While Pentagon Spends Billions on War, Military Families Say They’re Getting Short-Changed

On April 21, nearly two months into the Iran war, the Pentagon unveiled a $1.5 trillion budget request that promised to bolster services for members of the military and their families. 

The proposed budget for the fiscal year that begins in September includes $90 million in additional funding specifically for the design of military child development centers and barracks, as well as pay increases ranging from 5% to 7% for service members. 

“With this funding request, we directly invest in our people, recognizing and respecting our warfighters, their families and the daily sacrifices they both make for our nation,” said Lt. Gen. Steven P. Whitney, who oversees force structure, resources and assessment at the mammoth agency.
 

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But for some military families whose loved ones are currently deployed overseas, those changes may be too little, too late. The vast sums being spent on the war effort, at least $29 billion as of May 12, has not prompted the Trump administration to provide enough support services to help those families cope with their extra burdens.

The war-related inflation — gas prices rising more than $1.50 a gallon, higher energy bills and more expensive groceries — is hitting military families especially hard, say spouses of active-duty military and advocacy groups for military families. They also say that they’re not seeing the support services that have been offered during previous wars, such as the Iraq War.

“Our costs keep rising and it’s hard to keep up,” said the wife of a serviceman deployed overseas in the Mideast since last fall. She lives near Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado, has a full-time job and is studying at night for her PhD, forcing her to pay for babysitting for her 8-year-old son. She and another spouse of active-duty military deployed in the Middle East requested anonymity to speak openly due to their fears of reprisal.

The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.

Before the government shutdown last fall, the Military Families Advisory Network surveyed members and found that one in four active duty military families were struggling with food insecurity. The group is finalizing a more recent survey and already sees that the degree of food insecurity has “significantly increased,” said Shannon Razsadin, the executive director of the group. 

“One of the things that families are citing as a pain point is the rising cost of groceries, which is one of the first times that we’ve seen that specifically called out in the research.”

At some military bases, families have depended on local food pantries, said several spouses. “At my kid’s school, there’s a nonprofit that does a fresh produce giveaway, and they pack up 500 bags of food and it’s gone within like 40 minutes,” said a military spouse at the Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo.

The affordability crisis hitting military families climaxed during the government shutdown last fall, causing “sheer panic from families,” said Razsadin. Her organization opened up an emergency grocery support program — and within 72 hours, more than 50,000 military families had signed up, she said. 

“What that shows you is that so many families are living in this bubble of just getting by, so that a delay in pay would throw everything off kilter and really put them in a situation of vulnerability around putting food on the table.” That type of situation impacts readiness and retention, making it a national security issue, she added.

The spouses also say they struggle with child care costs.

The Pentagon runs child development centers on bases that offer services to about 200,000 children of military service members and staffers. The largest employer-sponsored child care program in the U.S., it has experienced significant staff disruptions — with yearly turnover in the Air Force and Army programs ranging from 34% to 50% in 2022, per a Government Accountability Office study. 

“This is not the picture of a healthy system,” wrote K-12 education policy expert Elliot Haspel in a recent op-ed.

Despite being well funded, the child development centers are still unable to maintain staff “so they’re never operating generally at full capacity,” said Kayla Corbitt, a military spouse who founded the Operation Child Care Project to advocate for better child care for military families. 

Some military families are unhappy with the centers because of the understaffing, as well as a lack of support for special needs children, Corbitt said. Though the proposed 2027 fiscal year budget includes funding for the centers, she is not hopeful that it will improve the quality of the centers. 

“We will continue to see a lot of funding thrown at construction of [child development centers], but no one’s fixing the staffing issues. We’re now seeing a lot of families intentionally opt out of military-operated [child] care, mostly due to kind of accountability and transparency issues.”

The military spouse stationed near Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado told Capital & Main that her base shut down one of its two child development centers due to staffing issues. She stopped using the facilities because she said she felt it was not a safe environment for her son.  

When her son was in summer camp at one of the centers, “‘They had the kids running wild around the entire building. There would just be a teacher sitting in the corner while the kids watch TV or play video games, but there was very little structure or control in the room, which makes me uncomfortable.”

The issue came to the fore during an April 29 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee where Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-New Mexico) pressed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth about “critical staffing issues” at child development centers at Holloman Air Force Base in his state. 

“Spending $1 billion a day on a war overseas while leaving our service members out to dry is not America first — it’s a betrayal,” Vasquez said.

Hegseth vowed to tackle the problem but disputed Vasquez’s claims. “We will get you whatever we can, but that doesn’t meet with what we’ve seen, which is running as fast as this department ever has on quality-of-life issues,” Hegseth told the committee. 

Eileen Huck, the deputy director of the National Military Family Association, said that she hopes to see increased funding by the Pentagon for child care. “That one thing could make a big difference in family quality of life.”

Housing costs have been another challenge for military families not living on a base. They receive a housing allowance to help cover the cost of rent, which is adjusted depending on local price points, but it’s often not enough, say military families. In certain regions like San Diego and northern Virginia, “The housing allowance just doesn’t keep pace with the cost of housing,” said the military spouse stationed in Los Angeles. 

The challenge of keeping up with food and child care prices “is that much greater when you have a family stationed in a high-cost area, where the cost of living is already high and the housing allowance is probably not keeping pace with the cost of rent,” said the Los Angeles spouse.

At the recent congressional hearing, Rep. Vasquez also raised housing issues, noting that the Pentagon has received billions of taxpayer dollars. “At a time when cost of living is the top issue for families, including those who serve, the [Defense] Department is in the position to address these costs of housing, child care, groceries and other needs.”

During wartime, the Pentagon traditionally offers supplemental programs for military families — often triggered by high deployment rates — that focus on emergency financial aid, food security and family support, primarily provided by branch-specific relief societies and nonprofits like Operation Homefront and Soldiers’ Angels. 

The supplemental programs include interest-free loans, mortgage assistance, food distribution and specialized children’s programs that address needs from deployment-related stress to financial hardship. Military OneSource, a Defense Department resource, offers specialized support and counseling for caregivers.

But it appears that the availability of such programs and the notification given to military families varies from base to base. 

Razsadin, the Military Families Action Network director, said that there has been “an uptick coming out of Military OneSource as far as resources that are out there and available and really encouraging people to utilize things like family life counselors.”

As to how it’s actually being experienced by military families, she said that it’s a “case-by-case situation as far as what different installations and commands are doing to support families. People really were not seeing this [war in Iran] coming and so in a lot of cases some of those programs that were in place during the global war on terror, they haven’t been activated in a while.”

Razsadin said that one challenge has been the quick start of the war, in comparison to the Iraq War and other conflicts that involved more preparation. “In those cases, people had pretty significant notice before a deployment. That’s not the case right now. And so people are in a lot of cases having to respond very quickly. And in some ways that’s uncovering some fractures in the support system that exists around military families.”

Only 31% of military families surveyed by advocacy group Blue Star Families in the wake of the war’s launch said they’re getting the support they need right now. And 59% said the conflict decreases their likelihood to recommend military service to others with 39% saying it greatly decreases it.

Corbitt said that she’s not seeing such support programs — “unlike the former war. We see things advertised a lot that you actually can’t get access to. And if it is, it’s minimal or nonexistent for every branch right now.” She says that such programs are not getting surplus funding. “Maybe that’s because of how this conflict is being classified — not as a war, but something else.” 

The military spouse at Los Angeles Air Force Base said that she hasn’t been officially informed about such programs. “That’s not something that’s been shared with me or offered to my family at all.” She said that most of her peers have to “figure it out themselves, patchwork it together — you pay for the babysitter, do a parent’s night out at the church, phone a friend. You just make it work.”

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