Military Spouses Viewed as Free Labor
Broken promises, decades of inaction reflect purposeful neglect of key resource
When my son was twelve, he attempted to become part of the living room furniture. By habitually sitting motionless for several hours. I say nearly because his left hand occasionally ransacked an adjacent bag of cheese puffs, while the digits on his right hand busily manipulated a game controller.
Every half hour, he’d mumble a renewed promise to do something about the state of his room. We’d made the error of touring it in his absence the day before, encountering a combination dumpster and bear-rummaged campsite. Random gnaw marks adorned abandoned refuse.
After unreasonable patience, I asked him a fair question. “When will you stop threatening and actually go fix your room?”
His response was every bit as stupefying as you’d expect from the distracted, disinterested, cheese-bearded nihilist he was in that moment. “The longer I wait, the less time it will take.”
Regrettably, other nihilists roam the Earth. Like zombified tweenagers, except somehow less charming, they dawdle. Inveterate and purposeless dawdlers that they are, they threaten repeatedly to take action but remain more furniture than human.
And as though hiking with a broken ankle, they spend decades limping and laboring only to arrive in exactly the same spot.
We call these creatures bureaucrats.
Lately, when it comes to a certain issue which lodges in many a craw like a pulsating goiter, they’re mining new depths of moral putrefaction, as though seeking to unearth indecency in pure form.
The Plight of the Military Spouse
Military spouses spend years simultaneously kicking ass and getting their asses kicked.
Without them, our military services would be unglued. They are the human adhesive holding families together. Keeping communities coherent. Fostering unity and mutual support among those who stand behind our fighting forces.
They inspire. They provide purpose and meaning. They stabilize the inherently chaotic. Their quiet backstage graft is the key to operational focus.
Their signature quality is the way military spouses exemplify service before self, accepting a life of perpetual compromise so that our nation’s defense remains uncompromised.
For example. I know a particular spouse whose dubious reward for her choice of life partner was eleven moves in twenty years, four years of solo parenting, and a patchwork non-career featuring nine different vocations — ten if you include a year of homeschooling two kids — none of which were related to her field of study. None of which reflected her original hopes and dreams.
In those two decades, she learned the heartache of a reluctant nomad, numbing it with positivity and sheer will power. And occasionally, wine.
As do all who serve, she despaired prematurely upended relationships, but found the courage to build new ones. Her strength supplied everyone else with optimism and resolve in each chapter of a sometimes tiresome adventure.
In more trying moments, she permitted herself a twinge of regret. She mourned the death of her previous self, the one that never got to live that other life.
This spouse I describe is my wife, herself a veteran and unheralded national treasure. And by her actions, two other things: (a) a representative typical of the larger population of military spouses, though she would want me to caveat that many have had it much tougher, and (b) an unquestioned patriot and contributor to national defense.
But because of her, I could train. I could sharpen. I could deploy and deploy. Then develop, and retrain, and deploy again. I could be at my best.
When it came to command, I could focus on leadership knowing she was giving her time and energy to keeping our squadron’s families informed, bonded, and mutually supportive.
Whatever I managed to contribute over the years, she was the why behind it, the inspiration for it, the enabler unleashing it.
The Dark Side of Selflessness
Spouses have an outsized impact to our defense. Many go above and beyond a typical family and community support presence and contribute materially to the leadership of bases and communities.
Why do they do it?
Well, they don’t do these things to be recognized or tangibly compensated. Because they know neither will happen.
They do it because they believe in the mission. Or to the extent they are indifferent or slightly skeptical about the mission, they believe in their spouse, and respect that their spouse believes in it.
And of course, they do what they do because it is right and good and constructive. Because community impact creates fulfillment.
And sometimes, they do it because no one else can or will, and they can see it needs doing. They take ownership, and in doing so purchase an obligation.
But there’s a downside to all this. We might even say a dark side.
The unselfishness of military spouses has, over decades, fed an inverted incentive. The military services and legislative financiers have become ever more dependent on what spouses deliver, recognizing they are getting a lot of impact without having to pay for it.
And maybe that uneasy balance was reasonable for a while.
But September 11, 2001 changed everything. The subsequent years put unprecedented pressure on military families. Operational tempos and deployment lengths exceeded those of the Vietnam years. Communities were wracked with seismic trauma and unrelenting demands. They needed more adhesive and support than ever.
Spouses kept the lanterns lit for two decades.
World-shattering loss was absorbed in service of a dubious strategy. A mission that at times contradicted the underlying values it was allegedly validating. Faith was tested as families were stretched on the rack, riven with doubt about the necessity of the wars taking so much from them.
And in this time, the support networks led by spouses made sure we never broke. They held it together. And as bad as those wars went, it’s unthinkable how they’d have gone without the support of spouses and the families they kept unified.
Community Leaders
For decades, the military services have acknowledged their dependency on spouses. For example, here’s a memo from a decade ago issued by the Air Force Chief of Staff to every new squadron commander. Check out the highlights, which say the quiet part out loud during an excruciating period of strain.
That’s pretty explicit. A four-star expectation that commanders appoint a Key Spouse. Which is bureaucrat for “lead spouse.” Why not use that term? Well, because that would, like, acknowledge they are in a leadership role, when we’re not even paying them. But we acknowledge it anyway. Such are the contradictory absurdities of bureaucratic reasoning.
But it’s okay, because we can extract the reality we need from actual experience, underscored by Welsh in the memo.
The lead spouse is part of the leadership team. They’re responsible for stuff. Like connecting the leadership team to families. Like building community capacity. All with the stated objective of keeping the fighting force resilient. So it can keep slogging.
This is one of thousands of examples over the years of the services admitting they are putting spouses to work without paying them for it. That they perform leadership tasks core to mission success without being paid is baked in as a cultural norm.
Promises, Promises
For decades, defense and legislative bureaucrats have yakked about doing more. While no one has suggested putting spouses on the payroll, lots of supportive and sensible things have been bandied about. Things like portable professional qualifications, flexible employment contracts in federal jobs, subsidized job placement, subsidized child care, and funded vocational training have all been suggested, along with numerous other notions.
But much like my tweenage son making idle threats to clean his room amid gobfulls of cheese puffs, bureaucrats have kept their asses firmly planted in swivel chairs. They’ve made a few marginal improvements, like getting certain licenses to stay valid across state lines. Enough to move the dial from the square root of nothing to approximately nothing.
And maybe that’s the point. The point is to make a show of doing more in order to placate the masses, but underneath it all to continue shepherding a festering attitude of entitled chauvinism disconnected from the realities of service life.
I’ve noticed over the years that when values and interests are divergent in organizations, interests usually win. The government and military services have cultivated a system where they are able to invest minimally while maintaining access to highly effective free labor at a mass scale.
Value statements notwithstanding, many in the system will see a strong interest in maintaining this status quo.
Evidence of How Spouses are Viewed
Two pieces of recent evidence indicate that nothing has changed despite decades of threats to improve support and recognition for spouses.
Here’s Exhibit A, excerpted from a Stars and Stripes report published May 15th.
The context is debating a proposed law which would protect the ability of a spouse who has a government job to continue in that job despite a forced relocation, if doing so is business neutral for the agency employing them. While we can disagree about the details, the proposal is totally reasonable.
And yet, the response from a senior official is coarse, malicious, and dismissive. It’s not enough for him to disagree. He goes further, diminishing the role and value of people exhibiting levels of selflessness clearly foreign to him.
This is a hell of a way to characterize a group of people who live under the kind of pressure that breaks families all the time. I mean, this guy could charm the paint off walls. But trust me, his attitude is more feature than bug.
This is often what comes leaking out of the rotted brains of senior bureaucrats when we get within blast radius of actually doing something. When their coveted interests come under pressure, they bear their true philosophy, which is that they feel entitled to something for nothing.
Most of the time though, the signals of underlying decrepitude are more subtle and crafty, and sometimes not even the conscious product of bureaucrats so much as the unwitting miming of entrenched pathology.
Which brings us to Exhibit B. Here’s another excerpt from Stars and Stripes, this one published May 6th.
Re-labeling stuff is a common organizational tactic. It creates the impression of activity without expending actual resources. When you see something re-labeled, it’s often the case that the organization sees itself as constrained from progress or is otherwise deciding against it, but is under pressure to look busy. So it engages in tokenism.
In this case, the re-labeling provides a degree of stealth, permitting the premise to be overflown without most people noticing.
The premise, that it’s perfectly cool to appoint spouses to leadership teams, giving them a full time job for which they are neither paid nor properly recognized, is bypassed. Everyone who gets interested in the re-labeling is thereby distracted from a debate about that premise.
This kind of thing shows the Air Force has not advanced an inch in its mentality. The limit of its innovation is to add a veneer of inclusivity. Like slapping gloss paint on rotting wood.
Someone is Paying a Price
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that zero goodness comes of this bargain, even in its twisted form.
Many spouses gather massive fulfillment from what they contribute. They’re wired for selflessness. Every time they give away their vitality and work ethic for free, they get a dopamine hit, whether it helps anyone or not. They exhibit a high form of humanity.
And I love that they are fulfilled. And that given their generosity of spirit and overgrown heart muscles, it is enough to keep them warm at night.
I am thinking of a few spouses in particular who are still working their magic after two or three decades. A few in particular who absolutely radiate joy. They clearly feel uplifted by the differences they have made, and have been able to define themselves this way constructively.
But this doesn’t make it right or fair to take advantage of them. Underneath it all, they might be more conflicted and at times hurt than we notice. Their grace shouldn’t enable disgrace.
And for every spouse who finds a way to harmonize mission and self, there’s a legion who just go along because they’ve been conditioned to see it as their duty.
With time and repetition, they stop complaining. They silence even the internal voice of dissent. They go passive. They accept their lot in life even if part of them resents what it has done to their horizons and their self-concept. This isn’t harmonizing self and mission. It’s subjugating or even destroying self for mission.
Corie Weathers, whose excellent book is worth your attention, captures this as a choice to implode rather than explode. That is damned insightful, from someone who knows what she’s talking about.
But as lamentable a situation as this dynamic creates in terms of humanity and ethics, it carries a material risk as well. A risk that could hobble our defense if we’re aloof to it.
Neglecting Spouses Neglects Readiness
As Gen. Welsh’s 2014 memo stated, the military recruits individuals but it retains families. When it doesn’t retain those families well enough, experience levels drop and readiness plummets.
One of the ways a retention crisis can be triggered is if the financial prospect of service starts placing families at enough of a disadvantage vs their civilian counterparts that they can no longer justify continuing to serve. No matter how much a servicemember loves what they do, their duty to family will at some point win out.
We see the stirrings of this now. It is an unrecognized emergency. While everyone is focused on operational readiness for the next war, they’re overlooking non-operational factors that could undo everything.
Check out these two charts, which I’ve excerpted from an excellent report you can find here. It leverages Department of Commerce data and sharp economic analysis.
Two bottom lines:
Military household income is falling behind civilian household income.
This difference is small for single military members, but large for families.
The trend in civilian households is to assemble incomes from multiple sources. Military families struggle to do this. Military spouses participate in the labor market at a rate 10 percent below civilian counterparts, and many who attempt to participate are mired in unemployment.
Lots of things drive this. Lack of affordable child care, distance from extended family, frequent relocation, and the distance of many bases from the opportunities of urban centers are just some of myriad reasons.
And these are all known, unsurprising, assailable reasons which remain obstacles because of endemic government inaction. Bureaucrats have been threatening to fix this stuff for decades, yet their asses remain fused to swivel chairs.
For example, sponsored childcare during a change of station is often touted as a key support mechanism. Yet many families find that when they knock on the front door of this benefit, it is slammed in their faces because they don’t meet one of its dozen conditions. These conditions are purposeful friction imposed by bureaucrats to (a) hold down costs, and (b) trigger the use of free labor by leveraging the unpaid community.
A family left feeling like they tried to use an expired coupon at the cash register won’t hang around whining to the powerless cashier. They’ll ask for help from their unit, and swiftly find their support gap stitched shut by the goodness of fellow community members.
Whatever your views on the trend of Americans working more to afford the same standard of living, we can probably all agree that military families falling behind that standard is not acceptable, and won’t be good for readiness.
And yet, I’m not optimistic anything material will be done about it. My son only cleaned his room when the batteries in his game controller went dead. The military services and their funders will not act to improve this situation until evidence of an undeniable drop in readiness becomes too notorious to avoid.
When things are stalled in a particular position for decades, it’s because that’s where empowered agents want them to be.
We Need a Ruckus
Spouses are free labor. For the craven ghouls given too much access to responsible positions in government, passing a law to give spouses viable careers would be a double whammy. They’d have to commit resources to supporting spouses better, and they’d lose a shitload of free labor.
So I expect we will continue as we have been going. The tweenagers in government will never clean their rooms. They will become the furniture. But keep making periodic promises to placate and encourage those whose unpaid work they depend upon.
Unless of course, we make a ruckus. Enough of a ruckus that we trigger a level of bureaucratic fear capable of shifting the incentives. Deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties, bureaucrats know that losing spouses equals losing the war. Without their backing and allegiance, we will lack a fighting heart. History warns us how fatal that can be to a military campaign.
Free labor practices such as the one detailed here are hidden costs of war and readiness. By masking them we mask the true cost of conflict, and thus persuade ourselves to get into fights when lesser solves were available to us.
Let’s stop hiding the expense of war and be honest about it.
But if we’re not going to do that, if we’re too cheap to pay spouses for what they do or spend the money to ease their challenges and rebuild their horizons, then we should at least make them feel genuinely appreciated.
Or at least not make them feel trivialized and unappreciated.
So if you’re one of the fossilized bureaucrats saying and thinking and feeling the wrong things, I’m inviting you to practice holding your breath for as long as possible. Whenever you think you can’t hold it any more, just fight through the discomfort and keep holding your breath. If your field of vision begins to narrow or things start to darken, that’s a sign you’re doing it right. Keep going.
If you pass out, don’t worry. There’s always a military spouse no more than a few meters away. They are tough as nails and known for rescuing people, even those who don’t deserve it.
They’ll pick you up, dust you off, and send you back into the fight.
TC is a retired military officer and independent writer. He specializes in organizational leadership.
Great read, and so very true. In AMC at least, they just changed the name to Commander’s Key Support Program. My understanding is because spouse was too exclusionary a term🤪
You captured this beautifully: “I’ve noticed over the years that when values and interests are divergent in organizations, interests usually win.”