America’s military has a criminally inane reinvestment strategy.
Despite being 250 years in the business of molding civilians into soldiers, our services seem unaware their most valuable asset for the future fighting force is the veteran.
Grand military parades in the nation’s capital for the Army, iconic Fleet Weeks for its seagoing forces and rousing 250th birthday galas for the US Marine Corps are all well and good touchpoints along the ongoing democratic civil-military-relations journey, but without a deep consideration of the civic and national-security roles the veteran plays, the armed forces and the nation are doomed to relive severe recruitment crises they’ve only recently crawled out of.
The country has never formally acknowledged these crucial roles.
For 250 years, America’s citizens have been shedding their civvies for the nation’s uniform.
And for 250 years, soldiers, sailors and Marines have similarly shed their uniforms to reclaim their civvies.
For two and a half centuries, each branch of the armed forces has yielded one consistent civic output, the citizen-veteran.
America’s lack of a national veterans’ strategy stands as the most obvious mark of its failure to study the true symbiotic nature of its social civil-military relationship.
The root causes are structural but also involve longstanding policy decisions.
Both reveal a root presumption that veterans not only don’t play an inalienable role in the national security ecosystem but also that they’re nonessential actors within American democratic civil society.
Unlike in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Singapore and elsewhere, America has a Department of Veterans Affairs that’s an executive agency, independent in every meaningful way from the Department of War (formerly Defense) — from physical buildings to budgets, from personnel to programs.
This structural separation seems to have resulted in a mental separation, especially among those employed at the Pentagon, of treating active-duty military as their only personnel concern while dismissing veterans as someone else’s policy concern.
But neither do domestic policymakers treat veterans as serious subjects of serious policy.
Despite the now-hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars allocated to the VA, veterans are broadly treated rather as human-interest stories to stir the heartstrings and open pocketbooks of either Congress or a public empathetic to soldiers needing assistance because of the wounds of war.
On the policymaking side, when the United States decided to return to its volunteer military roots in 1973, it failed to recognize fully that an all-volunteer military is an all-recruited military, and the most visible brand ambassador of military service is the veteran.
As alumni are to a college or university, so veterans are to the US military.
Read the rest at New York Post.
Rebecca Burgess is a Yorktown Institute senior fellow and Independent Women’s Forum visiting fellow.
