How do we fix the growing disconnect between the American people and our military?

After reading the attached "The Tragedy of the American Military", it brought me to the subject and loaded question of this discussion.

We will likely never again know what it was like living in a post WWII era where everyone was tied so closely to the military and the war effort, but what can we do as a community of 1.4M+ active service members and 20M+ veterans to positively impact the future of this gap in understanding?

What are the steps we can take now going into 2015 and over the next 5-10 years to affect any change? Are there institutional changes that need to be made in order to help us get there?

I added some interesting excerpts below from this article that I feel really help convey the full disconnect we are in today. This piece is well worth the read.

Historical differences from WWII to today:
"At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.

Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once."

Thoughts from Admiral Mullen:
“My concern is this growing disconnect between the American people and our military,” retired Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama (and whose mid-career academic stint was at Harvard Business School), told me recently. The military is “professional and capable,” he said, “but I would sacrifice some of that excellence and readiness to make sure that we stay close to the American people. Fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. It’s become just too easy to go to war.”