Congress and military leaders point with pride to recent legislation that enhanced military retirement benefits for much of the career force, set raises above private-sector wage growth and established Tricare for Life coverage for Medicare-eligible beneficiaries.
Those initiatives, however, helped boost the cost of military pay and benefits by 32 percent in just five years and probably made it more difficult to sustain a 21st-century superpower force to fight a global war on terrorism.
That’s the theme of a new book, “Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military Personnel System,” from MIT Press. Its anthology of essays by prominent analysts on military personnel issues criticizes spending additional billions on a Cold War-era compensation mix and dusty personnel systems that resist change.
Edited by Cindy Williams of MIT’s Security Studies Program, a former senior analyst with the Congressional Budget Office, the book supports Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s call to transform the military with marketplace innovations. It warns of trouble ahead for the all-volunteer force if military leaders and politicians continue to ignore pay and personnel reforms.
Williams and colleagues challenge traditional thinking on military compensation, including the wisdom of protecting benefits such as base housing and discount shopping, and continuing to rely on old force-shaping tools such as 20-year retirement and tax-free allowances.
When faced with a recruiting and retention crisis in the late 1990s, military leaders sought and Congress approved broad increases in traditional pays and benefits. That, the book contends, was precisely what shouldn’t have been done.
Rather than address serious job skill imbalances, for example, large across-the-board pay raises boosted “incentives for people with the least valuable skills to stay in the military well past the period when their low-tech contributions are most useful,” Williams notes.
Likewise, creating Tricare for Life-enhanced medical benefits for 1.7 million elderly retirees, spouses and survivors will benefit a small fraction of the force that served long enough to retire.
The total annual cost of military personnel is now $140 billion, or $100,000 per active duty member, Williams writes.
The problem was underscored in October, she writes, when almost half of Army active duty brigades were serving in Iraq and 170,000 reservists had to be called to active duty. Yet, Rumsfeld opposed a 10,000-soldier expansion in the active duty Army, citing the “enormous cost.”
“In other words, whatever the consequences of the current overstretch (of personnel to handle the war), soldiers have become two expensive to hire,” Williams concludes.
Changes needed to modernize personnel and compensation systems, making them more efficient and flexible, the book contends, include:
* Switching from a one-size-fits-all pay system to different bands of pay at each grade to reflect the “market value” of skills.
* Cutting military training and infrastructure costs by recruiting skilled personnel, such as electronic technicians and mechanics, directly into middle enlisted grades after private-sector training and experience.
* Replacing the rigid 20-year all-or-nothing retirement plan with a more flexible system that vests members in some benefits after five years, has separation incentives short of 20 years, and entices careerists to serve well beyond 20 years.
* Changing up-or-out promotion and advancement rules for officers and enlisted to allow higher-skilled individuals to continue to serve even if their supervisory responsibilities don’t increase.
* Enriching career patterns for longer-serving officers by allowing longer tours in critical positions and more pay as experience grows.
* Overhauling reserve compensation in ways that reflect “new realities” of their direct support of active duty forces for war on terrorism.
* Transforming traditional in-kind benefits such as base housing and shopping discounts into cash.
* Shifting more family support functions off base and hiring more staff, in recognition that only 30 percent of families today live on base and fewer spouses today have time to serve as volunteers.
For now, the nation can buy its way out of military recruiting and retention problems. But without fundamental changes to the way personnel are paid and managed, the book concludes, “the services will find it increasingly difficult to attract and keep the people they need.”
Write to Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA 20120-1111, e-mail milupdate@aol.com or go to www.militaryupdate.
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