In The Rise of the Military Welfare State, Jennifer Mittelstadt offers a disturbing view of the armed forces as a high-value target in political clashes over public assistance. Investigating the military is “vital to any full history of social welfare in the United States,” Mittelstadt writes, because politicians have pitted the military against civilians in the battle over social benefits, while barely attending to the needs of service members and their families. The battle over support dates back to the shift to an all-volunteer army in 1973 and continues to roil our politics. Among the recurring issues are the size and scope of government, the applicability of market principles to social policy, the determination of just benefits for military families and ordinary citizens, and the role of women in the military. The decisions taken in those years have radiated out like the halo of a chronic migraine, undermining our nation’s delivery of welfare and education and its support for gender equality.
The headache flared up during the later years of the Vietnam War. Military experts worried that the army—auxiliary personnel were essentially volunteer and less symbolic of the war—could implode under the weight of its many angry and alienated soldiers, some of whom were murdering their commanding officers, abusing drugs and alcohol, and brutalizing Vietnamese civilians. Upon returning home, veterans suffered unprecedented adjustment problems, and some are still struggling. At the same time, the families of servicemen below officer level were often supplementing their salaries with food stamps and welfare. When the draft became the focus of the rage over a misbegotten war, politicians recognized that it had to go in order to appease the middle class.
Mittelstadt’s comprehensive narrative shows the long reach of some familiar figures. Shortly after his election in 1968, President Richard Nixon created a commission whose members included Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman to plan an all-volunteer army based on the free-market ideas of the Chicago School. The commission proposed discontinuing the traditional benefits that officers received—including support for housing, family, and transportation—and replacing them with better salaries and cash bonuses for all personnel so that volunteers could buy what they wanted, and the army could get out of the business of provisioning and caretaking.
On the other side of the debate, Gen. William Westmoreland, the army chief of staff from 1968 to ’72, thought that military service could not and should not be, as we might say now, monetized. Soldiers were called upon to die for their country, and a little money, more or less, was not a dignified way to reward that commitment. Westmoreland wanted the army to take care of its own so that volunteers understood they belonged to a responsive institution. He advocated extending many of the officers’ benefits to all enlistees. Whereas Nixon’s economists saw Westmoreland and his ideas as paternalistic, most soldiers preferred an army that provided housing, medical care, job training, and supports for families to one that dispensed cash handouts. Westmoreland won this round of the battle with the Chicago Boys, and his Army Family model was reaffirmed in 1976, with an expansion of benefits for volunteers. These changes helped improve the reputation of the army after the terrible years of Vietnam and eased its transition to an all-volunteer force.
No policy is implemented in a vacuum, Mittelstadt emphasizes repeatedly. As the army’s personnel shifted from draftees to volunteers, its members also began to shift from partially middle class and white to largely poor and minority. The educational level of the volunteer force also dropped, a sign that poor and minority youths were trapped in substandard schools. Army accounts of chaotic behavior reflected the military’s dim view of its volunteers, blaming them for being unable to shed the problems of poverty that had followed them from civilian life. In 1978, even with better salaries, servicemen and -women were redeeming a large number of food stamps at commissaries. Relatedly, in 1979, 50 percent of military wives were working—an increase of 20 percent from 1970. These women generally thought that the army saw them as problems rather than as committed partners working to supplement their husbands’ poor wages. Their employment led to an increased demand for childcare and other family services.