jobs, converted to 2018 dollars using the CPI-U. For the annual earnings tabulations, we impose two labor force attachment restrictions. First, we drop veterans who earn less than the annual equivalent of full-time work at the prevailing federal minimum wage. Additionally, we drop veterans with two or more quarters with no earnings in the reference year. These workers are likely to be either marginally attached to the labor force or employed in non-covered employment."

Employment

"While most VEO tabulations include earnings from all jobs, tabulations by employer characteristics only consider the veteran's main job for that year. Main jobs are defined as the job for which veterans had the highest earnings in the reference year. To attach employer characteristics to that job, we assign industry and geography from the highest earnings quarter with that employer in the year. For multi-establishment firms, we use LEHD unit-to-worker imputations to assign workers to establishments, and then assign industry and geography."

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/veo_experimental.html

Acknowledgements

United States Census Bureau

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/veo_experimental.html

Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

Inspiration

U.S. Veterans.

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

Armed forces personnel (% of total labor force) in United States was reported at 0.83764 % in 2020, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. United States - Armed forces personnel - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on July of 2025.

The average for 2022 based on 9 countries was 4.83 percent. The highest value was in Colombia: 9.18 percent and the lowest value was in Argentina: 1.26 percent. The indicator is available from 1988 to 2022. Below is a chart for all countries where data are available.

Veterans - Median Income and Poverty, by City. Veterans: Civilians who have served (even for a short time), but are not currently serving, on active duty in the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or the Coast Guard, or who served in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II. People who served in the National Guard or Reserves are classified as veterans only if they were ever called or ordered to active duty. Source: U.S. Census Bureau; 2012-2016 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, Table S2101

United States - Total Population: All Ages including Armed Forces Overseas was 343157.45000 Thous. in December of 2025, according to the United States Federal Reserve. Historically, United States - Total Population: All Ages including Armed Forces Overseas reached a record high of 343157.45000 in December of 2025 and a record low of 156309.00000 in January of 1952. Trading Economics provides the current actual value, an historical data chart and related indicators for United States - Total Population: All Ages including Armed Forces Overseas - last updated from the United States Federal Reserve on July of 2025.