Welfare's Last Stand
By
Jennifer Mittelstadt
March
05, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Aeon"
- Over the past four decades in the United
States, as the country has slashed its welfare
state and employers gutted traditional job
benefits, growing numbers of people, especially
from the working class, grasped for a new safety
net – the military. Everyone recognises that the
US armed forces have become a global colossus.
But few know that, along with bases and bombs,
the US military constructed its own massive
welfare state. In the waning decades of the 20th
century, with US prosperity in decline, more
than 10 million active‑duty personnel and their
tens of millions of family members turned to the
military for economic and social security.
The
military welfare state is hidden in plain sight,
its welfare function camouflaged by its
war-making auspices. Only the richest Americans
could hope to access a more systematic welfare
network. Military social welfare features a web
of near-universal coverage for soldiers and
their families – housing, healthcare, childcare,
family counselling, legal assistance, education
benefits, and more. The programmes constitute a
multi-billion-dollar-per-year safety net, at
times accounting for nearly 50 per cent of the
Department of Defense budget (DoD). Their real
costs spread over several divisions of the
defence budget creating a system so vast that
the DoD acknowledged it could not accurately
reckon its total expense.
Most
Americans would not imagine that the military
welfare state has anything to do with them.
After all, in the era since the end of the draft
and the advent of the all-volunteer force,
military service has become the province of the
few: just 0.5 per cent of Americans now serve in
the armed forces.
But the
history of the military welfare state tells us a
great deal about citizenship and welfare. Its
rise correlated with and, in some instances,
caused the decline of the civilian welfare
state, creating a diverging and unequal set of
entitlements. And the recent transformation of
the military welfare state – a massive
privatisation and outsourcing – signals an even
more dangerous future for the civilian welfare
state.
The US
military has always performed social welfare of
some kind or another. Over its long history, it
provided daily support to its conscripts – food,
shelter, clothing and medical care – and more
elaborate benefits such as homes, family support
and clubs for the career force and officers. The
military also rewarded citizen conscripts for
their faithful service during wartime. During
the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army
offered veterans land or a cash bounty. After
the Civil War, the military offered veterans
pensions. And after the Second World War,
millions of former service personnel were
guaranteed unprecedented education, training and
housing subsidies.
Military leaders embarked on a new and more
ambitious social welfare programme after 1973.
That year, President Richard Nixon and Congress
ended the draft and mandated an all-volunteer
force. Military leaders could no longer force
citizens to join – they had to convince them.
And one of their most vital tools was social
welfare benefits.
Unlike
European countries that provided nearly
universal social welfare to all citizens, the US
had only a patchwork social welfare system
consisting of various public and private safety
nets. Military leaders stepped into the gaps
between them. They decided, in the words of the
army motto, ‘to take care of their own’. They
expanded the benefits traditionally reserved for
the relatively few members of the career force
and officers to every single member of the
volunteer force and his or her family.
This
post-1973 military welfare state played a
different role in US life than most earlier
types of military welfare. For one, military
welfare no longer served as a reward for the
services of citizen soldiers. Instead, it
sustained the volunteer force: it lured new
recruits, supported them while on duty, and
convinced them to re‑enlist.
The
military welfare state post-1973 never
stimulated social welfare for the populace:
quite the opposite
More
importantly, earlier versions of military
welfare catalysed broader social welfare
programmes for the US populace. Civil War
pensions pioneered federal retirement and
disability payments, and paved the way for
civilian retirement pensions. Veterans’
healthcare after the First World War created the
first model of government health provision. And
the Second World War-era GI Bill vaulted
millions of former civilian draftees and their
families into the middle class, legitimising
government support for education and housing for
all Americans.
The
modern military welfare state of the post-1973
era never stimulated social welfare for the
populace. Quite the opposite. As a smaller
number and narrower cross-section of Americans
volunteered for military service in the late
20th century, the divide between the military
and civilians grew. So, too, did the divide
between the new military welfare state and the
existing civilian one. From the 1970s to the
early ’90s, while many civilian welfare
programmes contracted, public and private unions
declined, and employers cut private employment
benefits, the military expanded its welfare
functions.
How did
this happen?
With
the birth of the modern volunteer force, the
military and its allies pursued a politics of
separation. The generals who commanded the new
military drew bright lines demarcating their own
social welfare programmes from those for
civilians. The chairman of the joint chiefs,
General George S Brown, made the case for
military service as a uniquely deserving
vocation – more like a calling – and entitled to
special benefits. From President Gerald Ford’s
defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld down to army
privates, military personnel disparaged any
notion of ‘comparability’ between themselves and
civilians. Some went as far as lampooning
‘nine-to-five’ civilians for working easy and
self-interested jobs. Even as the recession of
the 1970s spurred budget cuts for welfare
programmes and public employee benefits,
generals and admirals convinced Congress to
shore up and enlarge military benefits.
During
the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan drove the
military welfare state to its apogee. Beginning
with a speech at the US military academy at West
Point in 1981, Reagan promised pay raises and
generous benefits to recognise soldiers’
‘honorable profession’. His unprecedented
peacetime military spending provided an enormous
budget for social welfare. First came a housing
boom, then a childcare programme that became the
US gold standard, then a raft of diverse family
support programmes that did everything from
easing marriages in crisis to providing free
legal and financial counselling.
Reagan
officials decried the shiftlessness of civilian
college students as they cut aid to higher
education
But
Reagan did more than bankroll the military
welfare state. He leveraged his support of
military welfare to attack the civilian welfare
state. The most obvious example concerned the
revival and reinvention of the GI Bill. Though
previously used as an education programme to
reward veterans for service, Reagan brandished
the new GI Bill as a weapon against
higher-education assistance for civilians – the
student loans and grants so many Americans had
come to depend on. Reagan and his team cast
these programmes as ‘benefits [given] to those
who were not serving their country’, and thus
undeserved. Reagan officials decried the
shiftlessness of civilian college students as
they cut aid to higher education. And they
praised the sacrifice of young soldiers as they
signed on to the new GI Bill.
Reagan
also protected the military welfare state by
aligning it with the Christian right. James
Dobson of Focus on the Family and other
right-wing evangelicals were welcomed onto
military taskforces advising the army on new
family support programmes. Dobson even sold his
videotapes and brochures to military counselling
programmes. Conservative Christians found allies
in the military’s chaplain’s corps and officer’s
corps, ensuring that the many new counselling
and family readiness programmes shaded toward
conservative Christian ideals of family life –
two-parent, patriarchal families with wives who
‘submitted’ to their husbands’ authority. The
alliance between the military welfare state and
the Christian ‘family values’ campaign protected
military welfare from associations with the
welfare provided to civilians. And it fostered
its continued growth.
As
the military welfare state grew and prospered,
it attracted some of the same opponents as had
the civilian welfare state. Not everyone in the
military or outside its ranks welcomed
programmes that, in their view, mimicked the
civilian welfare state – feminising the
institution, encouraging dependency, and
enlarging the state.
Some
active-duty and retired officers feared social
welfare would undermine the martial nature of
the military and turn commanders into ‘social
workers’. In the late 1970s and early ’80s,
Robin Beard, a Republican congressman for
Tennessee and a former naval officer – and, more
recently, the Democrat Jim Webb, a 2016
presidential candidate and former senator from
Virginia – charged that women soldiers and
obligations to the wives of men soldiers turned
the army into a ‘babysitting service’.
In the
army, the largest and least popular of the
services, opponents of military welfare also
feared that welfare benefits attracted, as one
general put it, ‘the dregs’ of US society. By
the late 1970s, the army had trouble recruiting
white high‑school graduates, much less anyone
who had attended college. It had become nearly
one-third African-American and, just as
opponents of the welfare state used racist
stereotypes to attack it, so too did opponents
of the military welfare state, who likened the
disproportionately African‑American soldiery to
despised welfare clients.
By the
early 1990s, military welfare skeptics both
within and without the military gained ground.
Leaders of the army’s community and family
support services and its Morale, Welfare and
Recreation unit latched onto the civilian agenda
to ‘end welfare as we know it’, charging the
military’s support programmes with encouraging
‘dependency’ among military personnel and their
families. They worried about ‘overly dependent
spouses’, and purged the word ‘support’ from
their lexicon. Cued by family psychologists who
studied civilian welfare programmes, the army
pressed its families to become ‘self-reliant’.
The army even changed its official motto from a
promise to ‘take care of its own’, to an
awkwardly worded, half-hearted pledge to ‘take
care of its own so that they can learn to take
care of themselves’.
An even
more powerful attack on the military welfare
state came from outside the military’s ranks,
from a group rarely linked to the military –
free‑market economists. While military leaders
worried about welfare’s degradation of their
instition, free‑market economists loathed the
military welfare state’s extension of ‘big
government’.
Clinton
created the perfect environment for realising
the free-market dream
Economists had first set their sights on
transforming the military in the 1960s. The
free‑marketer Milton Friedman guided the 1969
Nixon group that sketched the blueprint for the
post-draft military. He advocated a vision of
the military as an ideal free‑market
institution. In Friedman’s ideal, cash payments
and bonuses would drive enlistment, and the
military’s traditional benefits and social
welfare programmes – no better than any other
government social programme – would be
abolished. If abolition proved too difficult,
the remaining services and benefits would be
contracted out to the private sector.
The
military successfully resisted the free‑market
onslaught in the 1970s and even in the
putatively pro-private‑enterprise Reagan decade
of the 1980s, driving free‑market champions to
decry the ‘pure socialism’ at the heart of the
defence establishment. But free-marketers began
to make inroads with their military agenda at
the tailend of the 1980s and especially the
’90s. President Bill Clinton’s National
Performance Review, popularly called
‘Reinventing Government’, created the perfect
environment for realising the free-market dream.
It imported corporate practices of outsourcing
and privatisation in all government agencies,
including the military. Clinton hired a Wall
Street privatisation expert, Joshua Gotbaum of
Lazard Frčres, for the newly created post of
Assistant Secretary of Defence for Economic
Security at the Pentagon. His charge: privatise
and outsource whatever he could.
Meanwhile the dramatic defence cuts that
followed the end of the Cold War forced military
commanders to slash spending and seek savings.
Commanders and staff turned to corporate budget
and management strategies such as Total Quality
Management, strategic planning, and outsourcing.
The army joined leading sectors of capital on
the conference board, created a Captains of
Industry Conference, consulted with business
schools, and hired scores of consulting firms to
help guide the outsourcing process. More and
more, commanders chose to protect the ‘tip of
the spear’ – weapons and infantry – and contract
out and privatise military welfare. In the hopes
of reducing budget lines, they gave up major
elements of soldier and family support
programmes, from housing to healthcare, and sent
them into the private sector. In less than a
decade, the military, economists and corporate
advisors dramatically altered the military
welfare state. A system that had ‘taken care of’
military personnel devolved into a privately
contracted collection of services that all too
often promoted ‘self-reliance’.
The
transformation of the military welfare state has
done no good for soldiers or civilians, or for
social welfare in the US. For soldiers, it has
meant fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
under leaders who expected them and their
families to exhibit what the military came to
call ‘resilience’. Though the term ‘resilience’
drew from new psychological literature on
shaping positive reactions to trauma, its
practical effect was to demand the same
‘self‑reliance’ among soldiers that the military
of the 1990s had introduced. It was, at best, an
unrealistic expectation given the unprecedented
numbers of brain injuries, traumas and suicides
suffered by military personnel and families
during the extended conflicts.
When
soldiers and their families did need support,
they were likely to turn not to the military,
but to private contractors: doctors contracted
by national healthcare corporations, a
multinational real‑estate corporation, or
contracted social workers manning family support
programmes. Placing support programmes in the
hands of private contractors diminished the
army’s ability to solve the problems facing
military personnel and their families. The
scandal in 2007 at the Walter Reed Army Medical
Center in Washington, DC – with rodent
infestation, languishing patients and
unsupervised care – arose in no small part due
to the poor performance of contractors at the
facility. As the contractor Johnson Controls
wrangled for yet more work at the facility, its
administrators paid more attention to the
dollars and corporate control than the
day-to-day care of soldiers.
The
military social welfare system that evolved in
the 1990s failed to meet the needs of wartime
soldiers in the 2000s. But the Pentagon has
nevertheless continued on this path, making it
clear that private defence contractors and their
allies in free-market think tanks and politics
are the real beneficiaries of outsourced
military welfare.
They
completely marketise military welfare and
abandoned military personnel and their families
to true self-reliance
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
|
Beginning in 2011, the DoD entertained requests
to privatise more of its benefits – this time, a
more radical privatisation of healthcare and a
total restructuring and privatisation of
pensions. Sponsored by the conservative think
tank the Heritage Foundation and supported by
the CEOs of global defence firms serving on the
DoD’s Defense Business Board, and by former
two-, three-, and four-star generals now
assuming consulting roles in banking and defence
firms, new healthcare and retirement proposals
sought to replace existing programmes with
privately held, market-based healthcare and
retirement programmes. They offered vouchers and
cash substitutes in place of defined and
guaranteed supports. Using the rhetoric of
‘soldier choice’, the programmes decreased total
benefits and increased private‑sector access to
government funds and the money of military
personnel.
Military personnel and their families would
receive healthcare vouchers allowing them to
either purchase whatever healthcare plan they
chose from an array of private‑sector providers
– or to purchase none. Instead of earning
defined retirement benefits – pensions –
soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines would
participate in ‘defined contribution plans’,
such as privately-held 401(k) programmes, in
which a defined amount is contributed by the
employer toward the employee’s retirement
benefit. Or they could simply take a lump sum of
cash.
The
voucher and cash proposals represent the logical
end point of both privatisation and
self-reliance adopted by the military in the
1990s. They completely marketise military
welfare and abandon military personnel and their
families to true self-reliance. Every soldier
and veteran will venture into the private sector
alone, entering separate relationships with
separate firms for separate health or investment
services. If personnel endure poor treatment,
they will face it unaided, without recourse to a
chain of command. Military personnel and their
families will be scattered. Their ties to the
military will diminish.
With
their retirement and wallets on the line, will
military personnel rethink the distance they
have for decades maintained from civilians? For
many years, those in the military followed a
solo path toward recognition and support in
Congress. They avoided any association with
civilian employees, public workers, or
recipients of public entitlements. But now that
military personnel are facing bold corporate
gambits for their benefits, they see that the
military welfare state is unravelling. They
cannot deny their shared place alongside
civilian workers, who have long faced a
diminishing welfare state.
Why
should civilians care about the military welfare
state? The conversion of more military benefits
to fully free-market models will not bode well
for most Americans. If even the troops, whose
symbolic status in US politics as a sacrosanct
class can have their benefits outsourced and
privatised, what chance do social programmes
protecting civilians have? These have come under
renewed assault, especially at the state level,
among such Republican governors and presidential
hopefuls as John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker
of Wisconsin. In the past several years, they
have eliminated collective bargaining rights,
public pensions and Medicaid increases in their
states. Inspired by their inroads against the
welfare state, national Republican leaders in
Congress, such as Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, have
intensified their assaults on social security
and the new Affordable Care Act at the federal
level.
How
will the rest of Americans resist the
privatisation of social programmes if vaunted
military personnel cannot? Divided by decades of
divergent welfare states, military personnel and
civilians might now face the shredding of both.
Jennifer
Mittelstadt is
a political historian of the United States and
an associate professor at Rutgers, the State
University of New Jersey. Her latest book is
The Rise of the Military
Welfare State
(2015).
© Aeon
Media Group Ltd. 2017.
