“Everybody Hates Welfare”—adage in the communities of welfare activists and welfare scholars

For a long time after my initial public presentation, I thought that I understood the origin and meaning of the reaction to my study. As someone who had written a book on the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC), I had become accustomed to negative reactions to the idea of social welfare from those outside academia. No matter how broadly I framed my own study of AFDC, and no matter how carefully I described how scholars of social welfare defined the term, the discussion often short-circuited to a narrow, ideological present-day framework: social welfare meant “welfare,” and “welfare” meant a wasteful, means-tested public assistance program exploited by the nonworking poor.

This truncated cognitive path has, of course, been cut out of a long, inauspicious history of grudgingly-provided public assistance in the United States, marked by the drive to sort the deserving from the undeserving. Its persistent limitations and stinginess have been integral to the social sorting and ordering of the process, intending both to shame and drive away potential recipients.Footnote ⁴ In the twentieth century, the stigma of reliance on public assistance became inextricably associated with women. New state social welfare programs of the Progressive and New Deal eras bifurcated social support among men and women. The programs offered to working men consisted of non-means-tested social insurance, while programs for women consisted largely of means-tested public assistance. The word “welfare” over time came to be associated with the latter programs, and in the process became feminized.Footnote ⁵ When African American women finally gained access to relief after the New Deal, the program also became racialized. Over the second half of the century, the feminized racialization of public assistance produced a juggernaut of stereotypes around welfare programs.Footnote ⁶ By the 1990s, the opprobrium directed at welfare clients had pervaded politics so thoroughly and for so long that President Bill Clinton’s destruction of AFDC seemed nearly inevitable.

Viewed in the light of this history of welfare, the reaction of some people in or associated with the military to my research on social welfare and the volunteer army was not atypical. “Everybody hates welfare,” as the old adage goes. No one wants that stigma applied to them. Military personnel may also be especially resistant to this association. While social welfare has been thoroughly stigmatized through its racialization and feminization, the military has taken a more opposite trajectory. Defying its recent demographics of disproportionate numbers of nonwhites and record-high numbers of women, the military remains coded as a national institution that is essentially male and white.Footnote ⁷

Radically different codings of two institutions that were designed to bring benefits to ordinary Americans suggested that my arguments about the similarities between them did not compute for some people associated with various branches of national defense. They just could not square an association between themselves as soldiers and welfare clients or between their institutional benefits and “welfare,” no matter how many times I defined and qualified my use of the term. The soldier, with his masculinized imagery of bravery, independence, strength, and sacrifice, just didn’t fit anywhere in such a demeaned, racialized, and feminized landscape. “Soldier” and “welfare client” operated as mutually exclusive categories—How could they possibly coexist in the same historical narrative?

“The Tarnished Shield”—title of a 1973 book on the decline of the U.S. army

For a couple of years, I was fairly satisfied that the ideological power of the normative term “welfare” as well as the cultural coding of the military and its soldiers accounted for the resistance. But as I sorted through my evidence, I eventually began to piece together a more persuasive explanation through a story I had somehow overlooked—a fraught history of allusions to, attacks on, and defensive end-runs around the social welfare function of the military that made a far, as well as more recent, past more complex. It turned out that I was hardly the first or the only person to have raised, in one way or another, the question of the military’s social welfare function. The more I read and reread my sources, I realized that I had unwittingly stepped into a long-term debate over the meaning and status of military benefits and their relationship to social welfare. In other words, I had entered the history I was writing as one of its participants.

This history hinged on the social status of soldiers and the army over time, a subject about which our present-day political atmosphere misleads us. Today politicians say, and the public generally concurs, that military personnel are due special honors. Paying homage to “the troops” has been required for politicians at public events and during campaigns since the administration of Ronald Reagan. Reagan adorned his public appearances with military personnel in uniform, weaving heart-rending stories of “soldierly idealism” and sacrifice into his major speeches. He identified the office of the presidency with the “commander in chief” and the military with the nation.Footnote ⁸ Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—as well as other elected officials—have followed Reagan’s lead. Today, military personnel function symbolically as “super citizens,” as one scholar has put it, more loyal and deserving than other citizens because they “fight for our freedoms.”Footnote ⁹

Scratch the burnished surface of the valorization of today’s soldier, however, and a decidedly mottled picture emerges. From a historical perspective, the image of the soldier as deserving—much less extra deserving—has only occasionally been accepted, and it has never dominated discourse about the rights of citizens. If we consider a long history of the United States, the elevation of soldiers as civic paragons may stand as the exception rather than the rule. The legitimacy and honor soldiers and veterans have achieved has been hard fought, entailing rhetorical, ideological, and political work.

To be sure, American soldiers have probably never faced the fear and opprobrium leveled at the mass armies of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the citizen-soldiers of the United States have often been seen as the dregs of society, a lower order, and sometimes even dangerous. Conflicts of class and status punctuated the Revolutionary War; the American Civil War featured more dramatic class conflicts, including the New York City Draft riots. Veterans of wars have also been seen as socially dangerous: demobilization always brought potential social disruption, and unappreciative local communities bemoaned the burdens of veterans’ physical and mental disabilities. In World War I, many Europeans initially feared the arrival of the “doughboys,” whom they worried might represent the “dregs of American society.” Likewise, President Herbert Hoover feared the arrival of the World War I veteran “Bonus Marchers” to Washington, D.C. In sum, soldiers and veterans were rarely seen as the “better sort,” much less as citizens who were more deserving of consideration by the state than those who had not served.Footnote ¹⁰

Because soldiers occupied a tenuous social status, military benefits, even for veterans of wars, have had to be meticulously and determinedly constructed as a benefit that they deserved and as a reward for service. In the post-Revolutionary era, veterans’ poverty had to be carefully distinguished from the morally suspect need of other poor Americans—paupers, drunks, and other failures.Footnote ¹¹ The Civil War pensions and homes, which formed the basis not only for the modern Veterans Administration system but also for all public pensions, were the product of enormous rhetorical and political work to portray the Civil War–era soldier as an upright citizen deserving of help. Their advocates struggled to distinguish unemployed, physically damaged veterans from the other poor or unemployed, creating “soldiers homes” rather than “asylums” in an attempt to sever the associations between soldiers and the lower classes.Footnote ¹²

Efforts to legitimize soldiers and veterans gained traction in the mid-twentieth century in large part due to World War II and the subsequent G.I. Bill. To a degree greater than any previous war, World War II was sold to the American public as the nation’s war. A fairly representative cross section of American society served, one celebrated in countless films. The G.I. Bill, though not meant to glorify veterans—indeed it was as much to save the nation from the threat of millions of unemployed veterans as anything else—nevertheless pumped billions of dollars into veterans’ pockets, vaulting them into technical schools, universities, jobs, and suburban homes. The G.I. Bill stamped widespread social approval and legitimacy upon the soldiers of World War II and, to a large degree, upon those of the long Cold War era who also received G.I. Bill benefits.

But in the wake of the Vietnam War, this trend reversed. With the unpopularity of the war and the draft and reported instances of insubordination, fragging, and massacres like My Lai, soldiers and the military fell back into a less reputed status. A spate of books reported on the “anguish” of the army with its “tarnished shield,” and even forecast its death as a viable institution.Footnote ¹³ Alongside the many public reports of shocking and unseemly army actions, these books reduced the legitimacy of the army. Army leaders “became increasingly convinced that the professional fabric of the institution was unraveling.”Footnote ¹⁴ They felt acutely aware of “the extent to which the Army’s public image had declined.”Footnote ¹⁵

To my surprise, this story of decline in the 1970s directly intersected with questions of social welfare with which I was familiar. The perceived assault on the army and soldiers—from both within the military and outside—was complex, to be sure, and included a wide range of issues. But my reading of the evidence suggested that a significant source of the perceived collapse of soldiers’ status as deserving beneficiaries of the state derived from the increasingly close relationship between the military and its benefits, on the one hand, and social welfare, on the other. Budget-cutting imperatives in Washington, D.C., plus the changing demographics of the new all-volunteer army drew the army into the orbit of social welfare, often in unexpected and mostly unwelcome ways.

“One of the most wasteful welfare states in the world . . .”—National Review author writing about the military, 1970

One measure of this political convergence was the degree to which soldiers’ benefits became a source of public debate during the economic crisis of the 1970s. As with the questioning of civilian social welfare programs, critics of military benefits asked whether they constituted unwarranted or overgenerous social spending. This charge came in part from the Right, from influential advocates of free-market economics. Few historians have recognized the degree to which the switch to the volunteer force was promulgated and enacted by economists, with Milton Friedman—the father of neoliberalism—in the lead. Friedman and his protégées who ran the President’s Commission on an All Volunteer Force in the late 1960s described the draft as an unfair tax on the draftee and determined that the market could solve the manpower problems of a volunteer military. They argued for eliminating and privatizing benefits for soldiers and luring new recruits based on high pay alone. Conservative free marketers derisively called the army, with its many benefits and services, the “most socialistic organization in America,” and “one of the most wasteful welfare states in the world.”Footnote ¹⁶ In their campaign against socialism, free-market conservatives lumped military benefits in with all government social spending as the same violation of free-market principles.

Many critics of military benefits on the Left and even from the center and Right also lumped military benefits into the same category as other government social programs, though without the ideological rhetoric against socialism. These critiques derived from the context of the economic crisis of the 1970s. The recession, coupled with stagnating wages and high inflation, prompted severe cutbacks in federal spending. While military hawks wanted solely to cut civilian social welfare, many members of Congress, like Democrats Les Aspin and William Proxmire, both from Wisconsin, argued that “the fiscal scalpels must be applied to both military and civilian programs.”Footnote ¹⁷ “Everybody should get some fringe benefits,” Senator Aspin concluded, “but there’s a point at which they get out of hand. Federal benefits and especially military benefits are way past that point.”Footnote ¹⁸ More conservative politicos joined their critiques, linking military benefits to other kinds of social spending. James Davidson of the National Taxpayers Union referred to the military’s benefits and services as “the gravy train.” U.S. News & World Report produced a widely cited story asking if the army’s benefits did not create “Too Soft a Life” for soldiers.Footnote ¹⁹

Few members of the armed forces missed the connections made between military benefits and socialism, or the implication that military benefits were equivalent to other kinds of social spending. The Army Times, the journal that served the army community, covered the congressional debates closely; readers, largely active-duty and retired soldiers, resoundingly objected to comparisons between their benefits and civilian social welfare programs. Servicemen and women testified before Congress during hearings on military benefits. Their letters to the editors, which flooded Army Times’ pages, defended their benefits by deriding “welfare” programs and “welfare” clients.

Soldiers professed outrage that military benefits might be considered for cutbacks alongside civilian social programs. A congressional investigation of the army in the mid-1970s surveyed noncommissioned officers and found that they perceived the threat to military benefits as a stark repudiation of soldiers in favor of undeserving civilian recipients of social welfare programs: “Frequently, the NCOs stated that they did not understand how it could be right to provide social welfare to individuals who often ‘never work’ and then deny pensions to soldiers.”Footnote ²⁰ Letters to Army Times echoed this comparison.Footnote ²¹ An army wife wrote about her anger over potential reductions in pay increases and contrasted the legitimacy of soldiers’ benefits with the illegitimacy of civilian social welfare. “My husband and I, as well as thousands of other military families, are having enough of a hard time making ends meet, let alone taking a cut in pay. More money should be spent on defense and I feel that the money should come from HUD [Housing and Urban Development], welfare, Medicare, and food stamps, to name a few programs. Millions, and probably billions, of dollars are wasted on these programs.”Footnote ²²

A sailor summed up the perspectives of many soldiers and their families when he, too, attempted to draw a bright line between military benefits and civilian social welfare: “I have watched my pay . . . be the political football to be kicked around. . . . Meanwhile, welfare and other social programs have mushroomed.”Footnote ²³ Although accusations of growing civilian social welfare spending were wrong—indeed social welfare programs took the hardest hits in the budget crises of the 1970s—that was not the point for soldiers. Having their benefits placed on the same chopping block as civilian programs, and simply having their benefits discussed alongside social welfare, seemed a repudiation of their honor and worth.

“. . . the last poor refuge of those unwilling or unable to participate in any other way in achieving the goals and values or our nation.”—chief of staff of the army, referring to the negative public perception of the army in the 1970s

At the same time that military benefits were likened to civilian social spending, the military was also becoming more closely associated with social welfare in even more profound and intimate ways primarily because of the distinct fate of the army during the switch to the volunteer force. To a degree unmatched in the other services, the end of the draft decisively altered the army’s demographics. The army became poorer, less educated, less white, and more female. These were the demographics closely associated—correctly or not—with those of civilian social welfare programs for low-income Americans. The association was not lost on many observers of the time, both within and outside the army.

Although the Department of Defense denied that the volunteer force constituted a “poor man’s” military, its own statistics for the army belied that claim.Footnote ²⁴ While they did not constitute the poorest of the poor, the army’s new active-duty service enlistees fell toward the bottom of the income scale. In 1976, the numbers of recruits from low-income families grew sharply, from 16 percent from families earning less than $5,000/year to 30.2 percent. Just as telling, the army had one-third fewer soldiers from the middle class than were represented in the general population.Footnote ²⁵ The lower-income backgrounds of the recruits correlated with lower levels of education, a characteristic also shared by recipients of civilian social welfare programs. The number of recruits with “some college” or college degrees decreased enormously, from 28.2 percent of the total force under the draft in 1970 to 5.3 percent of total accessions in 1975.Footnote ²⁶ In addition, high school graduate recruits had dipped several times to as few as half of all new enlistments.Footnote ²⁷ Perhaps because of the lower levels of education, new enlistees scored poorly on the military’s intelligence tests.

In addition to recruiting increasing numbers of lower-income and less-educated personnel, the army began recruiting disproportionately high numbers of African Americans (who on average, incidentally, had higher educational achievement than white soldiers).Footnote ²⁸ African Americans constituted about 14 percent of enlisted accessions into the army in 1970 under the draft, in direct proportion to their representation in the population. By 1977, they constituted 30 percent of enlisted accessions.Footnote ²⁹ High enlistment rates combined with lower attrition levels and higher reenlistment rates meant that African Americans constituted nearly one-fourth of the total army by 1977 and one-third by 1980.Footnote ³⁰

As the number of low-income personnel, less-educated individuals, and African Americans increased, so too did the numbers of women, thus solidifying the army’s metamorphosis into an institution similar to any of several civilian “welfare” programs. On the eve of the volunteer force, women constituted 1.3 percent of active-duty enlisted soldiers, about twelve thousand total. By 1978, that number had increased over four times to more than fifty thousand, with women constituting 6.6 percent of the enlisted soldiers.Footnote ³¹ By 1980, their numbers had more than doubled again. Their recruitment was essential to the survival of the volunteer army, which could not recruit sufficient numbers of men. African American women became the single most overrepresented group in the army: soon, one-half of all women in the army were African American.Footnote ³²

This demographic constellation generated considerable controversy. Although army leadership in the chief of staff’s office and the personnel divisions fully understood the necessity to recruit these groups, others did not, or found it unacceptable. Critics of the new demographics came from both outside and inside the army, including retired army personnel, congressional “hawks,” and active-duty career commissioned and noncommissioned officers. They justified alarm on the basis of reasons ranging from purported unit cohesion and readiness, to proportional representation, to violations of military traditions.

But perhaps the most trenchant critique was that the new recruits represented the worst of American society, embodiments of the negative stereotypes associated with low income, low education, blackness, and femininity. Critics impugned the new faces of the army in a manner typical of the way welfare clients had long been discussed, betraying an uncomfortable recognition of closer connections between the army and social welfare programs in the new volunteer era. They referred to the new soldiers as dependent, dysfunctional, and even pathological.

Some critics charged that the recruits of the 1970s represented the lower order of American society, people who fundamentally could not make it in real life and depended on the army the way a welfare client might depend on public assistance. One soldier wrote in to Army Times to say he would only recommend enlisting or reenlisting in the army to “someone who is lazy, has low intelligence, is dishonest, and wants to generally ‘get over.’”Footnote ³³ Commanders displayed a similar association between critiques of welfare clients and those of the army’s new volunteers, referring to “dysfunction” and “serious family problems” exhibited by young, low-income soldiers and their families.Footnote ³⁴ The army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel lamented the growing public perception that the army functioned as “the last poor refuge of those unwilling or unable to participate in any other way in achieving the goals and values or our nation.”Footnote ³⁵

Critics further worried that the new personnel added direct social welfare burdens. In other words, critics of the class, race, and gender composition of the army charged that the army was turning into a “social welfare institution” in order to meet the needs of problematic soldiers.Footnote ³⁶ Senator Robin Beard (R-Tenn.) provided a particularly powerful voice in this regard. A former Marine Corps officer and an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves—the sole member of Congress to serve as an active member of the military while on the Hill—he felt he had firsthand knowledge of how the new recruits were undermining the army.Footnote ³⁷ In 1977, he published the “Beard Report,” based on anecdotal data collected from many dozens of interviews with soldiers of various ranks in posts throughout the world.Footnote ³⁸ Although finding much lacking, one of its most persistent themes was that “the Volunteer Army is plagued by social welfare problems to the detriment of its mission.”Footnote ³⁹

To Beard and those he interviewed, the new soldiers seemed to be poor people bringing poor people’s problems into the army. Army commanders cited a litany of troubles—“family indebtedness, child abuse, and family desertion”—among young recruits and their families that bore a striking resemblance to those purportedly experienced by public-assistance recipients in the civilian world. A colonel at Fort Hood, Washington, noted that “married kids in the enlisted ranks are plagued with all kinds of problems: abandoned children, wife beatings, bad debts, and in many cases these kids are very troubled people.” The problems “required counseling, administration and help.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Similarly, Patricia Bloebaum, married to an NCO and an army wife for twenty years, complained in an Army Times feature, “Must the services take care of everybody?” These young, poor, troubled families, she argued, constituted “an extra added burden on the community.”Footnote ⁴¹

Critics worried about the “extra added burden” often had the new women recruits foremost in their minds. Although high-level military leadership ostensibly welcomed women into the ranks, much of the army and many of its allies equated their arrival with the downfall of the institution, fearing that the army would become feminized. When the army opened all but 7 percent of its military occupational specialties (MOSs) to women, when women undertook integrated training and entered the military academies, the demise of the army’s status as a world-class fighting machine seemed assured.

Fears of women and of the feminization of the army informed the emerging critique of the army as a social welfare institution. The correlation depended on the equation of “female soldiers” with “mothers” and laying the responsibility for new and difficult “family issues” in the army at the feet of these women. “Increasing numbers of women soldiers,” Deputy Chief of Staff Robert Yerks wrote, “have brought new challenges,” by which he meant family challenges: “pregnancies, joint domicile for in-service-couples and single parent families, and . . . dependent care [child care].”Footnote ⁴² Congressman Beard insisted that because of women, “more social issues are predominating” on army posts.Footnote ⁴³ Some contemporary scholars of the military homed right in on the core assumptions behind such statements: “The issue of women in the military is directly related in the minds of many, with family responsibilities.”Footnote ⁴⁴Time magazine echoed just this perspective when it asked, “If Mom’s a G.I., who babysits?”Footnote ⁴⁵

While the media imagined women’s child-care responsibilities, men were actually far more responsible for bringing family issues into the army’s purview. In the mid-1970s, the army was between 90 percent and 95 percent male, and over fifty percent of them were married. Indeed, their wives and children were so numerous that they outnumbered soldiers two to one.Footnote ⁴⁶ In addition, single parents were overwhelmingly male. “Although there are proportionately more female than male single parents,” scholars of military manpower policy pointed out, “there are numerically more males than females in the armed forces with sole responsibility for dependent children, because there are so many more men than women in uniform.” It was clear that “the family issue is not just a female issue,” or even mostly a female issue, but it was nevertheless consistently portrayed that way.Footnote ⁴⁷ Jim Webb, former Marine Corps officer, Navy secretary under Reagan, and current Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia, at the time played up social welfare problems that women supposedly caused as part of his broader agenda to remove them from the armed forces. Focusing on the bogey woman of the single-mother soldier, he asked, “What do we do to assure [military] readiness? Do we turn the Army into a baby-sitting service?”Footnote ⁴⁸

Whether it was the “dysfunction” of lower-ranking families, the “social work” required to handle family needs, or the “baby-sitting service” for female soldiers’ children, the implications of the changing demographics and supposedly changing functions of the military were clear: a venerable war-fighting institution was in danger of slipping into a degraded role as a provider of social support for the least advantaged, least able, most problem-plagued groups in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁹ The “summary finding” of the Beard Report highlighted the link between shifting demographics and the army’s perilous transformation into a social welfare institution. “The Army is becoming too involved in social rehabilitation programs. . . . Officers and NCOs pose the question to Congress: ‘Is the Army a fighting machine or just another social institution?’ It can’t be both.”Footnote ⁵⁰

In 1976, Lt. General Harold Moore, Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel of the Army, lamented, “There could not have been a more challenging time in recent history in which to develop a volunteer army.”Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, the conversion of the military to the volunteer force raised a host of new questions about military benefits and their relationship to social welfare. General allusions to military benefits as being just like other social programs, and overgenerous at that, suggested that the benefits would be under political assault and be cut in the defense budget. Specific allusions to the army turning into a social welfare institution suggested the fatal deterioration of the army’s real purpose—fighting wars—through a feminized watering-down of military readiness. Together, the threats formed a dangerous complex for soldiers in which the one common denominator was an equation of military benefits and social services with social welfare. The two phenomena ratcheted up anxiety over the status of soldiers, military benefits, and the army itself—and perhaps masculinity itself. These tense years brought the military, its benefits, and popular perceptions of social welfare benefits closer than the military and its congressional supporters liked.

“Is the military just another welfare program?” “This is the #1 comment that offends people in the military!”—WikiLaw3k online forum question, ca. 2010, answer from Celeste 1070

Identifying and writing this history has helped me knit together the rather remarkable experiences of presenting my research with the intellectual work of producing a narrative. Above all, it let me see the reactions of military audiences to my work much more clearly. What had at first glance looked like the normative, negative reaction of Americans to the term “welfare” instead derived from a different, much more interesting history of an ambiguous, fraught relationship between the military and social welfare in the late twentieth century. Put simply, people in and around the army feel they have had sound reasons, in the not-too-distant past, to fear and reject allusions to social welfare and, implicitly, comparisons between those on welfare and themselves.

Understanding both this history of the military in the 1970s and the way that history played out in the minds of my audiences forced me to rethink additional aspects of my book. For one, I discovered that this moment of convergence had not faded from the minds of those who endured it or from the collective memory of the army. Indeed, the moment was not allowed to fade. This episode became part of military official history and military lore. Stories of the dangers of the 1970s—to benefits for soldiers and to the army itself—were widely retold within the military as part of the larger narrative within military and defense circles that contrasted “the dark days” of the army in the 1970s to the “rightful” restoration and honor of the Reagan years in the 1980s. In the 1970s, military benefits and soldiers were under attack from without and within, the story went. From without, their benefits were questioned and threatened with cuts. From within, they were undermined by “low quality,” burdensome recruits. As a result, the laudable nature of military service was almost destroyed.

In the 1980s, President Reagan, his defense department, and the service chiefs institutionalized this story of the fall and rise of the military. One of Reagan’s signal speeches on the topic became the touchstone for their narrative.Footnote ⁵² And army leadership made the Reagan administration’s message its own, with standard histories of the military fully incorporating this narrative of threat, disrespect, and decline in the 1970s followed by redemption in the 1980s.Footnote ⁵³

That redemption required more than just rhetorical work, however. In the 1980s and 1990s, the army actively attempted to sever connections between the army and social welfare, even as the social welfare benefits and programs of the military were growing. One episode involved the G.I. Bill. Through the revival of the G.I. Bill (cut for a period of about eight years after Vietnam) and an extensive marketing of its educational benefits, the army tried to recruit “better quality” soldiers than it had in the 1970s and hence reframe the programs and people of the army. The army was not a social welfare institution for the “dregs” but a leg up for the already aspiring and upwardly mobile—those who want to make something of themselves. The G.I. Bill education programs were deployed as a marker of a whiter, higher-achieving, more upwardly aspiring army. This marking also took place through army leadership’s turn toward conservative evangelical Christianity in the 1980s. The army began infusing its new family-based social services and programs with evangelical Christian perspectives. These programs helped both soldiers and army leadership contrast their “family values” with family breakdown in the civilian world, particularly among the supposed “welfare poor.” A decade later, army leadership’s efforts to sever connections between the army and social welfare drew heavily on neoliberal ideology. It officially changed its motto from “The Army Takes Care of Its Own” to “The Army Takes Care of Its Own So That They Can Take Care of Themselves.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This strategy employed neoliberal emphasis on self-support in order to tamp down army families’ social welfare expectations. Although different, all three of these elements operated to emphasize the bright line between military benefits on the one side and civilian social welfare on the other.

Just as I can trace the army’s attempt to sever the connections between itself as a war-fighting institution and its perception as a social welfare institution, I can also mark additional and repeated “dangerous” episodes since the 1970s in which public discourse has relinked the army to social welfare. These incidents reprised the history of the 1970s and refreshed the sense of peril associated with connections between army benefits and social welfare. The early to mid-1990s, for example, became almost as threatening a period of time for military personnel as the 1970s. The downsizing of the military pushed out career soldiers and restructured pensions. And in the wake of the first Gulf War, many sick veterans were accused of malingering, their maladies—now known to be caused by the conditions in which they served—questioned and ignored.Footnote ⁵⁵ Now in the 2000s and 2010s, soldiers of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffering posttraumatic stress disorder and brain injury face similar stonewalling and doubt. With the economic downturn beginning in 2008, the federal budget has tightened, and civilian defense leaders and many members of Congress again portray military pensions and medical benefits as too expensive. Military families are again feeling frightened and aggrieved about their potential loss of support. Yet the fact that many other Americans outside the military simultaneously experience budget cuts in social welfare programs does not register in the public statements of military personnel about the threats to their benefits. Now, as in the past, they deem civilian social programs as fundamentally different from their benefits. These periodic episodes of ambiguity in the stature and meaning of military benefits underscore how contentious are their boundaries with civilian social welfare.

This present-day landscape forced me to situate myself within its history in ways that I never expected. Navigating between the history I am writing and the ongoing history of military benefits in the present has helped make sense of my own experiences as a policy historian. When I first realized that I had stepped into the history I was writing, I considered my experiences part of the perils of writing about the recent past. Actors alive, issues still debated, archives in the midst of being created, the story was still unfolding—“history” piled up and on top of me. But upon reflection, I realized that all policy historians, and historians in general, face to some degree or another what I have, though perhaps they do not recognize or acknowledge it. Because the policy history we write is as much a product of its historical moment as any document we find in the past, and because the stories we craft are our own fiction as much as they are public accounts of events of the past, we enter history every time we write. In the end, the particular difficulties I have faced wading into my own historical present have been far outweighed by the opportunities to reflect upon the practice of history and the connections between the processes and outcomes of the historian’s craft.