The Rise of the Military Welfare State

by Jennifer Mittelstadt

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Military Fiction, War, Politics, Economics, School

296 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2015

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting history on the development of many of the Army's social programs, from on-base clubs to Family Readiness Groups (FRGs). Mittelstadt contrasts how free market economists such as Milton Freedman advocated for simply giving soldiers more cash, while career soldiers such as Westmoreland advocated for the Army providing housing and other services. Interestedly, it was under Clinton and Gore that the Army moved to the free market models.
What the book lacks is any insights or discussion on the way forward, and what the Army could do better. With that I would move the book to 4-stars. For any career officer, or anyone entering command, I would suggest this book as an excellent background on the services that soldiers and family members expect.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an original and thoughtful account of how the American army (and the army is the overwhelming focus) came to view itself, its soldiers, and the pay and benefits it provided, and how those ideas redounded onto the broader American political scene.

The author begins the story with the Gates Commission, the group of free-market economists, such as Walter Oi, Milton Friedman, and Martin Anderson, that worked to end the draft, and who hoped to instead entice new recruits into the army with pure monetary incentives and increased pay. The army fought it, with Chief of Staff William Westmoreland bemoaning the creation of an "army of mercenaries," and enlisted Senator John Stennis and Lyndon Johnson into their cause. The commission triumphed by 1971, but the army fought back by expanding an array of non-pecuniary services to soldiers to entice them to join, as part of a new "Army Family." They especially increased benefits to the first and second termers and enlisted men who previously had no housing or travel benefits despite all their deployments, and gave them variable housing allowances and junior enlisted travel benefits, among other enticements. As the army in the 1970s became more black (up to 1/3), more female (up to 1/10), and acquired more low-education recruits (up to half had not completed high-school, though blacks and females generally had higher education than white males), the importance of such a support network increased. In the 1980s, despite opposition from economists such as Martin Anderson, Reagan signed a new permanent GI BIll in 1986, pushed by Democratic Representative Sonny Montgomery, to replace the one that had expired 10 years earlier, and which provided new kinds of higher education benefits for enlistees.

After the Gulf War, however, and the post-Cold War "drawdown," there arose the perception that soldiers and especially their families had become too dependent on benefits and programs, such as the Family Support Groups, which had taken care of them. Joshua Gotbaum of Lazard Freres helped promote an outsourcing of services such as the new "Residential Communities Initiative," which from a 1996 law had private contractors build and run army housing. Meanwhile the Army Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) agency, which funded bowling, ping-pong shops, gambling parlors and sundry entertainments, became a self-funded corporate-style enterprise, with its own logo and board of trustees. The welfare and benefits remained, but became more devoted to modern business-style outsourcing and a supposed decrease in direct "dependence" on the government.

This book then is an interesting and well-told explanation of a parallel welfare state, one with both similarities and differences to the more famous civilian examples, and with similar trends. The book might have been helped by being a little more clear about how much army "benefits," say per capita or on total, rose and fell in these years, and how their composition changed, but on the whole this is a wonderful addition to the canon of American state-building, which tells a little known but important story about American governance.