Ever since iconic fife-and-drum corps marched into Revolutionary War battles, military bands have inspired American soldiers and citizens alike in war and peace. They are mainstays of state dinners, presidential inaugurations, funerals and celebratory events around the country, including the Super Bowl.
But are they worth the more than $400 million the government spends on them each year? Is there an objective way to measure how effective these ensembles are at boosting morale and patriotism and spreading goodwill across the globe?
The answer, at least for now, is no. Congress posed the question to the Government Accountability Office, and it determined this summer that the Pentagon has no “measurable objectives or performance measures” for the nation’s 136 military bands.
So the watchdog agency duly recommended that each military service step lively. But the idea of such metrics strikes a sour note with some military band supporters. And the discordance is an all-American illustration of the way government spending of wide emotional resonance can outrank more hard-nosed accounting.
The GAO is out of step with what empirical measurement can achieve, say the band fans. “How do you quantify what happens when someone gets home from a concert? Can you put a number on their feelings to what they heard?” asked Harry Gleeson, past president and historian emeritus of the Air Force Musicians Association.
John Moody, a former Army band member, chimed in. “It seems almost ridiculous that a GAO report wants to measure how well the military bands are doing,” he said. “How does Jimi Hendrix stack up against Mozart, or Burt Bacharach against Willie Nelson? Or apples vs. carrots? Can't be done.”
There is little doubt that military bands are popular. In total, Army bands played at more than 24,000 events last year, before total estimated crowds of 28 million people. A YouTube video of a November 2016 performance of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by the U.S. Army Field Band drew nearly 1.6 million views, the GAO says. A 2015 YouTube video of an Air Force band performance at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station logged about 4 million views.
About 6,600 uniformed personnel are currently assigned to military bands, the GAO says. The Army has by far the most ensembles: 99 -- including Pershing’s Own, the Army’s elite musical group founded in 1922 by Gen. John Pershing. The Air Force has 11 bands, the Marine Corps 12 and the Navy 11.
That’s a lot of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” -- not to mention jazz, pop and classical -- but the numbers would be larger were it not for a 2011 study projecting that the Pentagon might spend $50 billion on bands over the next 50 years. Reductions prompted by that study, along with spending caps placed on overall defense spending in 2011, led to a 7.5 percent decline in in the number of military band personnel between 2012 and 2016.
So now the services have to decline more invitations to play – they decline thousands – even as savings don’t necessarily materialize from the reductions. For example, the Air Force’s nine active-duty bands saw costs rise from $8.8 million in 2012 to $10.6 million in 2016, according to the GAO, due to “unique circumstances” with individual units. One such circumstance: the added expense of having band members swap woodwinds for Windex when they were tasked with building maintenance at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Washington, D.C.
A Pentagon study put the total cost for military bands at $437 million for the 2015 fiscal year – close to the cost of three F-35 joint strike fighters at $164 million a pop. All without firing a shot. But data and metrics are beside the point to band supporters who hear the music as sustenance to soul and patriotic spirit.
“Military bands absolutely increase morale,” Moody said. “They make the audiences, military or civilian, happy. Always.”
Moody recalled that when he was stationed in Germany, rumbling armored units “would have maneuvers in the farmers’ corn fields, upsetting the farmers.”
“Then we” -- the 8th Infantry Division Band – “would perform a concert for the community shortly thereafter and all would seem to be forgotten. Community goodwill,” Moody said.
But why couldn’t recorded music substitute for live performances in some cases, as Chris Preble, a defense expert at the Cato Institute, suggested in an interview for this article?
“I couldn't imagine a unit heading off to war without a ceremonial send-off,” Moody said, “or a commanding general's change-of-command ceremony with taped music.”
Yet true to straight-arrow bureaucratic form, Pentagon officials have saluted smartly and gotten with the GAO program, announcing plans to develop standard performance criteria for the armed service branches by the first quarter of fiscal year 2018.
Stars and Stripes forever!
