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‘We need to have their backs’: Sen. Warren sets sights on military members and families in new role
"It is important that they be treated well, but it's also a point of our moral responsibility as Americans."
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s recent appointment as chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel comes with a deeply personal connection; after all, the Massachusetts Democrat knows what it means to have a family member serve.
“All three of my brothers were in the military — the oldest one, Don Reed, was career military, was in Vietnam off and on for about six years,” Warren shared in a phone interview with Boston.com. “And how we treat our military families is also about how we are ready and how we have strong defense.”
Her new role, she said, puts her in a position to tackle the issues that touch those families directly, including housing and health care.
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“We’ve got military working here [in Massachusetts],” Warren said. “And it is important that they be treated well, but it’s also a point of our moral responsibility as Americans; these are people who signed up to put their lives on the line in order to protect the rest of us.”
Elizabeth Warren
She said there’s an obligation to ensure that military families aren’t being cheated or placed in housing full of mold, water leaks, or vermin.
“That’s not how you treat the people who are on the front lines to defend America, and that’s true whether those people are being treated badly here in Massachusetts, out in Ohio, or in San Diego, or some place clear around the world,” Warren said. “It’s just not right.”
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When she was running for president in 2020, Warren emphasized the need to bring military recruitment into the 21st century, in part by focusing on more flexible talent management systems and better quality of life for service members and their families.
Three years later, she said her stance hasn’t changed.
“We end up with people who would like to serve, who would like to have that opportunity to serve their nation and whose skills we need, but who may not fit into the boxes that are already established for what new recruits have to be able to do and how they have to be moved around by the military,” she explained. “I think we’re going to have to think much more creatively about that if we want to have a strong military going forward.”
Ultimately, Warren said she wants to ensure that the military has a broader array of tools at its disposal for recruiting and training.
“The strength of our military is that our service members are equipped to think, to have judgment, to know priorities, to get on the ground, see that things are different from how they were told they would be, and to adapt,” she said. “That makes them stronger, but only if we give them that kind of training and that kind of support.”
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Supporting the troops also means expanding their access to medical care, according to Warren.
She’s particularly interested in traumatic brain injuries, which impacted more than 450,000 U.S. service members between 2000 and 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It started when I first saw the reports from people who were stationed in Afghanistan — they’d been near bomb sites — and how they ended up with physical changes in their brains that manifested in some pretty devastating ways,” Warren explained.
She and other members of Massachusetts’ congressional delegation recently helped secure $5 million in federal funding for Home Base, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to healing the invisible wounds of war — both for service members and their families. Earlier this week, Warren met with a woman who had recently “graduated” from a Home Base class for military spouses whose partners died by suicide.
In her new role leading the personnel subcommittee, Warren said she hopes to get more funding to support programs like Home Base.
“These are people who said they would give their lives for the rest of us, and when they’re in trouble, we need to have their backs,” she said.
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