KOCH's - You can fix this, but you don't
For shame:
Military families go hungry as US
defense spending soars
Washington
gleefully pours money into endless weapons build-ups, but the rank and file
can’t get help putting food on the table.
JANUARY 18, 2023,
Written by Andrea Mazzarino,
link: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/
Copied here without permission
By
any standard, the money the United States government pours into its military is
simply overwhelming. Take the $858-billion defense spending authorization that
President Biden signed into law last month. Not only did that bill pass
in an otherwise riven Senate by a bipartisan majority of 83-11, but this year’s
budget increase of 4.3% is the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since
World War II. Indeed, the Pentagon has been granted more money than the
next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined. And that doesn’t even take into
account funding for homeland security or
the growing costs of caring for the veterans of this
country’s post-9/11 wars. That legislation also includes the largest pay raise in
20 years for active-duty and reserve forces and an expansion of a supplemental
“basic needs allowance” to
support military families with incomes near the poverty line.
And
yet, despite those changes and a Pentagon budget that’s gone through the roof,
many U.S. troops and military families will continue to struggle to make ends
meet. Take one basic indicator of welfare: whether or not you have enough to
eat. Tens of thousands of
service members remain “food
insecure” or hungry. Put another way, during the past year, members of those
families either worried that their food would run out or actually did run out
of food.
As
a military spouse myself and co-founder of the Costs of War Project, I recently interviewed Tech Sergeant
Daniel Faust, a full-time Air Force reserve member responsible for training
other airmen. He’s a married father of four who has found himself on the brink
of homelessness four times between 2012 and 2019 because he had to choose
between necessities like groceries and paying the rent. He managed to make ends
meet by seeking assistance from local charities. And sadly enough, that airman
has been in all-too-good company for a while now. In 2019, an estimated one in eight military
families were considered food insecure. In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19
pandemic, that figure rose to nearly a quarter of
them. More recently, one in six military
families experienced food insecurity, according to the advocacy group Military
Family Advisory Network.
The majority of members
of the military largely come from middle-class neighborhoods
and, not surprisingly perhaps, their struggles mirror those faced by so many
other Americans. Spurred by a multitude of factors, including pandemic-related
supply-chain problems and — you guessed it — war, inflation in the U.S. rose
by more than 9% in 2022.
On average, American wages grew by about 4.5% last year and so
failed to keep up with the cost of living. This was no less true in the
military.
An Indifferent Public
An
abiding support for arming
Ukraine suggests that many Americans are at least paying attention to that
aspect of U.S. military policy. Yet here’s the strange thing (to me, at least):
so many of us in this century seemed to care all too little about the
deleterious domestic impacts of our prolonged, disastrous Global War on Terror.
The U.S. military’s growing budget and a reach that, in terms of military bases and deployed troops abroad,
encompasses dozens of countries,
was at least partly responsible for an increasingly divided, ever more radicalized populace
here at home, degraded protections for civil liberties and human rights, and ever less access to
decent healthcare and food for so many
Americans.
That
hunger is an issue at all in a military so wildly well-funded by Congress
should be a grim reminder of how little attention we pay to so many crucial
issues, including how our troops are treated. Americans simply take too
much for granted. This is especially sad, since government red tape
is significantly responsible for creating the barriers to food security for
military families.
When
it comes to needless red tape, just consider how the government determines the
eligibility of such families for food assistance. Advocacy groups like the
National Military Family Association and MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger
have highlighted the way
in which the Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH),
a non-taxable stipend given to military families to help cover housing, is
counted as part of military pay in determining the eligibility of families for
food assistance. Because of that, all too many families who need such
assistance are disqualified.
Debt-Funded Living, Debt-Funded Wars
The
BAH issue is but one part of a larger picture of twenty-first-century military
life with its torrent of expenses, many of which (like local housing markets)
you can’t predict. I know because I’ve been a military spouse for 12 years. As
an officer’s wife and a white, cisgender woman from an upper-middle-class
background, I’m one of the most privileged military spouses out there. I have
two graduate degrees, a job I can do from home, and children without major
health issues. Our family has loved ones who, when our finances get tight,
support us logistically and financially with everything from childcare to
housing expenses to Christmas gifts for our children.
And
yet even for us, affording the basics has sometimes proved challenging. During
the first few months after any move to a new duty station, a typical uprooting
experience for military families, we’ve had to wield our credit cards to get
food and other necessities like gas. Add to that take-out and restaurant meals,
hotel rooms, and Ubers as we wait weeks for private contractors to arrive with
our kitchen supplies, furniture, and the like.
Tag
on the cost of hiring babysitters while we wait for affordable childcare
centers in the new area to accept our two young children, and then the high
cost of childcare when we finally get spots. In 2018, during one of those
moves, I discovered that the military had even begun putting relocated families
like ours at the back of wait lists for childcare fee assistance — “to give
others a chance,” one Pentagon representative told me when I called to
complain. In each of the five years before both of our children entered public
school, we spent nearly twice as much on childcare as the average junior
enlisted military service member gets in total income
for his or her family.
Our
finances are still struggling to catch up with demands like these, which are
the essence of military life.
But
don’t worry, even if your spouse isn’t nearby, there are still plenty of social
opportunities (often mandated by commanders) for family members to get together
with one another, including annual balls for which you’re expected to purchase
pricey tickets. In the post-9/11 era, such events have become more common and
are frequently seen as obligatory. In this age of
the gig economy and the rolling back of
workplace benefits and protections, the military is, in its own fashion,
leading the way when it comes to “bringing your whole self (money
included) to work.”
Now,
add the Covid-19 pandemic into this fun mix. The schedules of many military
personnel only grew more complicated given pre- and post-deployment
quarantine requirements and
labor and supply-chain issues that made moving ever less
efficient. Military spouse unemployment rates,
which had hovered around 24% in the pre-pandemic years, shot up to more than
30% by early 2021. Spouses already used to single parenting during deployments
could no longer rely on public schools and daycare centers to free them to go
to work. Infection rates in military communities soared because of
travel, as well as weak (or even nonexistent) Covid policies. All of this, of
course, ensured that absenteeism from work and school would only grow among
family members. And to make things worse, as the last Congress ended, the
Republicans insisted that an authorization rescinding the
requirement for military personnel to get Covid vaccines become part of the
Pentagon budget bill. All I can say is that’s a bit more individual freedom
than this military spouse can wrap her brain around right now.
Worse
yet, this country’s seemingly eternal and disastrous twenty-first-century war
on terror, financed almost entirely by national debt, also ensured that members of the military,
shuttled all over the planet, would incur ever more of it themselves. It should
be no surprise then that many more military families than civilian ones
struggle with credit-card debt.
And
now, as our country seems to be gearing up for possible confrontations not
just with terror groups or local rebel outfits in places like Afghanistan or
Iraq, but with other great powers, the problems of living in the U.S. military
are hardly likely to get easier.
The Fire of War Is Spreading
Secretary
of Defense Lloyd Austin has at least publicly acknowledged hunger
as a problem in the military and taken modest steps to
alleviate the financial stresses on military families. Still, that problem is
far larger than the Pentagon is willing to face. According to Abby Leibman,
MAZON’s chief executive officer, Pentagon officials and military base
commanders commonly deny that hunger exists among their subordinates. Sometimes
they even discourage families in need of food assistance from seeking help.
Daniel Faust, the sergeant I mentioned earlier, told me that his colleagues and
trainees, concerned about seeming needy or not convinced that military services
offering help will actually be useful, often won’t ask for assistance — even if
their incomes barely support their families. Indeed, a recently released RAND
Corporation investigation into military hunger found that some troops
worried that seeking food assistance would jeopardize their careers.
I’m
lucky that I haven’t had to seek food assistance from the government. However,
I’ve heard dozens of officers, enlisted personnel, and family members shrug off
such problems by attributing debt among the troops to lack of education,
immaturity, or an inability to cope with stress in healthy ways. What you
rarely hear is someone in this community complaining that military pay just
doesn’t support the basic needs of families.
Ignoring
food needs in the military is, in the end, about more than just food. Individual
cooking and communal meals can help individuals and families cope in the
absence of adequate mental healthcare or… well, so much else. The combat
veteran who takes up baking as a tactile way of reminding himself that he’s
here in the present and not back in Afghanistan or Iraq or Somalia or Syria is
learning to conquer mental illness. The family that gathers for meals between
deployments is seizing an opportunity to connect. In an age when military kids
are suffering from widespread mental-health
problems, eating together is one way parents can sometimes combat anxiety and
depression.
Whatever
is life-enhancing and doesn’t require a professional degree is vital in today’s
stressed-out military. Heaven only knows, we’ve had enough excitement in the
years of the war on terror. Perhaps in its wake you won’t be surprised to learn
that military suicide rates have
reached an all-time high, while mental healthcare is remarkably inaccessible (especially to
families whose kids have disabilities or mental illnesses). And don’t let me
get started on sexual assault or child abuse, or the poor school performance of
so many military kids, or even the growth of divorce, not to speak of violent crime, in the
services in these years.
Yes,
problems like these certainly existed in the military before the post-9/11 war
on terror began, but they grew as both the scale and scope of our disastrous
military engagements and the Pentagon budget exploded. Now, with the war in
Ukraine and growing tensions with China over Taiwan, we live in what could
prove to be the aftermath from hell. In other words, to quote 1980s star Billy
Joel’s famous record title, we did start this fire.
Believe
me, what’s truly striking about this year’s Pentagon funding isn’t that modest
military pay raise. It’s the way Congress is allowing the Department of Defense
to make ever more stunning multi-year spending commitments to
corporate arms contractors. For example, the Army has awarded Raytheon
Technologies $2 billion in
contracts to replace (or even expand) supplies of missile systems that have
been sent to aid Ukraine in its war against Russia. So count on one thing:
the CEOs of Raytheon and
other similar companies will not go hungry (though some of their own workers just might).
Nor
are those fat cats even consistently made to account for how they use our
taxpayer dollars. To take but one example, between 2013 and 2017, the Pentagon
entered into staggering numbers of
contracts with corporations that had been indicted, fined, and/or convicted of
fraud. The total value of those questionable contracts surpassed $334 billion. Think of how
many military childcare centers could
have been built with such sums.
Human Welfare, Not Corporate Welfare
Policymakers
have grown accustomed to evaluating measures meant to benefit military families
in terms of how “mission ready” such
families will become. You would think that access to food was such a
fundamental need that anyone would simply view it as a human right. The
Pentagon, however, continues to frame food security as an instrument of national security, as if
it were another weapon with which to arm expendable service members.
To
my mind, here’s the bottom line when it comes to that staggering Pentagon
budget: For the military and the rest of us, how could it be that corporate
weapons makers are in funding heaven and all too many members of our military
in a homegrown version of funding hell? Shouldn’t we be fighting, first and
foremost, for a decent life for all of us here at home? Veteran unemployment,
the pandemic, the Capitol insurrection — these crises have undermined the very
reasons many joined the military in the first place.
If
we can’t even feed the fighters (and their families) decently, then who or what
exactly are we defending? And if we don’t change course now by investing
in alternatives to what
we so inaccurately call national defense, I’m afraid that there will indeed be
a reckoning.
Those
worried about looking soft on national defense by even considering curbing
military spending ought to consider at least the security implications of
military hunger. We all have daily needs which, if
unmet, can lead to desperation. Hunger can and does fuel armed violence, and
has helped lead the way to
some of the most brutal regimes
in history. In an era when uniformed personnel were distinctly overrepresented among
the domestic extremists who attacked our Capitol on January 6, 2021, one of the fastest ways to undermine our quality
of life may just be to let our troops and their families, hungry and in
anguish, turn against their own people.
This piece has been republished with
permission from TomDispatch.
Written by
Andrea Mazzarino
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