Chapter 1 Rough Draft of "Can We Do Any Less for our Enlisted People?"
Can We Do Any Less
for our Enlisted People? Examining the Uneasy Relationship between America and
its Military though Narratives about Military Retirement
Chapter 1: I Support the Troops
The changing
nature of perspectives on the military in a democratic America
“There is going to come a time now when people are
going to be sorry that they ever saw a Soldier or a Sailor or a Marine” – President Harry
Truman to the Corps of Cadets at West Point, September 28, 1946.
In post- 9/11 America, we live in an era
where public officials, from presidents to small town mayors, feel compelled to
say that they “support the troops.” Elected officials seem to represent most of
the people of the nation in this regard. We are often asked to rise for the
national anthem to honor the troops, not simply in honor of the nation.
Professional sports leagues produce over-the-top pregame and midgame presentations
complete with flyovers of military fighters. No month would be complete without
a heartwarming news story of a soldier returning home early from deployment to
surprise his or her children at school. Perhaps the majority of Americans feel
it is appropriate to honor the few who have served, and it is a few. The
veteran population projection model produced by the Department of Veterans
Affairs estimates that at the end of 2015, there were about 20.8 million
veterans, or about 6.5 percent of the total population.[i]
In a polarized America, the military is
one of the few institutions that is seen as trustworthy. The Gallup Poll’s[ii] annual “trust in
institutions” survey reveals that while the “great deal/quite a lot” level of
confidence in Congress stood at 11 percent in 2018, the military had a 74
percent rating. In fact, of 17 “institutions” measured, the military had the
highest degree of confidence. This confidence level increased dramatically in
1991 as the U.S. military was extricating the forces of Saddam Hussein from
Kuwait in the first Gulf War (Desert Storm). By contrast, confidence in the
military in the 1970s was in the 50 percent range, roughly equivalent to
several other institutions such as public education and the medical system, and
even the presidency, interesting given the recency of the Watergate scandal.
And while trust in institutions declined for nearly all institutions Gallup
measured over the four and a half decades from the post-Vietnam era to 2015,
trust in the military greatly increased. Why?
Perhaps we do seem to trust the military
more because we still suffer from the hangover of how our nation treated its
soldiers who only did their duty in Vietnam. Far from being offered free cups
of coffee in the airport, soldiers in uniform were greeted with disdain,
including the indecency of being spat upon. They were called “baby killers.”
Protestors marched with Vietcong flags. Of course, the political malfeasance
that characterized America’s involvement in Vietnam had little to do with
ordinary soldiers, many drafted, many volunteers, who simply did what their
nation had asked of them. Like their predecessors, the soldiers who fought in
Vietnam were part of a warfighting force that was comprised of both eager
volunteers and reluctant draftees. Like the fictional soldiers “Willie and
Joe,” the World War II creations of cartoonist Bill Mauldin of the Stars and Stripes, the soldiers of
Vietnam were no doubt disdainful of the grand strategy of generals. What was
different about the soldiers of Vietnam is that they bore a large portion of
the public’s rejection of the war itself. So, if we are over-the-top today,
well, we owe them. We are atoning for our national sin of rejecting those who
served in Vietnam, those who were the sons of those who served in World War II.
In 1974, while testifying before Congress
in hearings for a bill on what was called the “Uniformed Services Retirement
Modernization Act,” Donald Harlow, a retired chief master sergeant of the Air
Force Sergeants association noted that
Public law 92-273 increases the federal
retirees’ annuity $20 per month and the
annuity for survivors for $11 per month.
Can we do any less for our enlisted
retirees? Since the President (Ford)
announced his amnesty program, additional
funds are being expended for . . .
deserters and so-called citizens of America who
turned their backs on their country..”
Harlow was reflecting the frustration and
dismay that soldiers, especially professional ones, felt in the aftermath of
Vietnam. A national sense of self-doubt set in. Perhaps the protesters were
right, perhaps the war was wrong. Unfortunately, those in uniform were the most
visible representations of failed policy, and so soldiers suffered. Slowly,
Americans began to understand this rejection of its warriors was unjust.
Americans began to admit that the treatment of those returning from the war was
wrong.
The problem with the view that low
appreciation for the military following the Vietnam experience was some kind of
historical aberration is this: it was not. The War of 1812 was derided by wags
as “Mr. Madison’s War.” The Mexican-American War was criticized as a blatant attempt
by President Polk to gain new slave territories. New York City saw violent
protests against conscription during the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson ran for
reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He Kept us out of War.” Wilson promptly forgot
his own sloganeering, which no doubt helped him win a close election, and
committed the United States to the Great War on the side of Britain and France
in 1917. Yet four years later, after Wilson had made the world “safe for
democracy,” Warren Harding won election on the bland promise of a “return to
normalcy.” Popular support for the Korean War declined significantly two years
into the effort. The relationship between American society and its military is
complicated and uneasy. For most of American history, the military was seen as
something of a necessary evil, and this attitude descended directly from the
disapproval that the writers of the Constitution had toward standing armies, a
philosophy that they wrote into the document itself. Though many Americans had
answered the call to service when the nation went to war from the Revolution
through the Second World War, nearly all did so as citizens, not as
professionals. Citizens take off the uniform when the fighting is finished, but
the appreciation they feel when they get home has often been a mixed bag.
However, our national consciousness seems attuned to the World War II
experience as our psychological exemplar.
During World War II, there were somewhere
in the neighborhood of 17.9 million (mostly) men and (a few) women in uniform.
About 61 percent of those serving were draftees.[iii] They came from all over
America. They were black and white and Native American. They were of German and
Italian, and, later in the war, Japanese descent. They were sons of subsistence
farmers and sons of former presidents. Movie stars, popular musicians, and
athletes donned the uniform. There were nearly entire generations of young men
from small towns in American serving in action. They were supported by a
massive undertaking that included the almost overnight transition of whole
industries from peacetime to wartime production. Women went to work in
factories in large numbers. Paperboys collected scrap metal for the war effort.
It was the best of times. It was, in Tom Brokaw’s words, “the greatest
generation” of Americans, perhaps ever.
In 1945, they came back home and went to
work. They got married, had so many kids that it created a baby boom, and
generally tried to pick up where they left off. Many went to college as a
result of the “G.I. Bill of Rights” legislation of 1944, marking the transition
of higher education from a privilege of elites to a right of common Americans. Those
involved in the battles did not talk much about what they had seen—the carnage,
the bombing of whole cities, the cold, the heat, the terror. But that hardly mattered.
What they became over the next few decades were legends. The experience of this
war changed America in ways not seen since the Civil War. It also profoundly
changed the institutional military forever.
The American experience is one of an
uneasy relationship with the military, and one that President Truman was well
aware of when he spoke in 1946. The presence of peacetime, or “standing army”
was one of the reasons Americans declared independence from Great Britain. The
fear of standing armies was why the quaint-sounding Third Amendment prohibits
the “quartering” of troops in private residences. The so-called Antifederalists
made this (along with the rest of the affirmations that became the Bill of
Rights) a condition for any support of the new Constitution. There was a fear
of professional military officers, with some justification. The “Newburgh
Conspiracy” of 1783 had threatened what looked like a military coup to take
over the newly independent United States. John Resch in Suffering Soldiers: Revolutionary War Veterans, Moral Sentiment, and Political Culture in the Early Republic
(1999) writes that the early political culture of the United States was one of
veneration of militia soldiers at the expense of the Continental Army. That is,
the Revolution had been framed as a “people’s war.” Until the near debacle of
the War of 1812 brought about in no small part by reliance on militia, this
narrative seemed to hold sway. It is an important storyline because it points
to the American traditional myth of the heroic citizen soldier, and diminishes
the importance of the professional soldier.[iv]
Yet for nearly all of America’s history,
the professional army was a cadre force, paid to form the scaffolding that
would frame the mobilization force formed by conscription or volunteerism, or
both. And according to Samuel Huntington in his classic, The Soldier and the State (1957),[v] the military lived
something of a separate existence, largely isolated from the civilian
population it served. The officers were almost like members of a monastic
order, refining military doctrine that most citizens simply did not want to be
bothered with. The demobilization following World War I was one of the more
pronounced in history. Along with its Great War Allies, the United States seemed
that it wanted to ignore the instability in the defeated Germany and its
ambitious armaments program. Like France and Britain, America was not at all
anxious to engage in another conflict of magnitude of the Great War.
To be sure, for all of America’s history, there
had been a professional military. It was small and it was largely an
out-of-sight, out-of-mind enterprise to most Americans. War did come, and wars naturally increased
force size. The pre-World War I armed forces comprised around 235,000 in 1915,
a force that grew to 3.7 million on November 11, 1918. The postwar drawdown
reduced the force to 370,00 by 1923. In the decade prior to the Second World
War, the armed forces of the United States were quite small. The average number
of personnel on duty for the entire military was around 440,000 in any given
year. [vi] This increased steadily during the decade. By
1941, as President Roosevelt pushed Congress for a larger force to meet what he
thought was an impending threat from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the
military reached a strength of 1.65 million. At the end of 1944, the last full
year of the war, there were 11.3 million military members in uniform. By the
end of 1946, there were 3.75 million. [vii]
World War II changed the prewar-wartime
surge-postwar drawdown model. After the Second World War, instead of drawing
down the forces to their cadre level, the nation retained, for the first time,
a standing army. The smallest force between 1946 and 1996 was 1.46 million in
1950. At the peak of the Vietnam War in 1968, the force was 4.87 million, and
while there was a drawdown following Vietnam, the Cold War still raged, meaning
the drawdown was not steep. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union did the
size of the force finally shrink to the 1950 level, with 1.47 million on active
duty in 1996.[viii]
The National Security Act of 1947 essentially reinvented the American military.
The expedient and ad hoc coordination between the Services of the war became
formalized in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president was provided with formal
apparatuses for military advice with the JCS and the newly-formed National
Security Council, with its staff. The American tradition of separate Services
was layered over with a new mega-department, the Department of Defense. The
creation of the DOD certainly did not end interservice rivalry, but it signaled
that National Defense was now taking a prominent, and permanent, seat at the
table.
This was uncharted territory for the
United States. The National Security Act provided the structure, and that act
itself was amended and strengthened over time. The Selective Service Act of
1948 established a peacetime draft, and essentially created a military
personnel model that was purposively designed as a hybrid force of professional
careerist volunteers and draftees, most of whom would serve one enlistment.
This was necessary to build a Cold War force to challenge the threat of the
Soviet Union. The new question was what this standing force meant in terms of
American cultural expectations. Gone was the frontier constabulary force and a
navy that was rarely seen. As Steven Canby (1972)[ix] noted, America was
redefining the force structure paradigm, from a mobilization to a garrison
force. Part of the new paradigm involved integrating the military into society.
As Mark Grandstaff (1996)[x] suggested, this meant the
military would be made “American” with its own permanent bases, complete with
its own middle-class housing, middle-class clubs, middle-class youth sports,
and middle-class stores.
In this new and reinvented military, how
should its personnel be treated? How much should they be paid? How long should
a professional military person serve before they are either forced or allowed
to retire? How do we reward those retirees? How much is too much? What is fair
for the person who served versus what is fair for the taxpayer? In 1949, as
Congress debated what came to be called the Career Compensation Act of 1949,
some of these questions were answered. This act established a somewhat uniform
pay and benefits system for the entire military structure, a first for a nation
with a two-Service tradition.
This book suggests that policy arguments
over one aspect of personnel policy, that of military retirement, can be used as
a proxy for exploring the story of America’s relationship to its military. The
policy is somewhat obscure, though not in the sense that it no one know about
it. In fact, as public retirement scholar Alicia Munnell notes, interest in
(and criticism of) public sector pension plans began to grow after the year
2000.[xi] Most of this criticism is
directed at state and local pensions and the perception that these pensions pay
overly-generous benefits at taxpayer expense. Criticism of military retirement
has been somewhat muted, so it is obscure in the sense that members of the
public discuss it very rarely except under certain circumstances. It only
applies to around two million persons in a population of 330 million.
That was not always the case. In fact, a
spirited public debate over how much is too much for military retirees occurred
between approximately 1965 and 1986. The argument was conducted in the press
and in Congressional hearing chambers. One group of antagonists were
influential interest groups representing military and veteran concerns, and
often their allies—the uniformed leaders in the Department of Defense, though
this leadership sometimes held differing views that the military lobby. On the
opposing side were a less well-organized but no less influential group of
reformers, whose primary interest was in bringing down the long-term budget
cost of military retirement. This loose coalition often allied with some
members of Congress, in particular those whom we would later start calling
budget hawks, and with influential private citizens who, particularly in the
early 1980s, saw grave danger in growing budget deficits.
The 2015 federal military retirement
outlay of $56.65 billion for 2,270,000 beneficiaries[xii] reflects the continuing
cost of building a Cold War force that the Founding Fathers could not have
anticipated. The lion’s share of this ($51.31 billion) was for the 1.87 million
non-disability retirees. Contrast that with the 2015 annualized pay for active
duty and full-time reservists (2.11 million, around 1.4 million of whom are
active duty), which was $63.73 billion. What is $56.65 billion in comparative
terms?
In 2015, the outlay for military
retirement would have been around 10 percent of the overall outlay for the
Department of Defense of around $562.5 billion (note: retired pay does not come
directly from the DOD budget, but a special fund). That outlay was larger than
the outlay for entire cabinet-level departments like the Departments of State,
Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Labor, among others. It was a far
larger outlay than that of NASA or the EPA.
Is that important? Perhaps not. Like any
government program, the decision to fund military retirement is the result of extensive
policy analysis and cost-benefit analyses. The simple cost of something is
interesting and perhaps even shocking to some, but cost must always be weighed
against benefit. The monetization of benefit is always a value proposition, not
simply a mathematical calculation. In this case, the value lay in the ability
of the nation to offer a tangible benefit to those who willingly elect to put
up with an arduous and often dangerous career that features frequent family
separation, frequent moves, unpredictable duty hours, and the ever-present risk
of being killed or permanently disabled as an expectation of the job. The
tension between cost and benefit produces value, and the American People must
assign that value.
Ultimately, retirement policy seeks to
find a balance between several positive values. First, we value reasonable
government budgets. Even though it is not necessarily possible in a
heterogenous nation, we want a federal budget that reflects our priorities, but
we also want a budget that is essentially balanced—a revenue and expenditure
match. The cost of the military overall and the cost of personnel programs
obviously are an important element of the national budget. Personnel programs,
especially retirement, are of course tricky because they are long-term.
Congress can, and does, make adjustments to annual military pay, it often
reduces or increases the force size, but it has a much more difficult time
reducing the cost of retirement, since the retirees are already entitled to pay
based on previously-established formulas. As chapter four discusses, many
military retirees and the organizations representing them balk at the notion
that military retirement is an entitlement program, but by definition, that is
exactly what it is. To support our societal value of a reasonable national
budget, the cost of retirement must be reasonable.
Society also supports a pragmatic value of
attracting and retaining quality personnel within the force. This has always
been important, but conscription dampens the need to offer incentives somewhat.
True conscription began with the Civil War, then was used in both World Wars.
Wars prior to the Civil War relied more heavily on recruitment devices, like
the promise of pensions to build force structure. Even with conscription in
these three major wars, there was enough societal pressure that both volunteers
and conscripts understood they were serving for a patriotic, and importantly,
temporary cause. The force structure that emerged during the immediate postwar
(early Cold War) period was that of a hybrid force: part conscription and part
professional. Until the Vietnam experience essentially destroyed the nation’s
faith in conscription, the fact of conscription covered part of the economic
cost of building the force. Conscripts and first-term enlistees are paid
artificially low wages. The advent of the all-volunteer force (seen as
something new, but actually more in line with historic norms) meant that the
true economic price of the force had to be considered. As with the value of
reasonable budgets, the societal expectation is that these incentives are
useful without being extravagant. No one wants to hear stories of enlisted
troops needing to rely on food stamps, but neither do they like the stories of
colonels retiring at 45 in time to start another career with a second full
retirement at 65.
The final value is related to both of the
above but is even more difficult to quantify. That is the value of gratitude.
Americans realize they owe something to those who have put their lives on the
line in service to the nation. How is that gratitude monetized? We all want to
“support the troops,” but how do we do that? How much do we really owe them? Trying
to answer these questions means that we need to understand what we believe the
nature of the relationship between society and the military, and this
relationship is ever-changing.
This study attempts to tease out the
answers to these questions with an examination of one period of American and
military history—the years 1964 to 1999. This period was selected because it
represents a time when Congress and America were forced to accept drastic
shifts in the paradigm of filling military’s ranks. By 1964, Congress started
to realize the budgetary implications of the first of these paradigm shifts—the
postwar shift from the traditional mobilization army, where conscription and
massive volunteerism built a wartime force, to a Cold War professional force
girded with conscription of first-term troops. This hybrid-conscription model
lasted until the Vietnam War nearly tore American society in two. The model of
patriotic service when the nation called had been deeply engrained into
America’s psyche. The 18 million (mostly) men who served in the Second World
War were the fathers of the college-age students being asked to serve in
Vietnam.
The by the end of the Vietnam era, the
American People rejected the conscription aspect of its hybrid
professional-conscript force, which was seen as inequitable and unjust. Unlike
WWII, the Vietnam War did not symbolize a unifying and existential struggle
where the nation would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from
militaristic nation-states. Instead, Vietnam came to represent a
poorly-considered quagmire, lacking in strategic direction, and directed
against a mysterious enemy who would not surrender. If the postwar National
Security and Selective Service acts brought about a new military paradigm, the
post-Vietnam era represented yet another paradigm shift. This brought about the
second paradigm shift in 25 years, that of an all-volunteer force. In one
sense, this was a back to the future moment. Even though critics like Charles
Moskos decried the creation of the AVF as a victory of “occupational values
over institutional values,”[xiii] the fact is that for
most of America’s history, the military had been a volunteer force. It is
absolutely the case that during wartime buildups, conscription was used to
create a large army, but it also seems clear that the postwar hybrid force (that
is, a standing army) would have been anathema to the majority of Americans
prior to the Second World War. The AVF brought the nation back to where it had
been.
The introduction of the AVF brought with
it the realization that the budget must somehow support recruiting and
retaining a quality professional force. This paradigm shift occurred
coincidentally with the growth of new social programs introduced in the 1960s,
and a nearly two-decade era of hyperinflation and slow wage growth. The peak of this era is in the 1980s, as
Congress battled the Reagan administration over beefing up the military while
trying to control costs. In 1986, Congress reduced costs by “reforming”
military retirement (actually cutting benefits). This reform occurred in the
same three-year period that saw Social Security and Civil Service Retirement
reform. The period ends in 1999, a decade into the cuts to the military that
consecutive Republican and Democratic administrations, along with the willing
support of Congress, had engaged in the post-Cold War era.
It was in 1999 that Congress became
convinced that the cuts had gone too far. In 1986, when Congress had reduced
the benefits, and thus the costs, of military retirement, it really had no
inkling that the Cold War was about to end; that was coincidental. It relies on
accounts of military retirement found in Congressional hearings during this
era, as well as accounts from several newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, and the Stars and
Stripes. The study suggests that when advocates or opponents of reforms or
changes to military retirement provisions offer their perspective, they are in
effect providing individual threads of larger stories.
I assert that the history of the
(sometimes contentious, sometimes mutually supportive) relationship between
America and its military can be divided into several eras. These eras certainly
correspond to the wars the nation has fought, but my treatment uses military
retirement policy as the unit of analysis. In turn, military retirement policy
serves as a proxy for the overall attitude of society toward the military, and
vice-versa. An exploration of these eras follows in the coming chapters. I
categorize these eras as follows:
1.
The
Founding era (Partial Pensions Era) through the post-1812 era (Full Pensions
Era), or about 1787 – 1820.
2.
The
full Pensions Era through the Pensions-Retirement Division Era; 1820 – 1862.
3.
The
Pensions-Retirement Division Era through the Postwar Era, 1862 – 1948.
4.
The
Postwar Era through the Post-Vietnam All-Volunteer Force Era, 1948 – 1973.
5.
The
Post-Vietnam All-Volunteer Force Era through the Post-Cold War Era, 1973 –
1999.
6.
The
Pure Professionalism Era, 1999 – the Present.
As noted above, he major focus of
my examination is from the Post-Vietnam era forward. I discuss the previous
eras to set the stage for that discussion. Throughout, I offer evidence that
changes and modifications to the military retirement policy reflects the
American People’s attitude toward the military, since Congress represents the
People. I also discuss how the military itself, both as an institution and as a
group of individuals who serve, responds to these policy changes, and what that
says about the military attitude toward the American People.
In the spirit of full disclosure, this
book had its genesis as my doctoral dissertation but it is not my doctoral
dissertation. In my dissertation, I was interested in the phenomenon of policy
change. Instead, the book is based on an observation that became more apparent
to me as I researched and wrote. That observation is that when advocates
holding opposing views about military retirement presented their positions to
Congress, or newspapers, or anyone who would listen, they were actually talking
about something bigger. They were talking about the relationship of the United
States Armed Forces and the Nation that employs it. That discovery is as
important as an examination of how policy change happens.
In order to make the connection to the
original research that spawned this book, I will discuss my study. In that
study, I was attempting to demonstrate that various theories of the policy
process, notably “punctuated equilibrium” as developed by Baumgartner and Jones
in 1993 and after, and the “advocacy coalition framework” as developed by
Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith in 1993 and after, were valid ways of framing policy
development. The study succeeded in this. However, because my study involved
looking at extensive documentary evidence, I was able to put myself in the
minds of policy advocates. In this book, I explore their perspectives.
[i] See the National
Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics (Department of Veterans Affairs) at
https://www.va.gov/vetdata/veteran_population.asp.
[ii] Information for
this paragraph is derived from the Gallup “Confidence in Institutions” summary
data at https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx.
[iii] From the National
World War II Museum at https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-us-military-numbers
[iv] John Resch
(1999), Suffering Soldiers: Revolutionary
War Veterans, Moral Sentiment, and Political Culture in the Early Republic.
Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
[v] Samuel
Huntingonton (1957), The Soldier and the
State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-military Relations. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
[vi] U.S. Census
Bureau (1940), Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1940, p. 149.
[vii] U.S. Census
Bureau (1947), Statistical Abstract of
the United States for 1947, p. 219.
[viii] U.S. Census
Bureau (1960, 1980, 2000) Statistical Abstracts of the United States for 1960,
1980, 2000.
[ix] Steven L. Canby
(1972), Military Manpower Procurement: A
Policy Analysis .Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
[x] Mark R.
Grandstaff, “Making the Military American: Advertising, Reform, and the Demise
of an Antimilitary Tradition, 1945-1955.”
The Journal of Military History, April 1996, pp. 299-323.
[xi] Alicia H. Munnell
(2012), State and Local Pensions: Now What? Washington, D.C.: Brookings
Institution.
[xii] See the “FY 2015
DOD Statistical Report on the Military Retirement System.” Washington, D.C.:
DOD Office of the Actuary (July 2016).
[xiii] Charles C.
Moskos, Jr. “From Institution to Occupation.” Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 4, 1977, pp. 41-50.
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