In this clarifying & informative podcast they mention the oddness of the “undersupply of information” abt mil personnel policy despite the millions of peeps it affects.They note the DC experts conversant in the same “would fill a small cocktail party.” How’s this happened? Well.. https://twitter.com/thesubtlenotes/status/1319052082004066308

I think, as Archuleta point out, mil pension/personnel policy/vet policy is often used as a tool for other policy objectives. To retain soldiers (George Washington at Valley Forge); to recruit volunteers (Lincoln for the Union in 1861) to wash out the deadweight (Eisenhower)

Thus tho arguably it’s what sustains the whole defense enterprise on the human front, it’s not considered a legit, serious policy field. That has some shortsighted modern expressions, that to use a contentious contemporary term, is now often “gendered”

I can’t count how many times I was told that this was “defense policy lite” & if that’s what you worked on/were interested in (even as a part of a larger research agenda) then clearly you were on the junior varsity team & not a serious policy contender

Almost like the general public assumption that any woman elected to Congress will “clearly” only be interested in ed policy & “soft” “people” issues

But the reality is that when Congress approved & the US military decided to become an All Volunteer Force that wanted some continuity among its soldiers & therefore needed to become professional & life friendly (a decent living wage; family housing; medical care; ed benefits etc)

Personnel policy was necessarily going to more & more predominate. And unsurprisingly, it has. It’s very expensive to take care of soldiers & their growing families. Mil health care/insurance costs alone take up a ginormous percent of DoD’s budget, for instance. Given that truth

It’s even more surprising that there’s been abt zero uptick in the study of these personnel policy matters since they are so front & center in the 21st century US military

But I think that’s also partly answered by the fact that all academic institutions basically stopped studying the military, soldiers, etc precisely at the point it was becoming an All Volunteer Force.And no one noticed until we had a new generation of war vets, the Post-9/11 vets

So we’ve been playing catch up bc almost everyone assumes that this body of research exists & the researchers exist same as other fields. The other assumption is that VSOs automatically do this. But while they’ve provided important services, they are legislative advocates

Hence, to round out this thread, the importance of books like Archuleta’s “Twenty Years of Service.” It’s truly doing national service in its own right.