When I was little, my mom volunteered for Navy Relief. I assume that it’s now called Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society. (Or maybe it was called that then, but it was called ‘Navy Relief’ in our house.) The NMCRS site says they provide financial support. I seem to recall when I was a kid that my mom gathered food and ‘thrift shop’-type donations for them.
I agree, horrible that anyone should go hungry in our country. Perhaps if we spent less on the military and VA benefits…
But if - as suggested above, someone allows their family to go hungry because they were stupid enough to pile up consumer debt, let them eat their fucking car.
…and there’s the real answer. The “If you want to earn more money get a better job, loser” attitudes have so permeated the US culture that it even manages to offset the “Thank you for your service” worship of the military.
So now we have a job in which the chance of being killed is not only a possibility, but actually part of the official job description, and some people think they deserve no more pay or better working conditions than a guy working the grill at McDonalds.
Heck, at least they could bring home a couple of burgers at the end of their shift! 
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The military re-assigns people to different localities fairly frequently, and personnel can wind up literally anywhere in the world. The enlisted member of the family has no choice in this, and refusal to comply has repercussions on par with getting a felony record in civilian life. This is not like a civilian job where the employee has the option of quitting.
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Multiple relocations over fairly short intervals makes it nigh impossible for a military spouse to hold down any sort of job. Having a career is even less possible for a military spouse. What jobs are likely to be available will be minimum wage. In the case of military families in a foreign country the spouse might not even be legally allowed to hold a job in the country of residence.
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The alternative is to either forbid military personnel from marrying (not likely to work) or to deliberately break up families, which our society does not view as a good thing.
The money to run the military is not “welfare”. It’s called paying for a military via taxes. Which is the normal way to do that sort of thing.
Yes, enormous money is poured in the US military. I’d personally prefer more to go towards the people involved and somewhat less towards new, shiny weapons “systems”, but as the section header indicates, that’s my opinion.
There is considerable scientific evidence that human brains are not truly fully mature until around 25. The last bits to mature are those involved with, among other things, anticipating future results of current actions.
By allowing 18 year old people to enlist we are letting physically immature adults make life-changing decisions that impact them and their families for years, decades, even a lifetime. I could not sign a lease for my own apartment until I was 21 (well, not without a co-signer) but at 18 I could have joined the military, gotten a dozen credit cards and maxed them out… why is it surprising that people who are not yet fully adult can screw up adult responsibilities?
Oh, and this is a very good answer for the OP:
The US military budget is indeed obscene. The money going to the actual employees and equipment maintenance is also obscene, but in a completely different way.
Some very good points already have been made. But pay structure is also worth looking at. Joe Snuffy the E-3 private with 4 years of service who lives in the barracks and eats at the chow hall (both for no cost) makes $2,372 before taxes. If they are authorized to live off post (as they must if they have a family, the officers get preference for free on-post housing, because fuck the grunts), they get about $100 more/month.
As mentioned, it’s hard for the civilian spouse to get a good job because their work history will show a lot of moves. Some posts have great networks of civvie spouses who can look out for each other, but not always and sometimes they get pretty toxic as the spouses tend to sort themselves by the rank of their military partners.
So yeah, the life of the low level enlisted person who is doing the bulk of the actual fighting, and who has minimal psychiatric resources, and who are typically very young and prone to making the same life choice mistakes as anyone else their age, and whose civilian spouse may or may not make their already hard life a living hell, is pretty much doomed if they want a family. I remember many years ago the Commandant of the Marine Corps took some heat when quite prudently mused that perhaps those who serve ought to forego marriage & children–for their own sakes, for the sakes of their fellows in uniform who depend on them to have a clear head, and for the sakes of their would-be spouses & children (aka widows & orphans). But he wasn’t wrong.
As for the food issue, military folks and their families have PX privileges–it’s a giant Walmart. There is no good reason Pvt Snuffy’s commander couldn’t approve an allowance of some kind–like $500/month or whatever the individual’s need might be. And nobody gets to cry about that system maybe getting abused until we fix the problems with overbudget garbage getting churned out by equipment suppliers.
Honestly? The age of cannon fodder is long over - it takes 11 people doing non-combat things to keep one person out at the pointy end of the stick, including medical [hospital personnel from radiology, lab techs, corpsmen who do random stuff to aid the doctors and nurses, food service, janitorial - and they all have to know not just the medical staff stuff but also military skills as well [everybody goes through their branch basic, then the school for their new skill set] clerical [data entry, depending on which office they end up in various other skill sets which include knowing which paperwork needs to be filed and with whom, HR equivalencies, legal aid/JAG] supply [warehouse, ordering, sourcing items not in the military supply systems] maintenance [buildings, vehicles, various equipment] There is even a department that is quality assurance for any work done on equipment and facilities [mrAru did 18 months in QA at the sub base in New London] and on top of all that, is training - people who end up on the pointy end of the stick can do tours back in the states training people to go out on the pointy end of the stick.
I am probably forgetting some military and civilian support jobs but they are way past some grunt with a shovel digging ditches [Navy has SeaBees with heavy equipment!!!] or pushing a broom. OK, well they probably still push brooms, but they do a lot more than sit around picking their noses and pushing a broom …
I was going to post something similar and get to the end of the thread to find your post.
You are correct. I would have said “unskilled compared to who?”
Believe it or not even ditch digging is a skill, all manual labor requires skills. Did you know that UPS has extensive training on lifting and carrying? Not just to avoid a injury directly, but to also help reduce wasting energy and tiring oneself excessively, which could lead to more or greater injury.
There are no unskilled laborers in the military.
My point exactly - there is training in all the various MOS in the military - nobody now is basic cannon fodder [hand them a gun and point them forward until they take over the objective or are dead. To be honest, hubs was a 20 year submariner, you get onto the boat with your basic training in whatever your job is going to be - no matter if it is just cooking, there is a school, and once you get on the boat there is a requirement to get qualified in submarine ‘practices’ - how to take a crap without getting hosed with feces [there is a process for flushing the toilet, and when it is tagged out for the tanks to be emptied out at sea, if you flush wrong you end up with the sanitary tank contents backflushing into the compartment and all over yourself and the compartment. Although one memorable time they ‘blew sanitaries’ overboard when the direction of the prevailing wind changed and the poor schlub topside got himself covered in biowaste. Oops. And yuck!] Even storing the ships food is complex - cramming enough food for 3 to 6 months means a sort of 3d Jenga [and yes subs can run close to out of food - one northern run under the arctic ice pack they had to surface and sort of hijack a research stations food supply because the supply officer did not order enough food for the estimated time under the ice. His career did not go so well.] Try cooking for 100+ men in a kitchen the size of your bathroom, working off ‘menu cards’ [if you need 100 servings of chili may I point you towards page 732 
] Let me note, there is pretty much always peanut butter and jelly, when they came up to hijack the supplies, they were running out of peanut butter.
You need to ask Robby for more fun stories.
I will also comment that dependent cruises can be a blast if you have the right age kids - they are given qual cards that need to be signed off upon, so they go through the various compartments for a little talk by one of the guys, who then signs off on the cards - I think I still have one knocking around somewhere [I do know I have the one when I went parachuting with my Seal boyfriend down in Virginia Beach, ‘Bird Turds and Idiots’ for jumping out of a perfectly good airplane =)] After the first dependents cruise, I stopped going to the various compartments for sigs and just went and hung out with our friends in machinery 1 =) .
I was always a little jealous of the Navy for the dependants cruises(as an Army Mecha-nick).
I’m sorry, but where did you get this information? During my time in the AF, the officers did NOT get preference for on-base housing. There are separate areas for enlisted and officers. And when someone moves off base, they don’t simply get “about $100 more/month”, but full Basic Allowance for Housing, which is tax free, and here in the DC area, is $2,355 a month for an E-3.
Numbers from The Interwebs. Application from personal experience (Army).
I found them fun - but then again, I was a civilian inside outside mechanic that was ASE qualified to work nuke plants, so I actually had an idea what my husband actually did for a living on the boat. Mainly, that is why I decided to go and hang out with he and our friends while the cruise was going on.
Angles and dangles, and emergency blows are fun =)
BAQ (Basic Allowance for Quarters) as it was called in my day, was location dependent for the amount. Where were you that it was only $100? I never received less than $430/month as a (lower)enlisted soldier, which was convenient since that seemed to always be the amount of the rent for a place off-post. Senior NCOs got more. Separate Rations was around $300, can’t remember the exact amount now(wife took charge of that money), it might have been a little more or a little less.
Well, let’s face it. A sea cruise is more comfortable and interesting than bouncing around in the back of a deuce-and-a-half.
ahhhh the sweet memories of tooling around the NTC in one of those. It was a ball to driven, not ride around in the back of 
This is more in line with what I remember. Basic monthly pay is just the start of what an enlistee is paid.
From when I served, the money problems stemmed from the fact that a lot of these people were raised poor, just like me, and once they started earning a paycheck, they had no idea how to budget for anything. Thank god for me having no desire to marry or have kids. It saved me from a considerable amount of problems others had.
Expensive flashy pickups were common, along with a new SUV or van for the spouse. ATVs, boats and motorcycles were very common recreation vehicles. It wasn’t uncommon for them to have 2 or 3 kids before they turned 21. I don’t think that’s the norm outside the military.
I don’t know how much food Canada throws away, but their food insecurity is worse than the US. One in eight families or 12.7% of Canadians are food insecure. And I’m pretty sure it’s not because of how much they pay their military.
I would like to know who they count and how they choose for these studies. Is it just working families? Do single people count? Married with no kids? Homeless?
As someone who volunteers at a food pantry, I wonder how much of the problem is people not knowing where to go for help. While we occasionally run low or out of particular items, we’ve never run out of food totally.
It’s a bit like when Country X has a famine. We have the food, we can get the food to Country X, but after that the food often never gets to the people who need it. Famine often goes hand in hand with war or bad government or lack of infrastructure. Thus the food is often diverted to people who want to make money off of it, or feed only their people or it just rots on the docks because there is no way to safely get it where it needs to go.
We need a better way to get food to people that need it, both here and abroad. Our current system(s) are obviously not working as intended.
Shit like this doesn’t help.