When I read this editorial from Robin Walker at the Hill, I found the story she was exploring almost beyond belief. Walker is a military wife whose husband has twenty years of service in uniform, so she is obviously familiar with the hardships that military families frequently have to deal with. Her topic this week is a proposed new program coming out of the House Agricultural Committee. It’s known as the “EARN Act,” standing for the Equal Access to the Right Nutrition for Military Families Act. The authors of this proposal claim that too many military families are unable to afford or obtain enough nutritional food, so a new avenue of assistance is required. The end result, as Walker points out, is that a significantly larger number of military families would essentially wind up on food stamps. But the bill’s authors fail to provide any substantial documentation to show that the problem even exists. The author goes on to cite numerous problems with this proposal and feels that it should be defeated.

Yet another dangerous entitlement expansion could be coming soon. On Nov. 10, the House Agriculture Committee will discuss a bill that would put significantly more members of the armed forces on food stamps, weakening the military in numerous ways. Yet the federal government has no evidence to justify this policy — and even if there is a problem that needs to be solved, there’s a better option than greater dependency on government welfare.

The Equal Access to the Right Nutrition for Military Families Act, or EARN Act, is being sold with the usual tugging at the heartstrings. Its congressional sponsors are focused on “food insecurity” among U.S. forces. They must not have read their own bill, which fails to prove that such a crisis exists.

The EARN Act begins with a lengthy discussion of the Department of Defense’s lack of data on food insecurity in the military. The Pentagon has been tasked with discovering that information since 2016, yet government investigations have found little to no movement.

I would certainly agree that if the Pentagon has been tasked with reporting on food insecurity among military families for the past six years and have failed to do so, that’s a tremendous shortcoming that needs to be addressed. It’s also an issue that should have already been brought to the attention of the Secretary of Defense so they can get out there and kick some butts to get this taken care of.

I wouldn’t be terribly concerned about issues of food insecurity among single members of the military. Speaking from experience, I can tell you that unmarried, unattached soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines pretty much always have a place to go where there will be a roof over their heads and access to at least three square meals per day unless they are out in the field of battle. But families are another matter. Married troops do receive extra funds every payday to help care for their families, but sometimes you really have to stretch those dollars, at least among the enlisted ranks.

So perhaps there are food insecurity issues waiting to be discovered and addressed. But this should not be an issue that needs to be handled by the Agricultural Committee or the Department of Agriculture. And the answer is not food stamps. If our men and women in uniform are being put on food stamps because we are not providing them with the ability to feed themselves in a nutritious fashion, that is a massive embarrassment to our country and a national disgrace. The answer needs to come from the Armed Services Committee in the form of increasing the funding to pay military families (if required) and putting a boot to the backside of the Pentagon to make it happen at once.

Nobody expects to get rich serving as an enlisted person in the American military. (I can attest to that personally.) But they also don’t sign up with an expectation that they or their families will be starving. I’m not suggesting that this situation be swept under the rug in any way. But I agree with Robin Walker that a new entitlement program is not the way to address the question. Read her full editorial to see some of the other issues the establishment of such a program would raise. But more than anything else, this is one of those issues that cry out for a solution that may require more of a sledgehammer than a scalpel. Our military faces any number of challenges on a daily basis, but ensuring that every one of our troops and the members of their families simply has the proper amount of food to feed themselves shouldn’t be one of them. If we can’t fix this, then we have no business maintaining a military in the first place.