What corporations are missing about veterans

That was the whole answer. Not a budget problem. Not a timing problem. An international company that builds things on American soil, with American workers, sat across the table from a program designed to develop and keep the veterans already on its floor, and decided veterans were no longer the direction.

I’ve been in a lot of rooms. That one stuck.

“We already hire veterans.”

For the past year, ATLVets has asked talent leaders for one thing: a conversation. Not a check. Thirty minutes about what happens to a veteran after the offer letter is signed.

Most of those requests go nowhere. Declined. Forwarded. Unanswered. When we do get in the room, we hear the same sentence almost word for word: “We already hire veterans.”

Good. What’s your retention number?

That’s usually where the meeting ends. Most companies can tell you how many veterans they hired last year. Very few can tell you how many are still there, how many have been promoted, or why the ones who left walked out. They are counting arrivals and ignoring departures.

That is the difference between veteran-friendly and veteran-ready.

Veterans rarely leave because they can’t do the job. They leave because nobody translated the job to them, nobody translated them to their manager, and the mission disappeared. In the military there is always a next school, a next assignment, a next standard. In most companies there’s a desk and a quarterly review.

Every veteran who walks at month nine takes your recruiting spend, your onboarding investment, and your next frontline leader out the door. In Georgia manufacturing, where annual turnover runs 56 percent and 238,000 jobs sit unfilled according to the Georgia Association of Manufacturers, that isn’t a culture problem. It’s a production problem.

Federal law already expects more than a head count. The Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act requires covered federal contractors to take affirmative action to employ and advance protected veterans. The hiring benchmark measures the first half of that sentence. Almost nobody is measuring the second half, and that is exactly where the talent is leaking.

Veterans were never a DEI line item.

When federal DEI programs were shut down in 2025, a lot of companies cleared the whole shelf. Veteran programs were sitting on it.

That was a mistake. Veteran status is protected by a 1974 statute that no executive order created and no executive order repealed. Supporting veterans was never an ideology. It was an obligation, and before that, it was simply decent.

And if diversity is the question, the military answered it a long time ago. Nearly a third of active-duty service members identify with a racial minority group, and nearly one in five is Hispanic or Latino, according to the Department of Defense’s 2023 demographics profile. Kids from farm towns and kids from the city, every faith and no faith, in the same formation, held to the same standard, trusting each other with their lives. Nobody had to be trained into that. The mission required it.

You don’t have to choose between merit and a workforce that looks like America. The military already built one. Part of it gets out every year, and it’s available.

If you build in America, build with the people who defended it.

Plants are going up across the Southeast. Companies from around the world are choosing to manufacture here, and they should be welcomed. But you cannot build in America and treat the people who defended America as optional.

The workforce you need shows up before the shift starts, follows a safety standard because it has seen what happens when people don’t, and can lead a team under pressure on day one. You can spend years trying to build that from scratch. Or you can hire the people who already are it, and then keep them.

To every company that chose to build here, including the ones headquartered overseas: you chose America. Choose the people who already paid for it.

What we’ve forgotten

Fewer than one in a hundred Americans wear the uniform. The rest of us sleep under the protection of that small group, and most of us never meet them. When they come home, we thank them for their service and move on.

We used to understand that service created a debt, and that paying it was a shared responsibility. Somewhere along the way we outsourced it to the government, to charities, and to one day a year in November.

Our country is more divided than at any point in my lifetime. We argue about almost everything. Veterans are one of the last things most Americans still agree on. Taking care of the people who served isn’t a political position. It’s a place where a fractured country can still stand together, and it starts in the most ordinary place there is: the workplace.

That isn’t nostalgia. It’s the American way, and it’s still available to any company willing to choose it.

What veteran-ready looks like

The military built a development system for every stage of a career, then stopped at the gate. ATLVets builds the civilian version.

Our workforce programs, VetOPS and the Advanced Manufacturing Pathway, aren’t job boards and they aren’t technical training. They are a continuum: military-to-civilian translation before the hire, structured onboarding at the start, and a leadership pipeline after it, so the veteran you hire this year is running a team in three. We work with the veteran and the employer, because retention is a two-sided problem.