Your right, I don’t Im tring to come up with suggestions to alternative systems of support anyway.
Perhaps you have an idea, is it even possible in your mind that we might return the military personnel management to something more akin to pre-civil war financing?
Could we for example abandon most all of the life time and family services in favor of higher pay? Let the solder decide how to allocate his hard earned resources, and for the most part cut the ties after the end of their military service.
Military families have to be accommodated, sometimes they live in unpleasant places where they have to live on post with their own school system, health care, and base security and social life.
Travel can be frequent and being an extended part of the military makes that uprooting and relocating, even in foreign lands, easier for a family.
The Indian fighting army had base accommodations, and that was a situation where some wives carried pistols to kill the children and themselves if capture was imminent, and even in 1780 laws were being passed for wives by the Continental Congress.
What alternative is there to families living together?