Jennifer Mittelstadt's latest book provides welcomed insight into the relationship between military personnel and the amorphous U.S. welfare state, and the varied implications of the 1973 creation of the all-volunteer force (AVF). Mittelstadt maintains that an “elaborate social and economic safety net” attracted prospective service members to the military following the end of conscription, and “convinced them to reenlist” (pp. 3–4). Focusing particularly on the Army, Mittelstadt describes the economic and social ideals that shaped entitlements from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century.
Mittelstadt's story begins soon after the establishment of the AVF, when free market economists like Milton Friedman argued that potential recruits should be treated as rational economic actors, and offered competitive pay rather than costly benefits like free housing and medical care. Military officials, however, worried that model would usher in “the age of the mercenary” (p. 33). A committed force, they suggested, could only be built by service members who were convinced they were being supported by a cohesive and interdependent institution. That model of “masculine familialism” eventually won the day (p. 36).
Just as free market economists viewed the military as a front in a larger battle to rein in government largesse, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) saw it as a site to wage a fight for workers’ rights. AFGE's unionization effort of the 1970s was important, according to Mittelstadt, because it offered high-ranking military officials and members of Congress a forum to highlight the “distinct and elevated status of military service” (p. 69). Here was a wholly unique work environment, they suggested, where unionization posed a distinct threat to hierarchy and performance. Arguments about the uniqueness of a military career helped to thwart AFGE's campaign, and served as a justification for further expansions in benefits.
By the early 1980s, military officials and members of Congress recognized with alarm that increasing numbers of poor, minority, and under-educated recruits were joining the ranks. One Congressman wondered whether the Army was becoming a “social welfare institution” (p. 89). Army officials, for their part, feared that recruits who had fewer years of education were relatively “low-quality”—costly to train and not likely complete their enlistments.
Those dueling apprehensions shaped debates surrounding the 1984 Montgomery G.I. Bill, when free market economists again argued for the sanctity of cash incentives, as army officials and sociologists maintained that educational and other benefits would attract more “committed, responsible, upstanding” recruits (p. 105). Justifications for expanding military benefits, Mittelstadt presciently observes, were occasionally directly tied to arguments that civilian entitlements should be slashed. Existing student aid programs were, “kind of a G.I. Bill without service,” according to G.I. Bill sponsor, Sonny Montgomery (p. 114). Service members, unlike others, he and others suggested, had earned entitlements.
Policies did not only trickle down from above, but also percolated within the ranks. Mittelstadt focuses particularly on the efforts of Army wives, who organized multiple Army Family Symposia in the 1980s, where attendees could discuss mounting concerns about the pressures of military life. The upshot was the creation of new family programs focused on housing, child care, counseling, and employment assistance. As Mittelstadt puts it, “the institutional power of wives spurred tangible enhancements to the social welfare of army wives and children” (p. 145).
Once family programs were in place, army leaders ensured that they were infused with the ideals of a rising evangelical Christian movement, which maintained that happy families consisted of male breadwinners and supportive, churchgoing wives. Such representations, Mittelstadt points out, were hardly realistic; between one-sixth and one-fourth of army personnel—many of them women—had been or were single parents in the 1980s. But the impressions helped reinforce the notion that military families stood counter to a “degenerating civilian family structure,” and were thus more deserving of entitlements (p. 168).
An ideological shift occurred following the 1990–1991 Gulf War, when army officials and officers’ wives expressed dismay that “problem families” required “repeated interventions” (p. 181). Wives of mobilized soldiers who expected the Army to ensure that their lawns were mowed and their children cared for, Mittelstadt observes, were viewed as pathologically dependent. Such assessments, “mirrored analyses of civilian welfare clients” and helped usher in an era when the army compelled families to embrace self-reliance (p. 180).
Against that backdrop, multiple factors led to the limiting and privatization of the military welfare state in the 1990s and 2000s. At the end of the Cold War, amidst a general drawdown, free market economists finally had the ears not only of Republican and Democrat politicians eager to pursue broad-based welfare reform, but also army leaders open to adopting en vogue efficiency-focused programs like “Total Quality Management.” Facing dwindling funding, the Army cut personnel and outsourced “non-core” jobs and housing and food services. The trends, Mittelstadt argues, signaled a powerful blow to the ideals espoused in the 1970s—that the Army should “take care of its own.”
Mittelstadt is most concerned with the ideological tensions surrounding entitlements, not with providing a political or institutional history of all forms of Army social assistance. A helpful Appendix briefly describes the variety of entitlements that comprised the military welfare state and could serve as the basis for further case studies.
The Rise of the Military Welfare State makes a variety of important contributions and deserves wide readership. Scholars have offered perspective on veterans’ benefits of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the selectivity and nebulousness of the U.S. welfare state, and the political underpinnings of the advent of the AVF and its impact on individuals and communities. Mittelstadt's work relates to and builds upon each of those diverse fields of inquiry by artfully demonstrating that the military welfare state of the 1970s and beyond was predicated on historically contingent ideals regarding worthy service and just rewards.
