![\"Jennifer](\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/Jennifer-Mittelstadt.jpg\")
<\/a><\/center><\/p>\nChock Block sends us a link to an essay<\/a> by Jennifer Mittelstadt, a pointy-headed associate professor at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Apparently she wrote a book entitled “The Rise of the Military Welfare State<\/a>” that just came out recently, and she bolsters her supposition that the benefits members of the military receive in exchange for their youth, their health, their families is some sort of “government social welfare”. In fact, if you downloaded the text of this piece, removed every instance of the phrase “military welfare state”, it would only be a few hundred words. The phrase appears in nearly every sentence.<\/p>\n The US military has always performed social welfare of some kind or another. Over its long history, it provided daily support to its conscripts \u2013 food, shelter, clothing and medical care \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 they had to convince them. And one of their most vital tools was social welfare benefits.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And there’s the rub. Military service, in many instances is difficult and demanding. The Pentagon needs to retain experienced troops, troops who are smart enough to be conduits for their institutional knowledge between the generations so that the military doesn’t have to relearn the basics of war fighting every time they go to fight our nation’s battles, that “continuation of politics by other means” thing.<\/p>\n 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, \u2018to take care of their own\u2019. 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I guess that the associate professor is letting her covetousness show through, because she doesn’t get the same “safety net” that mere soldiers get because of their career choice.<\/p>\n 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 \u201990s, while many civilian welfare programmes contracted, public and private unions declined, and employers cut private employment benefits, the military expanded its welfare functions.<\/p>\n How did this happen?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n She claims that the military pursued a “politics of separation” from the civilian world, as well they should. Look at the relative crime-free environments of military installations where military policemen still pull people over for “rolling stops” through stop signs and number of other minor infractions compared to what happens outside the gates of those installations. <\/p>\n Despite what many Leftists claim, folks in the military are the “best and brightest” who have myriad opportunities for employment in the civilian world and the military needs to attract them to a job where sacrifice is a daily occurrence and part of the job description. Not only do they need to attract folks to the military, they need to retain those people even after they’re aware of the sacrifice.<\/p>\n If the military welfare system is so down right good, why aren’t inner city youths beating down the doors at recruiters’ office to take advantage of it. I remember advising an unemployed young inner city man to visit his local military recruiter. His response was that “It’s not the 1950s”.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 the student loans and grants so many Americans had come to depend on. Reagan and his team cast these programmes as \u2018benefits [given] to those who were not serving their country\u2019, and thus undeserved. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’d like to see links to those quotes by President Reagan. But, even if he did say those things, he had a point. In the 70s, I couldn’t afford college because the grants and the loans didn’t exist (lucky for me, it turns out) like they exist now. If you look at the problems that those loans and grants have created in recent years, and now the entitlement attitude of college students these days, maybe Reagan was right, they don’t deserve government subsidized educations at the advanced level.<\/p>\n I’d remind Ms. Mittelstadt that the pay and the benefits of people in the military had been severely eroded by inflation and inattention during the Nixon, Ford and Carter years. I remember getting a pay raise of $22\/month when I was promoted from E-4 to Sergeant in 1978. And, oh, yeah, Carter tried to bribe us with a 25% pay raise the month before the election in 1980, so it wasn’t just Reagan. Before that, Carter paid us pay raises with a colorful bed spread and wooden beds and wall lockers. No one was reenlisting for that benefit package.<\/p>\n But, if Ms. Mittelstadt is so envious of the benefits that the members of the military provides, why isn’t she at the recruiters’ desk putting her signature on the dotted line for the job security and medical benefits? Clearly she’s not getting that at Rutgers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"