Military
The Real Reason For The Poor State Of Military Morale
A military with poor
morale is a military that fights poorly.
Recently,
the Military Times published an article
about the declining morale of the armed forces. It hit a big
nerve, and rightfully so. A military with poor morale is a military that fights
poorly. This should be a huge wake-up call to the senior uniformed and civilian
military leadership.
There
is a big danger that the wrong fixes will be applied to this problem. Oddly
enough, the easiest problems to fix are the ones based on dollars and cents.
Yes, the service chiefs will complain, but priorities can be shifted to reduce
the hit on service members’ pocketbooks. But it’s not primarily the pay and
benefit problems driving the downturn in morale.
According
to the Military Times piece, satisfaction with pay and allowances declined from
87% to 44% from 2009 to 2014. Military pay has kept up with inflation and then
some for the past
several years. That’s not to say that military pay is
a princely fortune, though it stacks
up pretty well against the civilian world. After several years
of military pay gains, 2015’s pay increase is falling slightly below inflation
and the basic allowance for housing formula has changed. Let’s be honest, it’s
not as if compensation has suddenly been slashed to the bone. After several
years of raises, service members are taking a year of losing slightly against
inflation, just like the rest of the federal workforce. Some service members
may feel that they aren’t being paid what they rate, but there likely isn’t any
dollar amount that would fix that. The plain truth is that military paychecks
have improved since most of the force joined.
The
other ancillary benefits of the military, be that health care, commissaries,
exchanges, or recreation facilities, may have had some small changes here and
there. Some are for the worse, like commissary surcharges. Some are for the
better: when I joined the Marine Corps, most gyms looked like old-school “iron
churches.” Today, gyms and other military recreation facilities are clean and
modern. On the whole, though, these sorts of things aren’t moving the needle
very far one way or another.
For
the most part, the recent downward turn in morale can’t be laid on deployment
schedules, either. Some units still have intensive deployment schedules. On an
individual basis, some service members also have very high operational tempos,
but on the whole, the pace of deployments has declined since the days of the
Iraq surge. Only a few years ago, leaders were worried that the pace of
deployment would break the morale of the force. Now that deployments have
decreased, the worry is that morale is suffering for want of a mission. Service
members complain about deployments, but they also complain when they don’t
deploy. Deployments are a factor in poor morale, but they aren’t the driving
force behind today’s military anomie.
The
key factor is senior leadership that has not kept faith with its troops. The
rest of the force that doesn’t live within the Washington, D.C., beltway feels
that it is being ridden hard and put back wet so that the generals and admirals
can claim success before civilian leaders in Congress and the White House. They
have come to believe that they are expendable.
There’s
no such thing as a free lunch. Even after taking away the burden of operations
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the security requirements of the United States have
not decreased in proportion with the downsizing of the force. As recently
retired Marine General James Amos said, “We
will not do less with less. We will do the same with less.” As powerful as
generals are, they can’t repeal mathematics. That difference isn’t coming out
of nowhere. It’s coming at the expense of personnel, equipment, and training.
Today, units have to swap equipment just to deploy; new personnel go forward
with inadequate training; and stateside support units, such as depots and
training facilities, have to support deploying units with people and equipment.
The military is like a subsistence farmer who’s eating his seed corn — it works
for awhile, but a reckoning is coming.
Service
members aren’t blind to this. Those who’ve been around can sense that they are
working harder, but accomplishing less. More work, but somehow, less training.
And perhaps they could deal with the extra work. They did join to serve, after
all. They just don’t feel as if their loyalty to the institution has been
rewarded. They see what appears to be an increasingly capricious and arbitrary
force-shaping process. From the Army
giving pink slips to soldiers in Afghanistan, the Marines
kicking out sergeants at ten years of service, to the Air Force enticing
airman to apply for voluntary separation incentives and then revoking the offer, senior leadership
has been making its mission, pleasing Congress, at the expense of the rank and
file.
That
mission of pleasing elected officials isn’t just about dollars and cents and
military missions overseas. It’s about senior leaders so cowed by civilian
authority that they will throw anyone under a bus to preserve the image of the
military. To many, senior military leaders’ fawning obsequiousness in the face
of civilian pressure has turned a bastion of warrior spirit into a Mormon
ladies’ social. While the military has certainly needed some cultural rudder
steers from time to time, events starting with the post-Tailhook
witch hunts, and continuing through such
initiatives as the 21st Century Sailor
and Marine Program, have left service members thinking
that they joined to be in the Sands of Iwo Jima but got stuck in a showing of
The Sound of Music.
Life
in the military has a lot of rewards, but also a lot of sacrifices and
hardship. What has made soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines withstand those
hardships throughout history is a sense of belonging and the knowledge that
someone has their backs. The source of the military’s discontent doesn’t lie in
money, it’s in the fact that many in the military believe that loyalty
currently only travels up, not down. Senior leadership can moan about not
having the money to fix the morale problem, but there’s not enough money in the
world to fix it unless the underlying problem is solved. If the military
doesn’t have its peoples’ backs, it will soon be looking at their backs as they
walk out the door.
Carl Forsling is a
Marine MV-22B instructor pilot and former CH-46E pilot who has deployed in
support of multiple combat and contingency operations. Follow Carl Forsling on Twitter @CarlForsling.
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