Fighting families: the military's focus on child care corrupts families - and the national defense

National Review, Feb 9, 1998 by Allan Carlson

Mr. Carlson is president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois. He was a Reagan appointee to the National Commission on Children.

THE star panelist at Hillary Clinton's October White House Conference on Child Care actually wore two on each shoulder. Maj. Gen. John G. Meyer Jr., until recently commander of the U.S. Army's Community and Family Support Center, captivated an audience of enthusiasts for institutional child care with tales of military success in the nursery. Under his leadership, 85 per cent of the child-care centers run under the Army's Child Development Program had received accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children, compared to the national average of only 5 per cent.

"Commitment, standards, and funding," the general declared, were the lessons offered by the military experience. Basking in the glow of the First Lady's personal praise, he expanded on the new military gospel of social parenting. "Child care is critical to the Department of Defense's bottom line," Gen. Meyer said. He added: "Supporting the care and development of children is a responsibility the military readily assumes in exchange for the loyalty of their parents in uniform."

Meyer emphasized the "new reality" of America's fighting forces: that the 1.4 million active-duty volunteers had 1.3 million children under age 18, 345,000 of whom were under age 3; that 60 per cent of this force was married; and that 68 per cent of the spouses were employed outside the home. Indeed, nearly 10 per cent of this force consists of "service couples," with both husband and wife in uniform.

Accordingly, "quality child developmental care" has become, in the words of the 1987 Army Family Action Plan, "a crucial [military] program." While the number of combat divisions has been slashed by half over the last decade, direct and indirect military expenditures for child care have tripled. Among the three services, eight hundred child-care centers -- a growing number of which are open 24 hours a day -- tend over 200,000 tykes, making the U.S. Department of Defense the nation's largest child-care system.

The Department of Health and Human Services now has nothing on the Department of Defense. Indeed, the Clinton Administration recently ordered the military to proselytize civilians on behalf of safe, affordable, and accessible child care. "I believe that the military has important lessons to share with the rest of the Nation on how to improve the quality of child care for all of our Nation's children," the President explained in his April 1997 directive.

Forget fixing bayonets; try changing diapers. In a Rose Garden conversation over punch and cookies at that Conference on Child Care, I asked the Army's new Child Development commander if his "warm fuzzy" assignment might hurt his career. The tall, lean, highly decorated Airborne Ranger assured me that a focus on "the Army family" and child care was, in fact, now the preferred path for promotion and career success.

This not only diverts the military from what obviously should be its primary task -- defending the nation -- but also puts it in the business of social engineering. In this area, it isn't the broader culture assaulting the values of the military, but the other way around. Since the first Army Family Action Plan, issued ominously in 1984 ("The Year of the Army Family"), the Army's focus has been on dissolving real, autonomous families and blending the human parts into "The Total Army Family," a notion that tacitly assumes the primacy of post-family or non-family bonds.

Some aspects of the Total Army Family appear traditional. For example, a range of family entitlements -- including housing subsidies, health care, and "high quality" child care -- encourages early marriage and/or childbearing. But the high rate of early marriage in the military is matched by abnormally high rates of family turmoil and divorce. Moreover, the birth of children in the military increasingly occurs outside the bonds of matrimony, with "the Total Army Family" assuming the roles of both breadwinner and caregiver for the unmarried service mom and her children. Up to 40 per cent of military pregnancies occur among the unmarried. Furthermore, because these unwed soldiers, sailors, and aviators are excused from hard duty and receive preferred access to medical care, education, and housing -- without even having to identify the father(s) of their children -- the military goes beyond simple moral neutrality and actually subsidizes illegitimacy.

In sum, present-day military families are neither autonomous nor strong, the true measures of family health. They are heavily dependent on special subsidies. And while our uniformed women, whether unmarried or in fragile formal liaisons, do reproduce, they increasingly give their children over to a system of collectivized child-rearing.

The logical end of this system is a kind of militarized socialism. In a 1978 article for the journal Armed Forces and Society, Harvard University's M. D. Feld identified the change sweeping through the Armed Forces. The services were less and less "a power-laden patriotic symbol" and instrument of war, and more and more technocratic institutions guided by intellectual elites in the pursuit of egalitarian ends: "One consequence of the contemporary fusion of the notions of national security and national welfare has been the sensible eradication of the conceptual distinction between the nation-in-arms and the nation at peace. The notion of total mobilization as . . . [a] wartime measure is being replaced by the model of the permanently mobilized state: a state mobilized not for reasons of war but in order to allocate its resources in the fullest and most rational manner possible."