A precarious financial situation

With news like this, it's no wonder the military falls short of recruiting goals.

The headline was stark: “Army suggests food stamps for soldiers battling inflation.” Despite the fact that soldiers are due a pay raise in the coming months, it won’t be enough to keep up with inflation, and that’s a sad fact for people who are putting themselves on the line to be our tripwire of defense.

Now I’m going to cheerfully admit I’m not a military veteran, as I had the good fortune of growing up and attaining draft age at a time when Vietnam was over and Desert Storm hadn’t been launched yet. At that time, the military was used for small-scale operations like those in Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, and Panama where we (mostly) swatted down tinpot dictators like so many flies. It was the era of “Top Gun” and a declining threat from the Soviet Union that led to the so-called “peace dividend” that we squandered in the Middle East. So I don’t have a personal point of reference to this unless you count my dad, and he was drafted into (and served his hitch in) the Army before I was born.

As an aside: I brought up “Top Gun” because it was a microcosm of the mid-80’s world we lived in, the Reagan era of “peace through strength.” We had a military that kicked ass and took names, and the movie illustated that perfectly. I think the popularity of its long-awaited sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” came because it once again illustrated the idea of the retro non-woke military: each of those pilots earned their way onto the sqaudron as the best of the best and you didn’t have the (seemingly obligitory for typical modern Hollywood) gay romance or transgender character anywhere in the movie. Anyway…

Because we’re not in a situation like we were after Pearl Harbor or in the wake of 9/11, when interest in joining the military surged, the general idea of their present-day peacetime recruitment is that of signing on the dotted line now for a plethora of benefits later. And who didn’t want to “Be all you can be” in the Army or one of the “few good men” who were Marines? Even the Navy pledged, “it’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.”

In that respect, you got a lot of working-class kids whose parents may not have been able to afford college for them or, in more recent times, were leery of sending the “skulls full of mush” away to school because of the indoctrination - problem is, the military has now taken a severe turn in that direction, too. Like me, they were taught the idea of the military was to “kill people and break things” and not that of stressing over addressing every soldier by their proper pronoun or paying for their gender transition.

Besides the idea of a “woke” military, there’s also the recent history of its usage. Just like Russia is finding with extending their excursion into the Ukraine, I’m not sure American kids are sold on the benefits of playing the world’s policeman or losing their lives defending Taiwan against China. I suspect a part of this is their indoctrination that reckons America is no more special than any other nation and, in fact, deserves its beating because of sins it committed in some bygone era, but there’s also a legitimate question of why we fought a nationbuilding War on Terror as we did over the last two decades.

In years past, our wars had a conclusion: we beat back the British and eradicated them from our shores (twice), the Union took advantage of its industrial power to subdue an agrarian Confederacy, Adolf Hitler committed suicide rather than watch his Nazi Germany fall to the Allies, and the Japanese realized we weren’t playing around when we vaporized two of their cities. But in more recent times, we pulled our punches enough to only maintain a stalemate, or worse: McArthur was fired by Harry Truman for wanting to run the Communists out of North Korea and back to China, we abandoned South Vietnam when public opinion turned against the war - including the verbal abuse of our soldiers returning from there - and our leadership tried to massage the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into building democracies when none had existed before.

Aside from the most extreme libertarians and isolationists, though, I don’t think the majority of Americans mind a great deal that we have troops all over the world because we have interests, via treaty and otherwise, in all those places. But the usage of those troops is another thing: it would be exceedingly unpopular to engage our military personnel in Ukraine because it’s not generally perceived to be a good idea to involve our troops.

More importantly, it’s an open question as to whether it’s in our interest to shuttle over $40 billion and counting in aid to Ukraine, particularly when it would cost a fraction of that to give our soldiers a raise commensarate with inflation. Granted, a lot of that is Ukraine-bound equipment and non-cash items, but the principle still remains.

But the question about the recruiting slump remains. In my view we would go a long way to restoring a “Top Gun” military if we cut out the money we’re wasting in an attempt at having a “woke” fighting force and gave it to the troops. And let’s be real: while the military-industrial complex needs to be reined in (no more endless wars), there are interests worth fighting for out there. If there weren’t, other nations wouldn’t be increasing their military budgets to have their way in the world.

A raise is just the first step.