The DAV Veterans Pulse Survey of 2015, the largest multi-generational survey of US veterans (n = 1,701, nationally representative of approximately 22 million veterans from WWII through post-9/11 eras), found that 79% would, if they had to do it over, repeat their military service. The implied action-side rate of approximately 21% (those who would not or are uncertain whether they would repeat) is the primary metric for this entry. Pew Research’s 2011 survey of 1,853 veterans, including 712 post-9/11 veterans, found that 96% were proud of their service, 82% said their service helped them appreciate life more, 93% said it helped them mature, and 90% said it taught them to work with others. The two surveys converge on a picture of low to moderate action regret, with pride nearly universal and the “would serve again” rate consistently above 75%.
The inaction side has no direct survey data, so it carries no reliable regret estimate. No national survey was identified that asks non-veteran civilians whether they regret not serving in the military, and this gap in the literature is notable. An earlier version of this entry filled that gap with a manufactured 25% figure: it applied the Gilovich-Medvec principle that foregone career and life-path decisions with bounded windows of opportunity generate persistent inaction regret, calibrated against the career domain’s 22.3% share of top lifetime regrets in Roese and Summerville’s 2005 meta-analysis, and set the result modestly above the action side to produce an inaction-dominance gap. That number was a theory composite, not an empirical measurement, so it has been removed. Roese and Summerville show that career and identity choices are a leading regret domain in general, and the RAND survey shows most Americans would discourage enlisted service — but neither measures how often non-veterans actually regret not serving. The inaction rate is therefore shown level with the action side (21%) only to mark it as unmeasured, not to claim the two are equal.
Only the action side carries a measured rate, and even it carries substantial uncertainty. The action side benefits from two large nationally representative samples with near-direct “would serve again” questions, but survivorship bias is significant: veterans who developed severe PTSD or service-related disabilities are under-represented in voluntary panels, and active-duty satisfaction has declined sharply since 2019 (Blue Star Families found only 32% of active-duty families would recommend service in 2023, down from 55% in 2016), suggesting the 21% action regret may understate more recent cohorts. This entry documents the state of the evidence rather than a resolved bilateral comparison: strong action-side data, no inaction-side survey, and therefore no honest basis for declaring which side regrets more. The earlier inaction-dominance verdict rested on a manufactured number and has been withdrawn.