Family Awareness for Military Recruitment

During the pilot strike at United Airlines in 1985 the Air line Pilots Association (ALPA) had a program called "Family Awareness". The program was designed to get the support of the pilots' spouses. Family coordinators would hold meetings to keep families informed and help improve morale so pilots would not be encouraged by their spouses to cross the picket line and return to work. It was a very effective program.

The Department of Defense now has a similar program to retain military personnel in an all volunteer (mercenary) army. The New GI Bill will allow military personnel to transfer their GI benefits for college to, you guessed it, their dependents. If you don't think a female spouse will not see this and put pressure on her military husband to re-enlist then you don't know how self interest motivates people. The wife also sees the transfer of college benefits to her children as a positive.

She also knows these benefits will someday be community property in a divorce. Re-enlist honey! War is not so bad. We all love you and are proud of you. Just make sure those benefits keep coming.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates interviewed by the Today Show's Matt Lauer, live from Camp Eggers in Kabul, Afghanistan.- To the families back home: “[I want them to know] how much we appreciate their sacrifice. You know, the line is ‘you enlist the soldier and you re-enlist the family.’ And the families are so important to our success and so important to the success of our all-volunteer force. They are as critical as the soldiers themselves.”

The mercenary army base pay has increased more than the rate of inflation. In 1955, E-5 (Sgt) pay was around $135, or about $1100 in 2009 dollars. Of course the draft was still in place in 1955 so the government did not have to hire as many mercenaries. Today the base pay, without a draft, for that same E-5 mercenary, is around $2100. The military has almost doubled the base pay, adjusted for inflation, and increased family benefits, in order to pay for their mercenary army. This does not factor in all of the private mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, who outnumber the military personnel.

"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel . . . And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth." Mark Twain

Charles Tolleson