Me just emphasize that we are at the Wilson Center, the nations nations memorial to 28th president and one of the nations key now Public Policy form here at washington dc. You are add to the washington history seminar, and activity since 2010 we have ten we have jointly sponsored with the National History center. Its represented here by date kennedy comments director and the associate director. Amanda along with pete in the back help us get organized for the sessions sessions that we hope will provide a forum for bringing Historical Context to Public Policy and to invite historical perspectives on international and national affairs. As always we want to acknowledge the society of historians of American Foreign relations for sponsoring, cosponsoring the series as well as George WashingtonUniversity History department and several others. Other named donors that allow us to make this on a weekly basis. Im supposed to point out that you can look at videos of this in past sessions on both the websites of the Wilson Center just google let me remind those of you here in the room that next week we will have albert jones on crimes against the security of the nation world war ii, the cold war and the evolution of mexicos laws, 1941. 1970. A seminar that we are organizing with cosponsorship with anthonys college. I think that is it, just to close with a reminder please turn yourself owns often now over to eric to introduce todays speaker, jennifer middleton. Thank you christian. Jennifer is a associate professor at the university of history and her books include from welfare to work fair. Welfare in the United States coauthored with marissa shelter fell and most recently the rise of the military welfare state. She is published widely in both scholarly journals and in popular publications. Including the journal of womens history, the Journal Journal of policy history, social politics, new york times, and the los angeles times. She was a scholar at the Woodrow WilsonInternational Center for scholars in 2008, 2009. You should hold the point out copies are available outside after the session. Today should be speaking on that subject. [applause]. Thank you very much eric for that introduction. Thank you christian, also. Thank you thank you for hosting the washington history seminar for inviting me and thank you today and kennedy and amanda from the National History center and also thank you to the woodrow Wilson Center for hosting this event. It is really a pleasure to be here. As eric mentioned i was i was a scholar here at the Wilson Center in 2008, 2009. It is right when i was beginning this project, this research was beginning this project, this research into the relationship between the military and social welfare. It was a wonderful place to spend a year and do the research. Im delighted to be able to be back here talking with you today. I want to start today with the story. Its a story i tell at the beginning of my book. The story about how i came to this subject, or rather the subject came to me. I did not seek it out. So, some years ago i was walking walking down the street in downtown brooklyn. I began eavesdropping on the self and conversation. In my defense, the man spoke loudly and energetically. As were walking along i pupate is behind him, i began to realize he was an Army Recruiter and he was trying to convince someone to join the army. Now i not have any background with military, so my own thoughts about what he would be sane had to do with things like job skills that were transferable maybe afterward into the private sector. Maybe hell be trying to convince this person to join by talking about the possibility of challenging oneself, adventure. Or maybe he maybe he would be talking about a skilled warrior identity that was characteristic of the army of one campaign that i saw on television in 1990. But in that particular conversation, and that particular day he was not discussing those things. Instead he said this. He said the army will get you out of Credit Card Debt and teach you to handle your money. You will get healthcare and youll get child care. Now i was a scholar at that time of the politics and social policy, i still am. As i listen to this i felt shocked, these sounded very much like the programs that i myself study. How did the federal government either implement or not implement programs like this . It sounded to me like perhaps these were social Welfare Programs in the military. This was the time before smart phones and what i did was run into a bank, actually this bank, the corner of montague street downtown brooklyn. I grabbed i grabbed a deposit slip, flipped it over and grabbed a pen. I jotted down this question, is the military may be a kind of welfare state . I folded it up, put in my pocket and took it home. I put it on my desk. I had other things to finish before i could finish before i could try to enter that question. Several years later i came back to. The i really had not left me and i started to really think hard about what it would mean to ask the question that of a story and politician asked to assess questions of the military. Of the army. What i started to get into this it turned out it was a very good time to ask these questions. The field in which i was trained, the history of social policies and politics had changed in ways that made possible the imagining of other institutions of social welfare. So a few things had happened, people were looking beyond the straight for Government Program like social security, aid to families with dependent children which is the program i had studies study. They were looking at what some called hidden welfare states or submerge welfare states, looking instead attacks programs. Tax programs that had inducements or support for having children or for owning a house for example. They looked at loans that might come from institutions like the fha for example. Also other scholars who talk not only about an obvious or federal welfare state but those who looked at private forms of social welfare which came to be known as a publicprivate welfare state. Here they looked at things like private benefits which were encouraged and even subsidize to the tax structure through the federal government. So through this expanding notion and look like it was possible to bring the military into this frame and to ask questions about how the military benefits and social services might function in a social welfare capacity. At the same time, military history changed also in a way that made this work possible. So i wondered when i started looking at this what military historians that mightve been accustomed to looking at tactics would think of asking instead about the social welfare context of the military. But im showing you here, this is from the society of military historians, 2014 white paper in which they lay out quite clearly that the new military history which has a quite broad conception of what counts as military history, that is the military history these days. Some military history two was quite open to the possibility of thinking about social welfare functions of the military. So i plunged in to this research. As it turned out i was hardly this first person who thought about the relationship between the military and social welfare. European scholars had long explored the relationship between war and social welfare. The particular the ways world war i and world war ii in europe offered and even demanded new opportunities for universal social welfare policies afterward. In the United States as well, scholars looked at the relationship between veterans and social welfare. In particular they took close look at the civil war era pensions. In the civil where home and then of course many have looked at the eight g. I. Bill that fault world war ii and thought about how that not only vaulted millions of americans into the middle class providing them with social and mimic security but also legitimated the function of the federal government in doing that for a wide group of citizens. But the scholars had thought about the relationship between the military and social welfare, and other countries are in a different time the thing was other people had thought about the relationship too. Between the more recent, all volunteer military and social welfare. Although no one had really. A comprehensive study of this relationship. It was the kind of Common Knowledge among journalists who studied the military, among military the military, among military sociologists, also among Service Members themselves, that the military function in the late 20th century, in the words of tom ricks as a kind of Great Society in camouflage. Here i have just a few quotes that would give you an example of that kind of Common Knowledge that was circulating at the time. So if the military was a Great Society and camouflage, what did it look like . So the first thing i needed to do was wrap my head around what constituted what i might think of the military welfare state. So this is a graphic that comes from the Defense Department and it shows you what military benefits would have looked at circa 2000. A little bit before the time i heard that overheard the conversation on the street. Thing to point out here are two. Number one, these programs these programs are quite comprehensive in nature. So they follow Service Personnel and their family members what we might think of through the life course, they provide various kinds of support for various needs that people or families would have as their families went from young to older. They also provide a wide variety of different types of social welfare, everything from Heart Services like housing and healthcare to what we might think of as a soft social services that might be related to counseling, social work, it might be related to Financial Literacy or my peak counseling on legal aid and things like that. It is also worth pointing out that they are universal. This is something ill are universal. This is something ill talk about more in a little bit. That is they apply to every Single Member of the armed forces and his or her family member. This was new with the advent of the all volunteer force. The cost of the military welfare state and wrapping my hands around what it was i had to grapple with this which was quite difficult. The cost of the military welfare state are high, they had been high since the advent of the volunteer force. These programs can be hard to locate, there squirreled away in different parts of the Defense Department budget, money of them buried somewhere in operations and maintenance but others in construction and others in research and development. Their vast that in 2009 the department of defense admitted that for qualityoflife programs that had no idea, it had some idea, cannot pinpoint pressure how sure how much they spent on them. What is clear is two things, manpower starting in the early 1970s was over 50 of the Defense Department budget. That percentage has changed over the year. It is largely declined. Declined. It is not declined as a result of manpowers bending its declined in real terms benefit and social programs that serve military personnel and their families have grown over the years. One way of capturing this and thinking about manpower is the benefits and social services depending on the year account between 35 and 40 of the overall manpower costs which also include pay package for example. Cash pay. So it is a very significant part of the Defense Department budget. Another way to capture the military welfare state and what it is is to think about how many people have served. Since 19731973 they have been over 10 million personnel who have volunteered for service. They have partaken using military benefits and social services. Theyre far outnumbered by their dependence or their family members. They account for about another 30,000,000 or so people who have had access to this. It is not an incident if you get number of americans who have been affected by military social Welfare Programs. So a few things that are important to think about also. In capturing what makes the military social Welfare Program distinct besides their universal and comprehensiveness. Beside the cost and decide the scope and number people they serve. One of the first things to note that they are quite different from past american examples of military social welfare. Number number one, they are not veterans benefits. We are looking here at programs for activeduty personnel. Nor do they serve activeduty personnel who are serving at the time of draft. Rather they are serving the selves like ripped of volunteers. Part of what this means is that this purpose is different from veteran benefits of previous eras. They are not to reward citizens for service but rather they are to recruit and retain volunteers. There there to make their lives while they are serving safer, more comfortable and more reliable so they can do their jobs and so their family members are supported. All of this became necessary for the volunteer force. Here ive just put out to different, this is an advertisement this is an article in the newspaper that shows the importance of the very early 1970s as the military switching to the volunteer force of these benefits, for especially recruitment, especially retention. Finally, unlike earlier periods in which there was a relationship between the military and social welfare through veterans benefits, what is distinct about these benefits and a volunteer a volunteer era is that they are growing at a time when civilian social welfare is declining. When it is under political attack, when it is entrenched in various ways. This is quite different from the period of civil war era pensions, its different from the world war i expansion of health care for veterans. It is different from the period of world war ii and the g. I. Bill. At those periods the state was generally expanding as was social overcapacity is whether at the state level or federal level. This is distinct about recent military welfare. So my book tries to collect all of this information and then dies deeply into the history of the benefits and programs of the all volunteer military. Take in the, the largest of the services of the most reliant really of every recruitment and retention compares all the other services. It does two things, first the book traces just the history of these programs in the army. It tracks the architects and the beneficiaries of rv social Welfare Programs. How it under what circumstances the programs are created or what these programs meant for soldiers and families and for the army itself. In keeping with my training as a scholar of politics and social policy i also pushed beyond the boundaries of the army and the military to consider what the military welfare statement for civilians. And the civilian welfare state, and in reverse with the civilian welfare statement for the growing military welfare state. For once i began studying studying history abound military social Welfare Programs could not at any point in their history be separated from the story of civilian social welfare. Indeed, far more than i had imagined when i started the started the project, much of the military welfare state hinged on its troubled relationship to civilian social Welfare Programs. All so what i would like to do is spend my time digging into military welfare state to the ill make just to arguments about the two. First the military welfare state was not really an easier natural development. Indeed the building of social Welfare Programs within the army was hard work. It was hard political work in congress were keen for the money and authorization, is hard political work with the general public as well in order to make these programs accepted and legitimate. As i observe this history of this hard political work i noticed something significant. That was that the military social Welfare Program grew in part as a result of actions of military leaders and some personal themselves in pursuing the politic of what i would call separation. Separation separation from civilians, and separation from civilian social Welfare Programs. If we put this another way, we might say that Army Leadership and others in the army produced a new social Welfare Programs while at the same time denying they were social Welfare Programs. Sometimes in the process denigrated social Welfare Programs. The second argument i will make is that this politics of separation was successful but only for a time. It turned out the military welfare state had opponents, critics, doubters, both within the military and outside. Their opposition was based in large part also on their understanding of the civilian Welfare Programs. On their fears about what it might mean to bring civilian social Welfare Programs into the military, into the army. The efforts of these opponents of the military social welfare pave the way for deep transformation of purposes and structures that took place in the 1990s and the 2000s. This transformation left the military welfare state in somewhat of a paradox, in a position that was not dissimilar actua