 So thank you to Martin Cook for inviting me here. I'm afraid I'm gonna be kind of podium bound because I'll be saying one of two controversial things and I need what other people have said to support me. So you don't think I'm some loony and you realize other people save us too. So I've got a lot of quotes and I can't remember them all so I've really gotta read them. I'm also not gonna have any slides because the subject doesn't really match it. So it'll just be me speaking. I'll speak for about half the time we have and then the other half will be Q and A but I'll try and make it interesting nonetheless. I gather Martin invites me to these things because he thinks I'll be provocative. So I will aim not to disappoint and I hope that what I say will stimulate discussion. I think it should do. So actually something reasonably interesting happened to me last time or second last time was in the United States and I was coming back from a conference in San Antonio and when I was at the airport checking in there was this guy at the check-in counter next to me so having an argument with the airline clerk and he didn't want to pay for his luggage which for checking luggage. And he said, hey, I'm a military reservist. I shouldn't have to pay for my luggage. And she said, well, yeah, but you're traveling as a private citizen. You pay and he looked at me and went, that's not right. And I didn't want to be rude so I just kind of smile, you know. But privately I was thinking like, who does he think he is? Like why should he not have to pay the same as everyone else has to pay just because he puts a uniform on at the weekend? And this isn't an isolated example but there's various other incidents I know about this. So for instance in the Canadian newspapers in my local Canadian newspaper actually the Ottawa Citizen a couple of weeks ago there was a story about a guy who was in the army for 14 years, he's now a farmer and he was complaining that in civilian life he didn't get free dental insurance for his six children. So in the article he says, give me my dental back. I appreciate the gratitude for my service but gratitude is also about making sure my family gets looked after. Now I find this attitude rather baffling when what he seems to be saying is that if you served in the military for any amount of time then society has an obligation to look after you forever no matter what. And at the time this man joined the Canadian forces there were very clear rules. If you served 20 years then you got an immediate pension and additional benefits such as free dental for yourself and your family. And there was a point to the system the point was to encourage people to serve 20 years but also to encourage them to get out before they got too old. And everybody knew the rules. You serve for 20 years you get the pension and benefits. If you leave earlier say after 14 years, you don't. I was in the army for a while but I don't get free dental I don't consider it's a problem. So why does he think that he's entitled to it? Making it more difficult is the way these things are reported in the press and they're always reported very positively. So like this poor guy is being ill treated and if you actually stick your head up and go well hang on maybe he's not. You get all sorts of stuff dumped on you. And that's the kind of thing I wanna talk about. And finally there's kind of interesting in the main Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail on Monday there were big headlines. The front page story was military refused to beef up addiction care. When it quoted General Romier Delaire who was former commander of UN forces in Rwanda and says Delaire decries penny pinching on veteran services. And this shows that the question of veteran benefits is not just an American thing it's very high profile north of the border as well. And the kind of issue raised in the Globe and Mail which was to do with what relates to what serving and retired military personnel can receive if they have mental and physical wounds is a very serious issue. And obviously it's far more serious than the issue of a reservist trying to get free luggage on an airplane. And in a way it's somewhat unfair to lump them together unless you trivialize the more important ones of them. However, in some respects they do have something in common. They all indicate that we're experiencing something of a problem of expectations in which serving in retired members of the military have come to expect a certain level of benefits but society and the state are not prepared to give them what they think they're entitled to. The result is growing dissatisfaction. And this seems to me to be a relatively new phenomenon. Certainly not something I remember from the era when I was in the Army. So I think it's worth analyzing. Because of this what I want to do in my talk is examine this problem of expectations and ask the question what are military personnel entitled to? My answers will be fairly general rather than specific and I'll suggest that what they're entitled to is what other citizens are entitled to. But the idea that the state and society have special obligations towards serving or retired military personnel is incompatible with liberal democratic principles. And I realize this may not be a popular conclusion but I hope that instead of rejecting it outright you will at least consider it seriously. So where do the growing expectations come from? I think there are a number of factors at work here. The most important is probably the increased tempo of military operations over the past 15 years which has meant that more and more personnel have served overseas. Along the way many have been injured, some very badly and their needs are often very great. Those needs have not always been satisfied. To be fair by historical standards the treatment of our veterans is generally pretty good but it isn't always as we have seen in the United States for instance with the scandal about Walter Reed Medical Center. So whilst publicized cases of things going wrong have helped to create a picture of unsatisfactory treatment which has become quite well-intrenched. Meanwhile the high profile which recent wars have given the military has helped also to raise military members social status. The support our troops movement has been phenomenally successful. The last 15 years have seen a sort of valorization of the armed forces which many people now see as embodying what is finest about their countries. Or at least that is what they say in public even if they don't always privately believe it. Certainly politicians in many western states have gone out of their way to praise military personnel as especially good people. For instance former Canadian Defense Minister Peter McKay told troops returning from Afghanistan that they were quote, Canada's finest citizens bar none. And it shouldn't be altogether surprising if people who hear such stuff over and over again start to believe it. Further complicating the issue is that certain high ranking people have promised things or implied things which they really ought not to have promised or implied. In Canada for instance in the middle of the Afghan campaign the then chief of defense staff, General Rick Hillier vowed to do everything he could to keep wounded soldiers in the military if they wanted to stay. The problem with this pledge was that it encouraged expectations which couldn't be satisfied. Although Hillier had only said that he would do everything he could. Hillier had a reputation as being a straight talking guy who looks after the troops and so people interpreted this as meaning that they would definitely be able to keep their jobs even if badly wounded. But of course that proved to be impractical and the Canadian forces weren't able to keep the promise. The result has been at least one court case in which a badly wounded soldier came forward to say that he had been promised he could stay in the army but was then thrown out. Now that was a case of a specific promise but in recent years in some countries a mythology has developed about a more general promise to members of the armed forces that they will receive a certain level of benefits which they find satisfactory. In some cases the language used to describe this alleged promise has taken on crazy religious overtones. In the United Kingdom for instance in the last decade an idea has taken root that the state and its soldiers are bound by a sacred covenant. And in line with this the British armed forces have recently introduced a formal doctrine of civil military relations called the armed forces covenant. The drafters of which were actually the son of a priest, a priest and a general who was educated in the Catholic school who wrote the drafter of Thomas Aquinas by his side. So it was very religiously deliberately religious in overtones. Similar language is used in Canada where a group of veterans has sued the federal government saying that the benefits it provides to veterans are insufficient and that the government has quote a sacred obligation, unquote, to care for veterans because of quote a social covenant which exists between the state and its soldiers. And according to the text of the lawsuit military personnel have quote a unique relationship with the crown by the crown in Canada we mean the state. In return for undertaking onerous and often dangerous obligations armed forces members were promised that they and their dependents would be fairly and adequately compensated. So the idea here is they're saying in a lawsuit that a general promise was made. Problems arise, however, when you try and pin them down about where and when this promise was actually made. And in Britain, supporters of the military covenants have conjured up long forgotten pledges made by Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century. And in Canada they rely on a speech made by Prime Minister Robert Borden in 1917 when Canada not only was fighting a world war but was also in the midst of a general election campaign. The idea then is that I mean it strikes me that the idea that a promise made by a politician in an election a hundred years ago is somehow eternally binding upon the state as it forms the foundations of a sacred covenant between the state and its servants I think is rather far-fetched. But this is the language which is being used. Indeed the whole idea that the state has promised something more than what is currently being provided isn't justified by most of the facts. At least in the countries I have studied, I can't really speak for the United States because I haven't studied your country so much. Certainly jurisprudence in Canada and the United Kingdom make it very clear that the state does not have any sacred obligation of the sort that veterans claim. In one of the key cases on the issue the judge determined that, quote, both English and Canadian courts have always considered that the crown is in no way contractually bound to the members of the armed forces. That a person who joins the forces enters into a unilateral commitment in return for which the queen assumes no obligations. So that's pretty clear. So here we come to the core of the problem of expectations. Many service personnel, it seems, have come to believe that they have been promised benefits and above and beyond what they are receiving but the state takes a very different view and is backed by the courts which is that the state never promised any such thing. All it has ever promised is what is written in legislation. So in Canada the state has promised in legislation that if you serve 20 years you get a pension and dental insurance. But there's nothing in legislation saying that if you serve a shorter time such as 14 years you should get it. So if the man I previously mentioned thinks that he is entitled to free dental he's just plain wrong. That was never promised. He was a volunteer who signed up with his own free will on the terms which existed at the time he signed up and has no right to complain that he is not being given something which was not part of the terms and conditions of his service when he joined or when he left. As for the idea that there is some holy covenant out there which entitles military personnel to something more that is a figment of their imagination. The state never agreed to such a covenant and is under no obligation to abide by what some of its servants imagine it to be just because they happen to imagine it. So my first answer to the question what our service personnel entitled to would be that they are entitled to whatever they have specifically been promised under the terms of their employment and whatever legislation they exist about veterans benefits and so on. They aren't entitled to more than that. After all they freely entered into a relationship based on those terms and conditions. However, there is a trend at least among some people to think that they are entitled to more. I cannot say how widespread this phenomenon is. You will know that better than I do because you're still in the military whereas my family ties to the military were severed several years ago so I'm viewing things at a distance. But I do know that I'm not alone in thinking that this is a problem. So journalist Tom Ricks who wrote a well-known book about U.S. operations in Iraq called Fiasco which perhaps some of you may have read. He got a few people to write about this on his blog and this is why I need my quotes because I have to read what these guys actually said, okay. So one of them a U.S. Marine wrote the following. He said, I think there's a culture of entitlement being bred in new veterans. I suspect that this is a product of the all volunteer force and the Vietnam era. No one wants to be accused of being anti-military so folks bend over backwards to extend various privileges and perks to veterans. This is compounded by veterans organizations which encourage service members to fight for disability benefits which may or may not be legitimate or at least that was my experience. New veterans are leaving the military thinking that society owes them something other than a little appreciation. And then another veteran wrote something similar on Rick's blog, he said, quote, in our attempt to heal, to be generous and to be thankful to those who volunteered to serve, America inadvertently created a cadre of veterans for whom nothing would ever be good enough. Our generation is easily the best supported generation of veterans since those of World War II. However, we have been nervous to say out loud that service alone should not guarantee free admission and the front of every line for every service member. And this service sense of entitlement can extend beyond service personnel to their families. For instance, there was a recent article in the Washington Post earlier this year in which the author who's a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Army said this, quote, my wife and I own a couple of smoothie food shops. Recently, I had a spouse grow irate with my cashier because we didn't offer a discount to military family members. Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened. In this particular case, my cashier was on the receiving end of a very long tirade about how obviously unappreciative ownership must be of the sacrifices of the military family. The woman ended by stating it would be in the owner's best interest to offer discounts to families as well. I wish I was there to find out exactly what she meant beyond her vague threat. Her response, I believe, had nothing to do with my veteran-owned business being unappreciative of military families and everything to do with the growing sense in our active and tired military community that as a group, its members should be catered to because of their service. This idea that military personnel deserves special treatment is not universally accepted. In essence, there are two models of the benefits that military personnel should receive. These are the no disadvantage model and the citizen plus model. So the first implies that servicemen and women should not be disadvantaged because of being in the military. So in the case of medical care, for instance, this would mean that wounded veterans should receive the same benefits as civilians who suffer the same injuries. The second model, however, implies that because of the unique nature of their service, military personnel should enjoy greater benefits than civilians. The wounded veteran therefore should not receive the same as the equally badly wounded civilian, but more. Unfortunately, people often muddle these up together and when they're making arguments, they put both in together in a sort of intellectually incoherent way so it's not very easy to work out what it is they're actually demanding. So for instance, in the Canadian court case I mentioned, veterans' lawyers fail to make a distinction between the two types of claims. On the one hand, their case says that quote, they are being treated unequally because the benefits and compensation available under the new veterans' charter are substantially less favorable than those that are available to injured person claiming under tort law or workers' compensation. So that's a claim which fits in the no disadvantage model. They're saying veterans' benefits are not equal to what you get under workers' compensation than you ought to be. On the other hand, the lawyers then go on to appeal to the armed forces quote, unique relationship with the crowd, which is a very different point of principle. And really fits better with the Citizen Plus model. So for instance, a guy called Michael Blay who's in charge of one of the more militant veteran groups in Canada called Canadian Veterans Advocacy has been backing this lawsuit and he has said things which make it very clear that he views the military status in terms of Citizens Plus. So this is what he has to say, I'll quote him. Nor do we agree with this or support the Royal Canadian Legion or many prominent veterans' organizations that have united under the banner of the consultation group on this issue. They would propose solutions that compare the sacrifice of Major Mark Campbell whose legs were explosively amputated, who suffered serious internal injuries, including the loss of a testicle who has brainstem injury and complex PTSD. We have applied to the civilian awarded legal damages due to negligence at the workplace in Ontario. This is unconscionable. There is no comparison. The sacred obligation is not accorded to a litigant in a lawsuit. The sacred obligation is reserved for Canadians who have sworn allegiance to this great nation, who have borne arms in our name and bled in battle, who have suffered in peace with unwavering loyalty and offered great sacrifice while treading in harm's way in Canada's name. Clearly the compensation quotient of the lump sum award must reflect and respect for sacrifice borne. End quote. So it's very clear in this quotation that the speaker views the entitlements of soldiers and civilians as being different regardless of need. He actually says that it's unconscionable to compare the injuries of the very badly injured major with a similarly injured civilian. Failure to distinguish between two models happens elsewhere. In Britain, for instance, the Confederation of British Service and Ex-Service Organization said the following in a 2009 statement, quote, the armed forces do not demand privileged status but expect to be treated as a special group within the public sector to reflect the unique nature of military service. And as one member of the British Parliament commented, it's difficult to know what to make of it. Okay, because they're saying, we're not a special group, but we demand special status. The Confederation finds further expression in the armed forces covenant adopted by the British government in 2010. This declares that, quote, those who serve in the armed forces should face no disadvantage compared to other citizens in the provisions of public and commercial services. So they're talking in no disadvantage language. But then a document goes on to say that veterans should receive, quote, priority treatment from the National Health Service, should have, quote, priority status in applying for government-sponsored affordable housing schemes and should have additional support in accessing local service delivery, such as social housing or free access to leisure facilities, discounts in shops and restaurants. In this way, the Covenant clearly seeks to extend perks to military personnel that other citizens do not have, and therefore it clearly implies a citizen's plus status for all military personnel. All military personnel are automatically deserving of civilian society's respect. That's the argument being made. So how could you justify this citizen-plus model? Well, a common argument I often hear in favor of it is that military service is unlike other professions because it isn't selfish in its intent. Military personnel don't serve in order to make money for themselves, but to protect their nation. Working for the military is a morally superior activity to other tasks. As it serves the community as a whole, the community ought to reward it by, for instance, offering discounts that aren't offered to members of other professions. There are some problems with this line of argument. First, it is paradoxical to use the idea that military service is selfless as an argument to demand greater privileges. Okay, it's just intellectual nonsense. Second, while serving the higher good may be part of many servicemen and women, such as yourselves, it certainly isn't the only motivation. People join up for all sorts of reasons to have their college tuition paid for, out of a sense of adventure, or to learn a trade while getting a reasonable salary. Furthermore, and this one I'm gonna really get a little bit more provocative, I'm not convinced that the military does provide a greater public service than other professions. Anybody working in any productive form of employment is contributing to the general good of society. Okay. Some might even argue that they are actually contributing more than the military is. I haven't yet met anybody who thinks that doctors, teachers, firefighters, and so on don't contribute to the public good. There are good reasons for everybody to be grateful to them. But if you disagree with what the military is doing in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan or something, then you may not think it's performing a public service at all. When I was last living in Britain, I was opposed to the war in Iraq. Did I think that British soldiers were contributing to the good of my society by fighting in Iraq? Not at all! Quite the opposite. They were making neither Britain nor Iraq any safer. I could not think of any good reason why I should have felt any debt of gratitude for them for doing something which wasn't helping me or my society in any way. So if we are to justify citizen plus status, we need to move beyond ideas of public service. Instead, a justification might be found in the idea that military service is a unique profession and thus merits unique entitlements. Specifically, one could argue that because they are subject to military discipline, military personnel lose rights as a result of their service. Because they lose some rights, they might be said to be entitled to receive some perks as compensation. And that kind of makes sense, but I don't find it desperately convincing, particularly when you're talking about professional armies, because in professional armies, the loss of rights is entirely voluntary. And if you voluntarily decide to discard your rights, it's difficult to then come back and say, well, I'm entitled to something right now. Furthermore, although I'm not at all sure what the situation is in the United States, but certainly in Europe courts are more and more often deciding that military service does not, in fact, deprive personnel of their legal rights, okay, even during armed conflict. So courts have used human rights legislation to determine that military personnel have a right to form a trade union anywhere in Europe. And also to determine that some soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq who are unjustly deprived of their right to life. You might find this a little bizarre, these are legal rulings, but they have been made. So legal trends are making the idea that military personnel must give up of their rights increasingly untenable. Nevertheless, it could still be said that the military profession is unique because it involves potential loss of life. Being different in this way, it could be said that it deserves special remuneration. And this idea was expressed by one of the authors of the British Army's military covenant, General Sebastian Roberts, who remarked that in drafting it, quote, I wanted it to be widely understood that soldiers potentially give everything in return the nation, private or public must be prepared to give everything back. And quoting General Sir John Hackett, some Canadian veterans have used similar language claiming that as soldiers have an unlimited liability in response, the state has an equally unlimited liability towards them. And I understand this argument, but I think it's unreasonable. No state and no society can issue a blank check. You cannot simply say that state and society have an unlimited liability to veterans and that they must give everything back. That is not possible. Resources in any society are limited. Those which go on one group must come from another. When veterans make a claim for additional resources, they are in fact making a claim for the money of fellow citizens, which the state will have to collect for them through taxes or which their fellow citizens will have to pay for in some other way. The needs of veterans therefore need to be balanced against other social needs as well. Liberal welfare states today are for the most part morally neutral, meaning they generally do not differentiate between the deserving and the undeserving. For instance, Canada's taxation-funded state-run health service, like the National Health Service in Britain, treats the patient whose lung cancer is self-inflicted through smoking equally to the lung cancer patient who never smoked at all. Their need is the same. In short, most states differentiate and distribute benefits upon the basis of what people need rather than who they are or what they are deemed to deserve. And Martin in Q&A mentioned the Israeli military officer, Michael Gross. He's written some interesting things on this. He argues that injured soldiers who cannot return to duty should not receive privileged access to civilian health care, but only the same treatment that equally-needy civilians receive. Soldiers, he says, quote, should be satisfied with military medical care when it, A, is sufficient to maintain their health and fitness, B, can return many of the wounded to battle, C, does not abandon the seriously wounded, and D, provides the seriously wounded with short and long-term health care on par with what their compatriots receive. In short, Gross argues for a no-disadvantage model. He notes that past behavior is not considered a reason for assigning priorities in health care. The bike rider whose serious head injuries are due to his foolish failure to wear a helmet is still rushed to the head of a line in the emergency room. For, as Gross says, quote, the distribution principle that governs the distribution of health care is medical need. It's the bike rider's own fault, but nonetheless, you send him to the front, okay? So if poor behavior is not a reason for giving people less access to care, then behavior which society considers good, such as serving in the military, is not a reason for giving more. As Gross says, quote, the right to health care is an unconditional universal human right guaranteed solely by virtue of one's status as a human being and unaffected by merit or past contribution, military service should not add to or detract from an individual's right to health care. And the same principle applies equally to other forms of state assistance. According to Gross, quote, the principle of not harming should trump that of not rewarding. That is, it is better morally that a faultless should not be harmed rather than the meritorious not be rewarded. The Citizen Plus model is incompatible with this principle. In distributing scarce national resources, what should guide us is not people, what who people are or what they do, but what they need. So the second answer to the question, what our service personnel entitled to is what they need. If it is true that wounded veterans are not receiving the compensation they need, then we have a problem, okay? And we should do something about it. But we assess that by determining their needs not by constructing arguments based on the unique nature of the military profession or some mythical sacred covenant or anything similar. And at the same time, we must remember that national resources are limited and that other people have needs which also have to be met. I was at a conference earlier this year at Kansas State University discussing the subject of honor and modern society. And one of the philosophers present said something I found quite appropriate and he said this, quote, liberalism would never claim that for any given citizen to exercise liberty, she must serve in office. So it doesn't, whether you're in office or not, you're still equally free in a liberal order. And he then went on to remark that it's difficult to see how liberalism could consider serving in government office, making someone ethically superior. As he said, quote, giving freedom priority value certainly gives us no reason to value government service over any other kind of job nor does it suggest that some citizens are ethically superior to others. Okay, I agree with this. And if it is true of political office and government service more generally, then it is true of military service more specifically. While no disadvantage is evidently fair, citizen plus is hard to reconcile with a liberal democratic order. I also think it is potentially dangerous. So Martin was telling me Andrew Basavich, as a former US Army colonel. Now a professor was here last year, he's written a number of books criticizing what he calls the new American militarism. And he comments that, quote, in public life today, paying homage to those in uniform has become obligatory and the one unforgivable sin is to be found guilty of failing to support the troops. And the risk is that this elevation of the military makes it very difficult to civilians to criticize anything that the military does. So we can see in countries like the USA, Canada and Britain that criticism of recent wars, many of which have been both morally questionable and militarily unsuccessful has been very muted. One reason is that the elevation of the soldier into a figure worthy of special respect has made it easy for war supporters to silence critics by claiming that in criticizing the war, they are criticizing the soldiers or in some way fading to support them. After all, the troops need high morale if they are to succeed and they can't have high morale if people keep saying that the war they are fighting is morally unjust. Therefore, you can't say it's morally unjust because if you say it's morally unjust, that's incompatible with supporting the troops. This was an argument used by Stephen Harper who until yesterday was Prime Minister of Canada who when the opposition New Democratic Party criticized the Canadian military in operation in Afghanistan and in reply Harper said that the New Democrats were undermining the troops. So he used to support our troops things just to silence any discussion about whether this was a good operation or not. And Basavich points out that before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there was considerable public disquiet about the planned war but quote, no politician of national stature offered himself or herself as the movement's champion. No would-be statesman nursing even the slightest prospects of high national office was willing to risk being tagged with not supporting those whom President Bush was ordering into harm's way. Opposition to war had become something of a third rail. Only the very brave or the very foolhardy dared to venture anywhere near it. Making it impossible to criticize soldiers also makes it more difficult to render the military as a whole accountable when errors are made. One can see this in Britain for instance, the British Army's operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan were decidedly unsuccessful to put it fairly mildly. This was in part due to some very poor decisions made at the higher levels of the military and privately some people will admit this. Yet almost nobody has ever criticized Britain's military commanders. Why? Because those commanders managed a wonderful political campaign in which they deflected blame onto the government by saying that the government wasn't supporting the troops by not giving them enough resources. So the whole support the troops scheme thus became a way of avoiding accountability and of actually getting even more money for a fading institution, which is the opposite of accountability. Okay. Accountability is the bedrock of democracy. You know, we think of democracy as being about voting. Well no, voting is not an end in itself. Voting is about accountability. Democracy is all about accountability. So when an institution's failures are not believed to be a reason for holding that institution to account but rather a reason to blame elected officials for allegedly fading to give enough resources, we do not have accountability. Okay. The raising of military personnel into citizens plus places them beyond the realm of democratic control. This is not a desirable development. So my third answer to the question, what our military service personnel entitled to is therefore that no disadvantaged model of entitlements is preferable to the citizen plus model. Military personnel should be considered equal members of our society not as deserving special rights. This conclusion fits well with the ethical theory currently used by the German army known as Inne Röferung, which means roughly inner leadership. Inne Röferung was developed as a response to the militarism of Nazi Germany and it specifically rejects the concept of citizens plus. Instead it stipulates that military personnel are citizens in uniform. As such, military personnel should endorse the same values and virtues as other citizens. This contrasts quite strongly with the approach in some other countries, which promotes the idea that the unique nature of military service requires military personnel to endorse different values from civilian society and which also requires them to be especially virtuous. This second approach goes together with a form of military ethics education which emphasizes character development and virtues. This is based on the view that military life puts people in particularly challenging moral situations and so requires that they be of particularly high moral character. Military institutions, the argument goes, therefore have to have higher moral standards than civilian ones. And no doubt this is something you have all heard and some of you believe. But it is an approach which is hotly debated and it has some drawbacks. One of which is that when you keep saying that the military has particularly high moral standards, you may end up believing that military personnel are particularly moral people. After all, we have particularly high moral standards and you're in here and you haven't been thrown out so you must be a paragon of these particularly high moral standards so therefore you are particularly moral people. And better than civilians. And because of that, you deserve special status. Actually this is also a relatively new phenomenon. At least in the English speaking world, once the prevailing view was what the Duke of Wellington said, which is that soldiers were the mere scum of the earth. Nowadays, however, there's a growing belief that members of the armed forces are supercitizens or as Andrew Basevich writes, quote, a repository of traditional values and old fashioned virtue. And in the United States, says Basevich, there is quote, a tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the apotheosis of all that is great and good about contemporary America. Soldiers, Basevich writes, quote, have tended to concur with this evaluation of their own moral superiority. And as retired US, as I'm in the Navy, so I've got a better quote than Navy officer, so retired US Admiral Stanley Arthur has said this, he says, quote, more and more enlisted as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve. And for the reasons I have outlined earlier, I don't think this is a good thing. And if I get all preachy, we'd like to caution you against it. So to conclude, I have three answers to the question, what are service personnel and veterans entitled to? First, they're entitled to whatever was in the terms and conditions they agreed to when serving in the military. Second, if they have some special need which results from their military service, their compensation should be based upon their needs, not upon the fact that the need is a product of their service. Furthermore, the provision of benefits to meet those needs has to be considered in the context of the limits of national resources and the needs of other members of society. Third, the no disadvantage model of entitlements is preferable to the Citizen Plus model. Military personnel should be considered equal members of our society, not deserving of special rights. And on that note, I conclude and I hope I've stimulated some thought and will be happy to take your questions. Thank you.