Different chap it terse in the book so some of the rich Historical Context is lost in my presentation today. I will ask your forbearance to offer you a few indeath glasses. Any questions about the details, the contest or other i would be happy to answer in the q a. Politicians this congress and many soldiers and their families made decisive distinctions between themselves and their social Welfare Benefits and civilians in theirs. Claiming soldiers and benefits isnt new. They had organize the after the civil war, for example, that soldiersere entitled to pensions and to soldiers homes, for example. But i would say in the late 20th century without conscription, without mass armies, the divide between civilian and soldier grew wide and army leaders made very special efforts to distinguish soldiers of the volunteer era from civilians and benefits from quite different. Id like to focus on the moment of origin of this politics of separation, a moment of origin for the volunteer force and the moment of the origin of the vast expansion of the creation of new ones. This moment of origin really, i think, it becomes distinctive for all the arguments that are made afterward. Let me take you back to the 1970s to this moment and think about the ways this argument of separation was made. So the 1970s is the moment when the army decides to survive the transition it will need to provide extensive benefits not only to its personnel and officers but to every rank and this, it says, will be essential to surviving this transformation. It will not be able to recruit without it. In the 70s as some of you might remember was also time of Enormous Economic crisis and the military state ran right into that. There was the energy crisis, precipitating and also joining in with a larger economic recession that begins in 1973 which is the same year of the switch to the volunteer force. Theres incredible inflation that accompanies this leading to the new term stagflation, and theres tremendous budget pressure in congress. And all sorts of Government Spending is on the table. For cutting. Theres civilian social welfare programs on the table for cutting. Theres the pay and the benefits of federal work eers and also benefits of the army right at that moment is arguing needs to be expanded. So some famous faces from this moment, william proxmayer made a specific argument against mi military benefits saying they are to generous and to expand more is too costly and they should take the skcalpel to military programs. Statements like this caused the deputy chief of stuff for personnel for the army to worry that, quote, it was the word possible time, is what he said, to switch to an allvolunteer force. So in this context soldiers are feeling embattled. And soldiers and the army make their case before congress. They make their case through professional Service Organizations and they make their case in the pages of army times. And there i started to see a pattern of Something Interesting happening. What was happening military personnel started to make explicit comparisons between their programs and civilian social welfare programs and to argue if there were going to be cuts as congress was threatening, the should come from civilian social welfare programs and not from military social programs. This is a letter to the editor from an army wife and what shes saying here is what a difficult time shes having, she and her husband, in making ends meet. As they consider the prospect their bin feenefits might be cuy are suggesting the savings be given to military personnel and their programs. She says i feel the money should come from h. U. D. , housing and urban development, welfare, medicare and food stamps, to name a few and then she talks about the millions and probably billions of dollars she believes are wasted on these programs and could be better spent on military benefits. These show up in another example. In this particular one a member of congress had made a suggestion that perhaps the military families who used the program that at that time was the champus for the families of personnel, that it might in some way use a kind of medicare or medicaid type of single pair option, and this was too much for this woman and what she said is i dont even want to hear those two in the same sentence. There really is no comparison between military medical programs and civilian ones. She saw it as down grading and discouraging to have any kind of those comparisons made. So in this context really what we started to see was the pulling away of military personnel and the army from any kind of identification of their growing programs with civilian social welfare. There was an irony here and that is in switching to the volunteer force the demographics of the army shifted marketly in this period in a way that i think it was fair to say, and people in the army feared, that their graphics were not dissimilar from social welfare programs. Among the white soldiers they became poorer and less educated. There were a much higher number of africanamericans in the 1970s and, of course, increasing numbers of women at the same time. Perhaps, in spite of this or perhaps because of this military Army Personnel and Army Leadership really felt a need to make a growing distinction between recipients of social welfare on the outside and those of expanding programs on the inside. Im going to turn to a second defining moment now and this, too, is the product of the austerity of the 1970s. So in the middle of this federal Employee Benefits were swept into the budget crisis and also into the labor unrest among employees, local, state, and national of the 1970s. And into this walks the federation of Government Employees, the largest, at that time, federal employee union. In the late 1975 they say they are going to try to unionize the allvolunteer force. Theyre doing this, they say, because of the threat to benefits so their pay is on the table for cost cutting but as i said before so too were military benefits. To protect military benefits, we offer you the opportunity to join, and if Congress Wont protect your benefits, the union will protect your benefits. Interestingly about a third of Service Personnel seemed to have serious interest and the greatest interest was among senior noncommissioned officers and Career Personnel not surprising since they had been long invested in these benefits and were going to continue to be long invested in these benefits. In the event the unionization never happened, not the least the dozens of bills introduced to outlaw military unionization, but even though it never happened, it was a really decisive moment for social welfare programs in the military. And for this reason it was at that moment that military personnel and military leadership and members of Congress Took yet another step to distance the growing programs of the military from civilians and this time from civilian employees. Show you here, it might be too small for you to see, this is a cartoon from army times and it sort of gets to the heart of what will be the comparability controversy. This has to do with whether or not imposing the idea you could unionize soldiers but the idea civilian work and military work is somehow comparable. For much of u. S. History no one had gone to Great Lengths to distinguish in part because of conscription in times of war people cycled in and out of the military and in the long cold war period they did as well. These distinctions become more important. And so the army and army leaders fight back against any notion of comparability between work and soldieri soldiering, between the benefits that are allowed for federal employees and the benefits that might come to military personnel. Here is a giant, really stereotypical looking union man complete with a dunce cap on his head and what he is saying is the more they shave it down to any old job, the sooner ill take it over. The idea military service wouldnt be Something Special but would just be employment was seen as dangerous. This is in the army times. It was seen dangerous by army pen he will and seen dangerous by army leaders. What you see as a result are arguments, real specific arguments that fight for this notion of comparability. Here i have a couple of different quotes that you can look at. One from secretary don rumsfeld in his first stint. Both are notable to the degree they not only refuse any notion of comparability between employment and military service but they say its degrading. They work a kind of evaluation where employment ends up decidedly less valuable than doing military service. And this moment of distinction is a further moment, not only has the army distanced itself from civilian social welfare programs but its distancing itself from all civilians and all government benefits of all kind and creating instead a different wrong slide a different category this would be a category in which there was nothing comparable to a soldier. The third defining moment has to do with taking these two previous moments of distinction of separation and the armys thoughts about what then if it was not like the social welfare state. What was the growing military welfare state. The argument that they make uses a metaphor and a very important metaphor, of the family. The army describes itself in the 1970s for the first time very selfconsciously in congress and its own publications and advertisements to soldiers as a family. Inward looking Distinct Group of people and then the army further says that what this family will do is take care of its own. This is a revised phrase from world war ii when the red cross assisted the many people who are drafted and their families into the war and becomes a hallmark of the volunteer force and a hallmark of military benefits. Distinct from civilians, its an army familiy and that army famiy takes care of its own. Distinction, separation and elevation and these arguments which were created and deployed in the first years of crisis become were key throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. For all of these efforts to separate the military welfare state and it to protect its growth the truth is it was never secure and this brings me to my second argument. And this was formed by their understanding of not just the military but of civilian welfare programs and what it meant to bring those programs, programs like those into a military setting. It was from within actually for military leaders or recently retired critics who opposed the military state. And a key early moment in which this opposition was expressed was the occasion of the beard report in 1978. The only active duty member of congress. He was serving in the reserves at the time, a fierce critic of the volunteer force and he had many reasons why he was a critic. One of the most important among them, the one that sam nunn when he asked to testify in the senate asked him about first was this one, the military was turning into a welfare institution. Now the beard study expressed the fears of many noncommissioned staffers who were interviewed and key retired figures. What they feared was this. They feared that the military with these benefits expanded to all ranks and with the benefits growing attracted the dregs. That word is in quotes because theyre not my words. So the army became worried the last poor refuge of those unwilling. They worry about the lower case origins of the new volunteers in the 1970s. A kind of welfare heaven, if you will, and this came out in a variety of ways and have a vari military leaders and came out most strongly in the beard report. These people were not comfortable with transforming the army in this way. The other thing that made them worried, and this came out this the beard report and in other ways in the 1970s, they feared the new social welfare programs were with the femininization of the army. That came with changing demographics. While the military had been composed of just over 1 women, by 1980, thats up quite high to around 9 and so theres a rapid increase in the number of women. Over half of all women by the 1980s who are in the army are africanamerican women. The fears of feminizing also come from wives, actually, military wives. The all volunteer force is a much more married force than the draft army had been. In fact, they formed what i describe in my book as a kind of social movement in the late 70s and early 1980s and they force army leader shship to expand ths like child care, for example. Also counseling and other civil services. Those for employment for wives. These sort of create an atmosphere of uneasiness that the new benefits and programs are somehow associated with the fem aininization and both in th beard report and in a famous article published by jim webb, worry about the military becoming a babysitter. The army is becoming filled with welfare workers. The key is this. In their view the army cannot be both a war fighting machine and an institution that provides social welfare. Its going to have to choose one or the other. While it abates somewhat, i argue that it never really goes away and we can talk about in the q a other instances in which it arises. I want to turn now to a second way that the opponents of the military welfare state are influential. And this comes from outside the military and here i want to turn your attention to the influence of welfare reform which is becoming a new policy consensus in the united states, both among governors and also at the federal level, maybe most famously candidate bill clinton running for office in 1992 says that hes going to change welfare as we know it. To do so he and other policymakers are relying on scholars who study what they call multiproblem families or welfare families trying to figure out how to switch them from welfare into the labor market and to diagnose what they see as problems of dependency. These people make themselves make their ways into the army in the early 1990s and the context for this is Operation Desert Storm, Desert Shield in 1991. The army for the first time in the volunteer era goes fully mobilizes for war. And in that instance it judges itself and its after action report has done quite a good job but nevertheless its cautious. It worries actually that too many spouses relied on the army for army support, that perhaps the support had been too good, in fact. And here im showing you a political not a political cartoon but a cartoon done as part of the Operation Desert Storm cartooning contest and this was quite familiar with the roles of rear detachment. There he is and i dont know if you can read this but hes fielding questions from about a dozen wives and theyre quite demanding questions, everything from i have no mail for my husband, why is the late . When is my husband coming home, i need a babysitter and i need help. This is what the army thought of its spouses. So concerned was the army that it hired the same civilian scholars who studied civilian programs to study army wives and Army Families and actually what they did is develop then a theory coming out of this of the overly dependent spouse, the overly demanding spouse and in a term that comes directly out of decades of work on welfare the multiproblem family. After the action report decides army policy should change, the care that it had created and would take care of its own should be clarified in their words and, instead what they recommended was that the army benefits and social Services Start has selfsufficiency. It would make soldiers and families responsible for their readiness. This comes out in the way the army portrays its programs to the public. The morale, welfare and recreation, Public Affairs office. They start to discuss how they can talk differently about the military benefits and army benefits to the public. This is from a strategy session they say theyre not going to talk about support about how it is geared towards prevention and theyre not social services and theyre not going to help peo e people. Working its way up over the years by 1995 the army decides that it will change its philosophy in thinking about its benefits and social services for soldiers and families. Rather than saying the army will take care of its own, the Army Takes Care of its own by teaching its own to take care of it self. And in case the metsage was lost on anyone in this power point theres the eagle with the giant word selfreliant at the bottom. I want to talk about one last way in which the military social welfare programs were resisted by outsiders. And here we turn to a different group, to free market economists. Some people dont know but free market economists were actually responsible for the idea of the modern all volunteer force. Economists at the university of virginia and syracuse had begun studying the military in the same way that they studied other government institutions in thinking about ways they could take the institutions and make them models of free market. In the case of the military what they thought about was a Cash Incentive Program not only for luring and retaining people but also for providing benefits. Rather than allowing the mi military to expand its social Welfare Benefits, the free market economist, name ly milto freeman, he and Alan Greenspan and the other free market economists actually ran the president s commission on the allvolunteer force and did all the research for it. They refused to endorse any expansion of benefits. Instead what they hoped would happen was that they would either be outsourced or privatized or that they would offer soldiers simply more cash and then soldiers could, not unlike in a School Voucher program, simply choose which support or which benefits they would like to have in their own terms. But it would not be provided directly by the government. Now these proposals which came as early as 19681969 were handily beat back by the mi military in the 1970s as it made the transition or otherwise these programs wouldnt have grown, as im telling that you they had. However, i think its fair to say free market economists and, by the 1980s, many corporate leaders, many defense contractors, and many members of congress sympathetic with the approach really watched in horror as the military social welfare programs