Citing national security interests tied to the war on terrorism, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has suspended indefinitely the start of the $100-per-day "individual tempo" pay for service members assigned away from their home base for more than 400 days out of the previous two years.
The first payments were to begin Nov. 5.
In a move intended to sustain fleet morale, however, Wolfowitz, in the same Oct. 8 memo to service secretaries, directed the Navy Department to accelerate adoption of its enhanced career sea pay plan. This will mean additional dollars in the pockets of many more seagoing service members.
The sea pay improvements, which Congress already has authorized, are to be retroactive to Oct. 1, Navy officials said. The new monthly rates were to be published by Oct. 12 on the Bureau of Naval Personnel web site, www.bol.navy.mil.
Sea pay rates will rise for current recipients. Junior enlisted members in grades E-1 through E-3 will be eligible for the first time, if assigned to seagoing billets. All seagoing junior officers also will get the extra pay; the Navy is ending a requirement that they serve three years at sea before drawing sea pay.
Wolfowitz’s memo promised supplemental funding — $150 million for the Navy and $3.8 million for the Marine Corps — to improve sea pay "at the earliest practicable date." Navy officials said that will be back to Oct. 1, start of fiscal 2002.
Congress first approved individual tempo pay in 1999 to force the services to better manage deployment schedules to prevent burnout. It delayed implementation until this fall to give the services time to prepare, including finding ways to track and record time that individuals spend away from home base, whether on lengthy deployments or routine business trips.
Sea service leaders have roundly criticized the pay as a bad idea born of good intentions. Given the size of the fleet and the pace of operations, they argue, 400 days deployed over two years is a payment threshold set too low.
The Defense Department has authority to suspend the pay for national security reasons. The war on terrorism and mobilization of the reserves, Wolfowitz suggested, make uniform application of the pay too difficult.
"Effective immediately," he said in his memo, "the accumulation of deployment days for the purposes of determining eligibility for high deployment per diem is suspended."
Wolfowitz also lifted, for now, a requirement that flag and general officers personally manage deployment of service members with certain high-demand skills. However, the services should continue to track and report on the pace of deployment for individual members. Such data, Wolfowitz said, "is valuable in developing after-action reports, replying to queries or accomplishing analyses relating to the scope of operations."
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