The Rise of the Military Welfare State

Jennifer Mittelstadt

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674915398
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Since the end of the draft, the U.S. Army has prided itself on its patriotic volunteers who heed the call to "Be All That You Can Be." But beneath the recruitment slogans, the army promised volunteers something more tangible: a social safety net including medical and dental care, education, child care, financial counseling, housing assistance, legal services, and other privileges that had long been reserved for career soldiers. The Rise of the Military Welfare State examines how the U.S. Army's extension of benefits to enlisted men and women created a military welfare system of unprecedented size and scope.America's all-volunteer army took shape in the 1970s, in the wake of widespread opposition to the draft. Abandoning compulsory conscription, it wrestled with how to attract and retain soldiers—a task made more difficult by the military's plummeting prestige after Vietnam. The army solved the problem, Jennifer Mittelstadt shows, by promising to take care of its own—the more than ten million Americans who volunteered for active duty after 1973 and their families. While the United States dismantled its civilian welfare system in the 1980s and 1990s, army benefits continued to expand.Yet not everyone was pleased by programs that, in their view, encouraged dependency, infantilized soldiers, and feminized the institution. Fighting to outsource and privatize the army's "socialist" system and to reinforce "self-reliance" among American soldiers, opponents rolled back some of the military welfare state's signature achievements, even as a new era of war began.

1

Army Benefits in a Free Market Era

AT A 1966 meeting at the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman and fellow free market economists met with sympathetic opponents of the draft at the height of the Vietnam War to discuss the possibilities for ending the unpopular system of military conscription. Their meeting hinted at the breadth of the growing antidraft movement, which accommodated both newly elected congressional representative Donald Rumsfeld (R-IL) and Stokely Carmichael in the same camp. Indeed, by 1968, most Americans had come to oppose conscription. But while activists ranging from civil rights leaders to peace groups, from the New Left to religious organizations, all agreed to end the draft, few envisioned the future of the military. For free market economists at the University of Chicago, however, ending the draft was part of a full-blown model of how a new volunteer force would function. This model incorporated the military into their larger worldview of small government and free market principles. Their blueprint called for the army to use solely cash inducements to attract enlistees. It would also forego in-kind and institutional benefits and services like housing, health care, and recreational facilities. Instead free marketers proposed that the army provide cash to allow soldiers to purchase whatever private sector “support,” if any, they chose.

In many ways, free market economists succeeded in changing the military. At the most fundamental level, there was no question that the new volunteer army had to enter a labor market for young men, and, to a lesser degree, women, in a way that conscription never fully required. Luring and retaining soldiers, especially into hard-to-fill positions in medical fields and combat arms, necessitated some of the methods of economists. The army also relied more heavily on tools of consumer markets such as advertising. More than ever before, the army in fact did enter the market.¹

Yet senior army leadership and many soldiers also resisted the redefinition of the army as a market institution, and in no area more than the social welfare function of the army—its benefits and support programs. From the highest leadership—Chief of Staff of the Army (CSA) General William Westmoreland and his deputies as well as secretaries of the army—to its enlisted soldiers, members of the army refused to accept that the army was an institution in which rational choice and utilitarian behavior described by neoclassical economists bore much relevance. In their minds, the army represented an institution steeped in tradition, molded primarily by nonpecuniary and nonquantifiable values. Rather than using market mechanisms, army leadership of the 1970s proposed expanding the paternalist mechanisms of the army’s social welfare apparatus in order to lure and retain soldiers in the volunteer force. If there was a model appropriate to the army, it was not a firm in a marketplace. It was more akin to a family—both paternalistic and patriarchal. For the next two decades, the army’s view proved more persuasive than the free market economists’.

IN THE SEVERAL decades before Friedman and his cohort trained their vision on the military, the armed forces filled its ranks through combining recruitment of a relatively small cadre who would make the military their career and conscription of a larger group of one-to-two termers through the Selective Service system. Conscription, largely absent from American military history except during times of war, persisted after World War II, when the onset of the Cold War convinced President Harry Truman and much of Congress that the United States had to maintain a large standing army to counter the threat of the Soviet Union.² Though the Cold War military technically was composed of two categories—volunteer and conscript—the divisions were never neat. Enlistment formed a continuum. Some volunteers constituted what the military called “true volunteers,” men who had dreamt of becoming soldiers, sailors, or airmen, men who had family traditions, or men with a patriotic desire to serve. After their initial enlistment, many planned to make the military a career. However, estimates suggested that no more than 10 percent of army enlisted personnel in their first term and no more than 15 percent of army officers in their first term would have constituted “true volunteers.”³ Many “volunteers” were better labeled “draft-motivated” volunteers. They were men who knew they might be drafted and decided to volunteer in the hopes of exerting some influence over their enlistment. Outside of the Korean conflict and the buildup of the Vietnam War, probably one-third of “volunteers” enlisted to avoid actually being drafted.⁴ After both types of volunteers took their places, the rest of military manpower derived from conscripts, a number that varied depending on the timing of conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.⁵ Overall, while a small minority of volunteers stayed on to make careers, far fewer conscripts made the same choice.

General military enlistment statistics masked the unique composition of the army. As the largest, least technological, and most likely branch of the armed forces to engage in direct ground combat, the army relied far more heavily on conscripts than the other services.⁶ The air force—perceived as modern and technology-driven—never relied on the draft, for example, and the navy and the marines only exceedingly rarely. As a result, almost all draftees of the postwar era ended up in the army, where they filled approximately half of its manpower. The conflict in Vietnam intensified this phenomenon. In 1969, the army had conscripted over half of all its new enlistments, and of the remaining volunteers, half were draft-motivated, having enlisted to avoid being drafted into a system beyond their control. The army endured almost complete “dependency on the draft.”⁷

The army, like the other services of the Cold War era, retained its small career cadre by offering a system of economic and institutional supports. Benefits constituted an in-kind exchange that evaded market logic. They depended on the perceived commitment soldiers made to the army. As one senior enlisted man’s wife explained to junior wives in a letter to Army Times, “The military has decided that when a man has committed himself to a military career and has demonstrated his commitment by serving a required number of years—or has accepted the added responsibilities and duties that go with increased rank—the military command will support him in return.” The support was “not a ‘right’ all dependents can demand,” but “a ‘privilege.’ ”⁸ As part of earning the honor of rank, senior enlisted men and officers were provided with housing or a housing allowance for them and their families, subsistence allowances, health care, and the use of special facilities like officers’ clubs and tennis courts. The army used the promise of these supports to convert first- and second-termers into career personnel, and to keep career personnel through their full minimum twenty-year career.

The army advertised its retirement package, for which career personnel were eligible after twenty years, to retain soldiers. Ca. 1950s, courtesy of U.S. Army Recruiting Poster collection, CECOM Historical Office archive, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD.

Draftees and first-term enlisted volunteers received little of the military’s largesse. In the mid-1960s, first-term enlistees received about $2,000 per year in direct pay, plus another $200 or so in additional compensation calculated through subsistence and other allowances.⁹ By 1970, with pay raises, the same first-term personnel earned $2,776 per year in direct pay, plus about $475 in other allowances, a total that one government measure judged to be about 53.4 percent of what civilian men of comparable age earned.¹⁰ The enlisted man did not qualify for special housing but lived in the barracks and ate in the mess hall. He did not earn the privilege of the military sponsoring permanent change of station moves by his family, if he had one, nor access to many of the recreation facilities and special programs of career soldiers. Even second-term soldiers—anyone below the enlisted rank E-5 (sergeant)—failed to gain the privileges of support offered to those who made long-term commitments to the military.

In 1971, the lowly pay and conditions of servicemen prompted Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) to lament, “we don’t pay the man who carries an M-16 rifle with his head stuck out in front of the enemy as much as we pay the lowest paid domestic in the country.”¹¹ For Goldwater and others, it was unacceptable to compensate manly sacrifice in lesser fashion than banal feminized labor. Perhaps worse, some junior enlisted men relied on civilian social welfare programs to make up for what the army denied them. Beginning in the late 1960s, the media reported that junior enlisted men were using public assistance programs to support their families. The Associated Press investigated the incidence of soldiers and their families using welfare in fall 1969. “From New Jersey to California,” it reported, “public welfare agencies are supplementing allotment checks from Vietnam, paying the rent of married draftees or buying groceries for families whose breadwinners are overseas.”¹² Several years later, with the transition to the volunteer force under way, the New York Times again noted the welfare reliance of junior enlisted families. “These families—now numbering in the tens of thousands—who must depend on food stamps and other forms of welfare to make ends meet” needed far more support.¹³ “That a man with or without a child has to be on welfare while serving his country,” Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR) exclaimed, “certainly should put the Senate to shame.”¹⁴

Despite the privation facing the low-ranking soldier, the military’s manpower system staffed the armed forces fully and without difficulty from World War II until the mid-1960s. With the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, however, the system faced a crisis. Many young men did not want to fight a war they opposed. Others objected to the inequities of a manpower system that provided deferments to many middle- and upper-class white men while lower-income and working-class Americans and disproportionate numbers of nonwhites shouldered the burdens of conscription. By 1968, the draft had become so unpopular that every candidate for the presidency from the right to the left announced his opposition to it. In the tense final weeks of the 1968 presidential election, Republican Richard Nixon addressed Americans in a CBS Radio speech. “We have lived with the draft so long,” he said, “that too many of us accept it as normal and necessary.… I say we take a new look.” And with that, Nixon pledged to “bury” the draft.¹⁵ That a hard-line, anticommunist hawk like Nixon felt compelled to make such a promise spoke to the general disgrace into which the system of conscription had fallen. When Nixon won the election, one of his earliest actions was to order the “Defense Department to devise a ‘detailed plan’ for replacing the military draft with an all-volunteer army,” thereby abandoning the conscription system used since World War II.¹⁶

Though popular support for ending the draft ran high, serious opposition to the volunteer force remained. Staunch military and war supporters in Congress, such as the two heads of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, Representative F. Edward Hébert (D-LA) and Senator John C. Stennis (D-MS) were skeptical about a volunteer force. They feared declining military readiness with the inevitable waxing and waning of manpower supply that a volunteer system would suffer.¹⁷ President Lyndon Johnson’s presidential commission on the draft in 1967 had also rejected a volunteer force as costly and dangerous, creating a gap between the military and civilians in American society.¹⁸ The New York Times opined that “in the present chaotic state of the world, it seems rash to try to abandon the draft altogether.”¹⁹

Army leaders despaired. So heavily reliant on the draft to fill their ranks, they expressed open doubts about a volunteer military. In the midst of the protracted and disastrous war in Vietnam, the army was “utterly dependent” on the draft and gloomily faced the prospect of struggling to attract sufficient numbers of soldiers.²⁰ The prospect for a successful volunteer force was particularly dim given the serious personnel problems the army faced at the time. Crime, alcohol, and drug abuse, overt racism, and resistance to authority plagued the army of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Events like the massacre at My Lai—and its cover-up—and the killing of superior officers by their own soldiers (known as “fragging”), as well as commonplace binge drinking and marijuana smoking, undermined the professionalism and effectiveness of the army. Army leaders “became increasingly convinced that the professional fabric of the institution was unraveling.”²¹ Persuading hundreds of thousands of soldiers to join a frayed institution during an unpopular war presented a seemingly impossible task.

BEYOND ALREADY enormous challenges in reengineering the army from a conscript to a voluntary force, the army’s leaders found that they were not free to define the contours of the new institution. Its generals and civilian staff faced competition in creating a model for a volunteer force from the free market economists increasingly interested in military affairs. At the time that Nixon announced the end of the draft, conservative free market advo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Army Takes Care of Its Own
• 1. Army Benefits in a Free Market Era
• 2. Is Military Service a Job?
• 3. The Threat of a Social Welfare Institution
• 4. Supporting the Military in Reagan’s America
• 5. Army Wives Demand Support
• 6. Securing Christian Family Values
• 7. A Turn to Self-Reliance
• 8. Outsourcing Soldier and Family Support
• Epilogue: Army Welfare at War in the Twenty-First Century
• Appendix
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index