On Service

According to the DoD Manpower Data Center, as of 31 December 2019, the US military had 1,352,917 active-duty members across all five branches of service (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard). This slice of the American population is afforded an unmatched level of preferential treatment not seen in other sectors of American society on account of their service. Members of the military, regardless of what they did in the military, how long they were in the ranks, or where they were deployed, are all qualified for loan forgiveness, the option for a $0 down mortgage, use of the GI Bill to pay for college, preferential points on federal applications, and military-to-civilian job programs. This list does not begin to attempt to enumerate the countless lesser and intangible benefits, from priority boarding on airplanes to a reverential deference to anyone who puts on a uniform. This preferential treatment is the result of our society using a hatchet when a scalpel is necessary. In conferring this preferential treatment, there are two main reasons given: this is the least a thankful nation can do for these service members’ selfless service, and the base military pay is not sufficient compensation for said service. Hopefully this essay will uncover the pernicious side effects of these policies on American ideals and our social fabric.

First, then, we should define service. Service, in the context of the armed forces, seems to imply more than the simple dictionary definition of providing assistance to someone else. If this simple definition of service were all we had in mind when doling out these privileges, the list of recipients would be long and exhausting, and there would probably need to be a new government bureaucracy created to keep track of all those people providing services to the citizens of the United States. Sanitation workers, whose jobs ensure there is no outbreak of typhus and other communicable diseases, provide a service that affects far more Americans than the average military member. There is a curious irony that military occupations with direct civilian equivalents — police officers, firefighters, doctors, lawyers — are given additional benefits that their non-military cousins do not. “Service” in the military context must mean something else, something additional. What is this something additional? The implication is military service goes above ordinary, civilian service, namely due to its inherent danger and the hardships of deployment.

The straw man of this argument is proven in the numbers. According to the Congressional Research Service, since 2006, a total of 16,652 active-duty personnel and mobilized reservists have died while serving in the armed forces; seventy-three percent of these casualties “occurred under circumstances unrelated to war,” which equals about 12,116 service members. Methods of death in this category include “accident, self-inflicted wounds, or illness.” So far, sounds like ways civilians die. That leaves approximately 4,536 military personnel who have died in hostile action against an enemy — this is where the military separates itself from the civilian population. To put this in perspective, in Afghanistan (arguably the most active theater of war currently) twenty-four U.S. service members were killed in action in 2019. Given the figure listed above for the total number of U.S. service members, that is a per capita KIA rate of about 1.8 per 100,000 service members. By contrast, the per capita murder rate in Baltimore in 2019 was 58 murders per 100,000 residents. At the risk of being flippant, it is far more dangerous to live in Baltimore than to be in the military, and if you do join the military, you are more likely to die outside of combat (where the same causes of death plague the civilian population) than in combat. Arguments, then, on the basis of service qua service and danger thus prove to be unfair.

This leaves the second argument often put forward in defense of these benefits, particularly the “hard” (i.e. tangible) benefits the government provides. This second argument contends military compensation is not sufficient, and additionally that these benefits are what attracts and retains soldiers. There are two problems with this argument. The first is that these benefits are unique to government employees, since they are benefits conferred by fiat. A private entity, for example, cannot offer loan forgiveness; while a private employer cannot forgive a loan outright, they can incentivize employment by offering higher pay or money on top of a salary that is devoted to loan pay back. If a company does this, however, it comes from their bottom line, unlike the government, who can borrow against itself. This lack of parity is the heart of the unfairness. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, in 2019, people working in the (again, ironically titled) service industry earned an average of $31,252. Calculating an average salary for someone in the military is very difficult; there’s base pay, and then there are locality and cost of living allowances based on where the individual is stationed, etc. After enlisting, an E-1 (the lowest enlisted rank) earns a base salary of $20,172 for the first six months before an automatic (!) promotion to E-2. Certain opportunity costs skew this figure down, however. During this time, a recruit would be at boot camp, where he or she would not be paying for rent, meals, and other costs such as transportation. While the math could be done, it is likely that a military enlistee with a high school diploma will earn the same as other career fields that do not require advanced degrees (those “service” jobs).

The rejoinder to this argument is to say military life is full of hardships on families: deployments, relocation, isolation. Perhaps a good reflective metric for this is divorce rate. If we agree a higher divorce rate for a profession is correlated to pressures and externalities exerted on the family, then military enlistees should have a record-high divorce rate (this seems to be a commonly held belief). One study indicates the national median divorce rate is about 36%. According to this study, the military has the third-lowest industry divorce rate at 28.3%. Interestingly, the transportation industry, which arguably faces many of the same family dynamic issues as the military listed above, faces a 40.5% divorce rate. This is not to deny the difficulty of military life on families; rather it is to show that military families are not alone in their difficulties, and to provide benefits based on these difficulties is to ignore those same difficulties faced by countless other sectors of the American population. It is outside of the scope of this essay (and outside my abilities in statistical analysis), to prove the post hoc argument, which is that military divorce rates are low precisely because of the benefits the government confers. All that should be said to this is this: if these government handouts are such a palliative to a social illness, why stop at military service members?

Ultimately, joining the military is a voluntary act that we must assume is made by a rational actor who has assessed the pros and cons of military life. Perhaps he or she is drawn by the appeal of service. This is noble. It is the same calling heard by many of the people listed above: fire fighters, doctors, police officers. If the government decides additional manpower is needed to fulfill the needs of our military, the equitable and egalitarian option we should be considering is mandatory military service, as seen in countries like Switzerland or Singapore. Barring this, we should be employing a scalpel when doling out these benefits in order to align with the ideals of American democracy.

There is no doubt that some members of the military have given more, risked more, and sacrificed more than others, both within the military and within American society. These benefits and these accolades we shower on all veterans and soldiers should be saved for this fraction of a fraction of service members. It is a comparison between a mountain and a mole hill; can it be said an Army enlistee who has spent his 25 years of active duty service (before retiring with a monthly allowance) at a benign job in CONUS with a civilian equivalent is in any way the equal to, say, someone exchanging rifle fire with a Taliban in Nangarhar? In the latter case, these benefits and cultural acclaim would seem like fair and equitable remuneration for services provided to the country. Similarly, where is the fairness with spreading these benefits across the entire military population, which inevitably degrades the treatment and support given to that minority of military veterans who suffer from PTSD or permanent disfigurement as a direct result of combat? Where is this generation’s peace movement? Why aren’t students of any political affiliation fed up with soldiers dying in Afghanistan in the new war against illusive dominoes? There’s a compelling argument to the idea that benefits such as those discussed in this essay have two pernicious side effects: they normalize the abnormal (warfare), and they absolve society from responsibility.

Democratic egalitarianism and American culture have historically shunned such obvious preferential treatment to one sector of the population. The etiology of our culture’s reverence for all service members is outside the scope of this paper, but its root in our collective guilt is likely one source. And guilt, in most things, is a bad motivator.