Cheap Military

I was appalled (though not horribly surprised) when I read this article.  It turns out that starting wages for military service are lower than average fast food wages.  Just to get wages above the Federally defined poverty level, it takes around 3 years of service (with at least one deployment).  In a previous article, I discussed some research showing that the Federal poverty level is around $10,000 a year short of the real poverty level (which is somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 a year, depending on location).  It takes 6 to 7 years of military service to get out of poverty for real.  Most people who join the military never make it that far, in part because it is almost impossible to survive on what the military pays.  Several years of military service can qualify a person for a law enforcement or security job that pays two to four times what the military pays for a much higher risk position.

The above mentioned article is about military families who must get some kind of food aid just to survive.  In some areas over a quarter of food bank patrons are military.  Part of the problem is that the military expects spouses to work as well, because many families in the US do have to have both adults work to make enough to get by.  For military families that just does not work.  For families with children, if the military parent gets deployed, the other parent is left caring for the children, and the extremely low military pay is just not enough to cover childcare in many areas.  In addition, because the military frequently and unexpectedly transfers people, and it is currently difficult to find jobs, even in the ideal situation, the non-military parent often spends more time looking for a job than working.  Worse, frequent job changes make it even more difficult to find a job.  It is totally unrealistic to assume that spouses of military people will be able to work a job to make up the difference.

There are multiple things wrong with this situation.  The first is that it is unethical to pay so little for such a high risk job.  Even military service entirely in the US, without any combat, is fairly high risk.  More soldiers die in mechanical accidents, on base, in the US, than in combat situations.  Soldiers regularly die or are seriously injured in weapons accidents and other training accidents as well.  Military service, especially for the lower ranks, is just plain dangerous.  Paying low wages is straight up wrong for this kind of risk.  The second is that soldiers need to be able to focus on their job.  A soldier that is worrying about how he is going to provide the next meal for his family is not a soldier that can focus well on military service.  Military service is stressful enough by itself.  Adding more stress will result in potentially critical mistakes.  Aside from practical issues, these people are being paid to defend our country.  Is national defense really less valuable to us than providing low quality, unhealthy fast food?  If we are paying soldiers less than fast food workers, we should expect more mistakes from them than from fast food restaurants.  Do we really want our military to make mistakes?  Mistakes in fast food are annoying.  Mistakes in the military are fatal.

This situation is getting worse.  This year, the Department of Defense issued a military raise of 1 percent.  According to the article the DoD has said that it plans to continue asking Congress for only 1 percent annual raises.  Annual inflation is bigger than that.  This means that each year military workers are taking pay cuts, not getting raises.  Over the last decade, inflation rates have ranged from 1.5% to 3.8% (with the exception of a -0.4% in 2009).  At this rate of inflation, members of the military will be loosing 0.5% to 2.8% of value of their pay each year, even with the 1% annual "raise."  While McDonald's employees get real raises that keep ahead of inflation (just barely), members of the military are getting veiled pay cuts.  That is just plain wrong.

(Just for the record, with a minimum wage of $7.50 an hour, working full time all year, the yearly earnings come out to $15,600, about half of the real poverty level.  With Obama's planned minimum wage of $15.00 an hour,  this comes out to $31,200, which is above the real poverty level for the lower cost areas in the US.  A military salary of $18,000 a year will be just under 2/3s of Obama's planned minimum wage.  Note that this assumes no vacation time, because military work comes with no guaranteed vacation and typically entails far more than 8 hours of work a day.)

Now, I am not pro war, and I do not think that we need to throw more money at the military, but if we cannot afford to pay our soldiers enough to survive, something is very wrong.  It is bad enough that we tolerate businesses paying wages that are too low to survive on, but our government should know better.  No government job should pay less than the poverty level, otherwise the government is directly responsible for some amount of poverty.  Our soldiers are not only working for our government and our nation, but they are the first line of security for our nation.  By underpaying them, we are buying second rate security for our most important security.  We are putting our lives and our freedom in their hands, but then we are paying them so little that there is no way we can expect them to do a very good job?  That just does not make sense.

My solution to this is a smaller, more elite military.  Instead of a large standing army, we should have a small standing army of extremely well trained soldiers.  To balance this for emergencies, we can increase the reserves.  Reserves work far less and typically work normal day jobs.  They report for training for only a few weeks a year, unless there is something major that requires more soldiers than the regular military currently has.  This makes them cheaper, and while they are usually less well trained than active duty military, they are still far better trained than drafted civilians would be.  A military with fewer, better trained soldiers would also not need as large of numbers.  The real kicker though is that we could even reduce the number of military by only 50% and start paying new recruits $36,000 a year, which is above both the Federal and the real poverty level.  If we left the top end of the pay scale alone (those with 20 years typically make around $65,000 a year), we would actually save money by doing this.  This might also reduce the rate of accidental casualties as well (given the better training).

At this point, it looks like our military is bloated, and it is becoming very clear that we cannot afford it.  If things continue the way they are going, military jobs will be the worst paid (legally) jobs in the US.  The quality of our military will continue to suffer, and eventually we may have the largest, lowest quality military in the world.  By focusing on expertise instead of numbers, we could improve our military and cut costs at the same time.  It is a travesty that we are willing to pay less for national security than we are for fast food, and something needs to be done about it.