WHAT do American troops, who have spent much of the past 15 years in desert camouflage, do when they come home? Compared with veterans of previous wars, they are more likely to work for the federal government, where almost half of all new hires are now veterans. They are more likely to be disabled. And they are less likely to be in the labour force. These last two trends mean that the financial cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars will remain high long after the final bullets have been fired.

Around 200,000 people leave the military each year. Most go through a Pentagon programme designed to ease the transition to civilian life. This often points in one direction: towards government employment. Veterans have been more likely to work for the government than workers as a whole since the introduction, between the two world wars, of laws ordering the bureaucracies to favour them when hiring. There was a bump in the number of vets in the civil service after the second world war and again after Vietnam, but nothing on the scale of the increase since 2009 (see chart) when Barack Obama ordered the government to hire even more of them. Americans revere veterans almost as much as they distrust federal bureaucrats, yet increasingly they are the same people.

No one would be surprised to hear that a hefty 46.5% of the civilian employees of the Defence Department are veterans. But it does not stop there. Some 36% of staff at the Department of Transport, 24% at Justice and 22% at Energy are accustomed to calling their managers “sir”. Under veterans’ preference rules, soldiers who were severely wounded or received a Purple Heart gain a ten-point head start over everyone else when being considered for employment. For some jobs, civil servants are obliged to hire veterans if competent ones can be found. In cases where a soldier has been killed or severely wounded, his or her spouse can be appointed to a federal job without any competition.

Though there are reasons to worry about the effects of hiring people on criteria other than being the best person for the job, an infusion of veterans can be beneficial. “These folks are generally used to getting things done, rather than coming up with 50 reasons why something is impossible,” says Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. Besides, the federal government’s hiring practices have bigger problems than a pro-veteran bias, argues Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service, another think-tank. Mr Stier’s outfit examined hiring at one government department and discovered a 105-step process involving 45 people, none of whom had a clear idea of what the people leading the department wanted from new employees. “The likelihood of getting the right person for the job was next to none,” says Mr Stier. “It was essentially random.”

Traditionally, military veterans have done well in the labour market, not least because the kind of people the military hires in the first place tend to be in better physical and mental health than the population as a whole. But a forthcoming paper by Courtney Coile of Wellesley College, Mark Duggan and Audrey Guo (both of Stanford) finds that this is no longer true. From 1980-2000 veterans were more likely than other workers to be in or looking for work. That changed around the turn of the century and the gap has widened since: young veterans are now more likely to be unemployed than other workers.

As Mr Duggan points out, this change coincided with another: the rise in the number of veterans receiving disability payments. After the second world war about 15% of veterans claimed some disability payment, a rate that increased to about 25% after Vietnam. For the current cohort leaving the military, the figure is closer to half. One often cited reason for this is that improvements in battlefield medicine and body armour mean that soldiers survive blasts that would once have been fatal. Instead of dying, many return home with traumatic brain injuries.

Yet improved body armour does not get close to accounting for the increase in disability payments, says Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gade of West Point (Mr Gade speaks from experience: his right leg was blown off in Iraq in January 2005). Disability payments are awarded according to a sliding scale of severity, expressed as a percentage. A case of post-traumatic stress disorder rates as 60-70% disabled. Mr Gade’s amputation would qualify him as 100% disabled if he left the army. One of the fastest growing subsets of disabled veterans is a group judged so disabled that they are eligible for an “unemployability” payment of $3,100 a month for someone with a spouse and one child.

While most disability payments are made in addition to anything veterans earn, this is not the case for these more generous benefits. As soon as a veteran earns over $1,000 a month, $2,100 in unemployability payments are withdrawn—“a monster disincentive to work,” says Mr Gade.

The lingering cost of war

Attempts to reform veterans’ benefits are almost as old as the benefits themselves. In 1955 the Bradley Commission judged that payments to veterans were unaffordable and poorly designed. Yet where veterans are concerned, congressmen worry only about whether their votes seem generous enough. Spending on disability benefits for veterans has almost tripled since 2000, to $54 billion a year. Left unchecked this will increase as today’s veterans age, further shifting the Pentagon’s budget away from fighting and towards providing care for ex-employees. Reversing this will require politicians to take on disabled veterans. Most would sooner burn Old Glory on live television.