The government wants you to have Wi-Fi in the barracks if you’re single and childcare if you have kids, according to a Defense Department memo released Friday.
The Pentagon is pushing for more money and savings in military families’ pockets while aiming to improve their experience after years filled with headlines focused on moldy barracks, recruiting woes, and increasing unaffordability on and off base.
“It’s critical to our mission, our recruiting efforts, our retention, our readiness,” a senior official told reporters during a press conference on Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin’s “Taking Care of Our People” memo, which laid out the Pentagon’s plan for a range of quality-of-life improvements across the force.
Over the last three and a half years, Pentagon officials have collected feedback from senior enlisted advisors, junior enlisted troops and military families to understand “what’s on their minds and how they are experiencing life in service,” a defense official said. Their answers have “driven the content” for the plan.
The memo also includes some ways to improve junior troops’ quality of life, with more Wi-Fi access in the the barracks and a plan to tackle specific issues at remote installations.
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To expand Wi-Fi access, the Defense Department is directing all military branches to create pilot projects that put Wi-Fi in the barracks “at no cost to the service member,” the memo said. While more Wi-Fi could give troops the opportunity to access mandatory online training in their downtime at the barracks, it’s more likely to be a morale boost because, well, having easy access to the internet means easy access to entertainment.
The memo also highlights a new effort to “make life easier at remote and isolated installations,” which will include on-site installation evaluations of three bases in 2025 to tackle their “unique” issues.
To select which bases need the most attention, officials will consider quality-of-life indicators like behavioral health care access and unmet child care needs and use a “resilience index” which looks at factors from the individual all the way up to the community level like the number of domestic violence incidents and suicide rates on base and local public health data such as crime data, high school graduation rates and substance misuse rates.
With the latest push to improve the day-to-day lives of service members, officials said they hope that recent and proposed changes will positively impact the military’s reputation among its current force and potential recruits who have heard horror stories from their friends in the service about barracks filled with black mold and rats.
“Our data, both from a qualitative and a quantitative standpoint, indicates that young people just generally don’t have a full understanding of what life inside the military is like, and that’s largely driven by anecdotes and then headlines,” said a defense official, who added that the push to improve quality-of-life for rank-and-file servicemembers “can have a corresponding positive impact on recruiting efforts.”
The new policies and programs are part of the Pentagon’s effort to improve service members’ lives in the military beginning as a recruit all the way to separation. Defense Department officials said they hope these changes will put more money into military families’ pockets or equate to cost savings for areas like healthcare, uniform allowance, moving stations, spouse employment and childcare. However, most of the savings earned from new programs or policies are not immediate and will take place over the next few years.
The Pentagon is trying to strike a balance between addressing short-term, immediate and acute needs while putting in place longer-term programs they expect will have positive impacts on service members, officials said.
“Many of these you can layer together,” one official said, giving the example of increasing child care availability and subsidies to support military spouses seeking employment, “so they have that child care available to them helps them remain in the workforce.”
Immediate dollars in service member pockets from new initiatives include covering relocation costs for pets during permanent change of station moves, offering up to $3,200 in pre-tax earnings to go towards healthcare costs with Health Care Flexible Spending Accounts, and giving military spouses up to $4,000 in financial assistance to pursue a license, certification, or associate’s degree. The Pentagon increased the amount of time that temporary lodging allowances can cover from 14 to 21 days and also authorized the same allowances for up to 60 days for assignments outside of the U.S.
Officials acknowledged the need to look at troop salaries due to the impacts of inflation and rising costs — an issue greatly affecting junior enlisted service members with the lowest income. A quality of life report by members of Congress released in April found that service member salaries overall did not keep up with the rate of inflation and a 2023 Rand Corporation report found that 25% of the armed forces were deemed food insecure. The rates were higher for service members who received a housing allowance and lived on base.
The Friday memo noted a cumulative 9.8% pay raise in the last two years and a proposed 4.5% pay raise in the President’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget request which is currently being considered by Congress.
The Defense Department has also increased Basic Allowance for Housing rates by 18% over 2022 rates and Pentagon officials are looking at “how to manage the BAH program long term,” an official said, but added that it would be “premature” to discuss those conversations.
Officials also touted a $33.5 million investment toward improving recruitment, retention, and working environments for military child care. A senior official noted that conversations about “economic security and career progression” cannot exist without considering childcare.
Other savings initiatives could come in the form of uniform costs after the military service secretaries review enlisted allowances and decide whether to increase that amount by next September.