The 2011 United States Army Commemorative Silver Dollar

The United States Army is older than the United States. The Continental Congress voted the Continental Army into being on June 14, 1775 — more than a year before the Declaration of Independence. So when Congress decided the Army deserved its own coin, it was honoring an institution that predates the flag, the Constitution, and the dollar itself.

That decision became law on December 1, 2008, when President George W. Bush signed the United States Army Commemorative Coin Act (Public Law 110-450). It authorized a three-coin set for 2011: a $5 gold piece, a half dollar in ordinary clad metal, and this — a 90% silver dollar.

The coins had a job beyond celebration. A surcharge built into every sale — $10 on each silver dollar — was sent to the Army Historical Foundation to help build the National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. In other words, collectors who bought this coin were quietly paying to give the Army its first national museum. (A commemorative coin doesn't circulate; it's sold by the Mint to collectors at a premium, and here that premium did real work.)

The three 2011 Army coins were split by theme. The gold $5 took "war." The clad half dollar took "peace." This silver dollar took the present tense — "Modern Service" — and it shows.

The obverse — the heads side — breaks from the usual single profile. Designer Richard Masters placed a male and a female soldier back to back, with a globe rising behind them. The message is plain once you see it: today's Army is two genders and the whole world. It carries only LIBERTY, IN GOD WE TRUST, and the date 2011. Mint sculptor Michael Gaudioso cut the design into the working model — the die that strikes the coin.

The reverse — designed by Susan Gamble and sculpted by Don Everhart, one of the Mint's most prolific artists — is quieter and heavier with meaning. At its center sits the Great Seal of the United States, the same eagle soldiers wear on their uniforms. Ringing it, separated by stars, are the seven core values every soldier is taught to recite: LOYALTY, DUTY, RESPECT, SELFLESS SERVICE, HONOR, INTEGRITY, and PERSONAL COURAGE. It is, in effect, the Army's creed turned into a coin.

Modern commemoratives have a pattern, and this coin is a textbook case of it: the version that sounds fancier is the common one, and the plain one is scarce.

The Mint struck the coin two ways. The proof — a mirror-finish coin made for collectors, with frosted devices against a polished field — carries a P mint mark for Philadelphia, and 119,829 of them were made. The uncirculated coin — a normal business-style finish, the kind that would circulate if it ever did — carries an S for San Francisco. Only 43,512 of those sold before the Mint closed the books in December 2011.

That gap is the whole game. The shiny proof is what most buyers wanted, so there are nearly three times as many. The everyday-looking uncirculated coin is the genuinely scarce one, and it's the figure a collector watches. Far below the 500,000 the law allowed, the program never came close to selling out — which is common for modern commems and is precisely why the low-mintage variant carries the premium it does.

Because it's 90% silver, the coin also has a floor under it: roughly three-quarters of an ounce of silver, so its melt value rises and falls with the metal. The collector value sits on top of that floor — and for this issue, the climb above melt belongs to the 2011-S uncirculated coin in the highest grades.