The Department of Defense has asked Congress to roll back the increases in family separation allowance and imminent danger pay enacted in April for deployed forces. Instead, the department wants to raise hardship duty pay only for military personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If Congress agrees, the separation allowance for tens of thousands of personnel would fall Jan. 1 from $250 a month to $100, and danger pay would drop from $225 a month to $150. Depending on individual circumstance, the pay cut could range from $75 to $225 a month.

Among deployed forces, only troops in Afghanistan and Iraq would be spared an actual cut. Many in those theaters could even see a pay hike. Their hardship pay would be raised Jan. 1 by at least $225 a month, an amount to match any combined drop in separation or danger pay. Hardship pay, in fact, could be raised as much as $300.

The uncertainty, as of Oct. 1, reflected the fact that defense officials still weren’t prepared to discuss their plan to roll back the earlier increases, even though broad details were revealed during a Sept. 25 Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., criticized panel witnesses, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his comptroller, Dov Zakheim, for making "a serious mistake."

"How in the world do we justify activating all these guard and reserve (forces), removing them from their families and saying, ‘If you don’t happen to be assigned to Iraq or Afghanistan, we’re going to revert back to $100 a month in family separation allowance,’ " Durbin asked Rumsfeld. The move, the senator said, doesn’t square with recent rhetoric.

Zakheim, who appeared with Rumsfeld to defend an $87 billion spending request for 2004 for Iraq and Afghanistan, acknowledged the plan to shift special pay levels. He argued, however, that raising hardship duty pay would be fairer for troops in the two theaters because April’s family separation allowance increase went to all service members with families, while hardship duty pay is paid to all members in the two hostile areas.

"So that removes an inequity," Zakheim argued.

"I disagree completely," Durbin said. "The inequity is that somebody has to leave a family behind. … And the impact of increasing the hardship pay only in two theaters means an activated guardsman out of Illinois who is sent to some other place so that an active soldier can go to Iraq or Afghanistan now is not going to get higher separation allowance."

Congress raised the stipends to show appreciation for troops involved in the war on terrorism. Defense officials opposed the move as inefficient, going to many more thousands of personnel than those in Iraq and Afghanistan. David Chu, the department’s top personnel official, likened the April raises "to using a sledgehammer to hit a small nail."

Congress made the increases retroactive to October 2002. They were to expire Sept. 30, but passage of the fiscal 2004 defense appropriations bill that day, with $128 million to continue higher the family separation allowance and imminent danger pay through December, appeared to prevent a temporary drop in payments.

One reason to delay the drop until January, the administration reasoned, is to mask the overall impact on troop paychecks by timing the cuts to coincide with annual raises in basic pay and allowances. But a quick look at military pay tables suggests pay and allowances of most enlisted members won’t climb by enough on Jan. 1 to avoid an overall pay cut for those who would see the stipends fall by a combined $225 a month.

Though House-Senate appropriators supported the plan in the 2004 defense spending bill, a House-Senate conference on a defense authorization bill continued negotiations that still could alter pay plans. The Senate version of the authorization bill would make last April’s increases permanent. The House version would narrow eligibility to personnel involved in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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