The Hidden Cost of Militarisation
The military activities of the last forty years, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, have been disastrous for America and the United Kingdom. Most of all, they’ve been a testament to how quickly, thoroughly, and viciously the State can destroy human capital through military programmes.
While broadsheet newspapers continue to blame Oxford’s admissions demographics and investment bankers for the widening divide between the rich and poor in America and England, I find the majority of the blame lies with the governments of these two countries. And, perhaps most of all, with the military.
I struggle to imagine an institution that economically cripples and scholastically neuters more American workers than the U.S. military. Witness the 14% unemployment rate among returning Afghanistan and Iraq veterans in New York City, with the rate in the higher teens in Chicago and Los Angeles – this, despite millions of dollars spent on programmes that overtly favour veterans in all manner of hiring, lending, entrepreneurship, and so forth. The unemployment statistics in the more rural areas of America are even more devastating.
I argue the U.S. military has become the most expensive and least successful job-training programme in the history of the world. It is absolutely terrible at creating well-trained workers with solid employment prospects, which is, last I checked, the purpose of a job-training programme.
The military has long recognized that its on-the-job training is insufficient to create competitive private-market workers. This was the reason the G.I. Bill was created (and similar soldier benefit legislation in England and Wales) – the concept was that the university system would be tasked with re-training soldiers for civilian work. At this time, most universities were full-time, charitable institutions or organs of the State.
Today, American veterans primarily use G.I. Bill benefits at two-year and for-profit institutions. In fact, many of these institutions draw a substantial portion of their revenue from struggling veterans ill-equipped to engage in traditional studies but willing to pay a for-profit website for a degree unlikely to make them more skilled or employable. The University of Phoenix alone (a wildly profitable for-profit university that issues degrees) has over 10,000 students who pay using G.I. Bill benefits, according to a 2010 report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
This is the hidden cost of the militarisation of the underclass in the United States and, to a lesser extent, England. By having a volunteer military that draws the poor into its enlisted ranks and fails to prepare them to be productive members of civilian society, the military takes a worker who had great potential at age eighteen and turns him into a former soldier with few job prospects. In the interim, society absorbs an avalanche of costs and reaps few benefits.
Not only does a soldier cost a fortune to train, transport, feed, house, and administer benefits to, but that same soldier continues to present costs to society for the rest of his life in the form of benefits, decreased wages, increased healthcare costs, and less versatile human capital. While serving, the soldier is an able-bodied person "missing in action" from the civilian workforce, where the better-educated, better-prepared, alternate-universe version of him- or herself is badly needed. This better-trained, higher-earning version of that person will never exist, his or her professional and intellectual development having been aborted by the intervention of military recruiting. Worse still, these veteran families then begin the next generation at a substantial disadvantage: with little experience at university, little savings, and little earning power, it is no wonder veterans on both sides of the Atlantic struggle to provide opportunities for their children.
It is unreasonable and insulting, particularly in this fiscal climate, to expect society to absorb the substantial costs to convert a civilian into a soldier and then, inefficiently and incompetently, transform the soldier back into a civilian. Yet more tragic is that training people to be soldiers often involves teaching people to work within unique militarised bureaucracies, teaching people to operate equipment with no civilian equivalent, and teaching people to excel at wartime activities that have no peacetime counterpart. In other words, much of the teaching that does occur within a modern military is either alien to, or counterproductive for, civilian life. It is the system at fault, not the worker-soldier-worker.
The U.S. military contains nearly 75 million people ready for military service, while the British military contains about 15 million people ready for military service (in each case, about a quarter of the population). Supposing that each of these people has had his or her lifetime economic productivity damaged by at least $5,000 per year of remaining life expectancy on average (a conservative estimate in my view), this is about nineteen trillion dollars in lost (wage) productivity, not including the countless positive externalities that might result from having these people develop their talents more fully, participate in innovative industries, exchange and improve skills with fellow workers, and so on.
Next time you ponder whether the U.S. military budget sounds “about right” at 680BUSD or whether it should be 650BUSD or 700BUSD instead, might I suggest that you ponder these larger numbers?
After all, it only seems fair to measure a military’s cost to society at least in part in terms of the workers (and, hence, the work) it contributes to society.
