Most important decisions can be boiled down to two options, and ordinarily one option stands out as more difficult than the other. Usually, the more difficult choice represents the correct path, while the easier decision offers expediency. As pressure mounts on the US defense budget, policy makers and those influencing them face a decision that is increasingly understandable according to two options.
Reducing the cost of national defense will be achieved either by pursuing structural reform, reducing wasteful practices, and discontinuing unnecessary expenditures — the correct path— or by taking a budgetary axe to military pay and benefits — the expedient but wrong decision. There is a mounting risk that key stakeholders could make short-term inputs leading to the long-term ruin of the world’s most important professional military.
At the national level, expedient decisions are made palatable through the construction of a political narrative designed to make them appear necessary. Such a narrative has been building around the concept of reducing military benefits for a few years now. DoD’s most recent quadrennial pay study advanced the proposition that military members were better paid than their civilian counterparts. A 2011 Defense Business Board proposal called for a sweeping overhaul of the current retirement system, pointing to a $3.85T bill by the year 2034. The motivations behind these analyses are not so much unpatriotic as they are pragmatic. Defense leaders are beset with huge challenges inherited from their predecessors and are driven to preserve resources for training and equipment modernization.
As competition for scarce funds intensifies, many see these motives colliding with the expense of compensating personnel. With the nation now focused on a budget crisis, some are warming to the oversimplified narrative of an overpaid military and cultivating a discussion that risks lending undeserved legitimacy to such a view. That this discussion is even considered fair game at one of the most difficult moments in American military history is shocking to many. It begs for context.
The nature of service in today’s US military is historically unprecedented. Since 9/11/01, servicemembers have been ordered to deploy more often, for longer durations, and under more intense conditions than in any other period. More than 2.5 million military members have deployed in support of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, with more than 800,000 serving multiple deployments. A stunning 400,000 have gone back to warzones at least three times, and around 37,000 have deployed more than five times.
Despite considerable research demonstrating the inordinate strain of long deployment, and as if having learned nothing from the experience of Vietnam beyond how to maximize abuse of a labor force at a level just shy of catalyzing mutiny or public outrage, an Army ill-prepared for two simultaneous counterinsurgencies had little choice but to send its soldiers to war for 12 months at a time, a practice established during the draft era and founded on the assumption of each soldier deploying only once.
The strain was aggravated further by the inability to give deployers anything resembling a constructive rest cycle, leading to many spending more time in combat than resting between engagements. The Iraq “surge” led to an extended deployment of 15 months for more than 100,000, a crushing blow to morale and an open admission by DoD of the need to resort to abusive practices to make up for the hubris of the war’s architects, who dismissed the advice of the Army Chief of Staff in designing a woefully understaffed operation.
Unsurprisingly, these and other policies of the past dozen years exacted a peculiarly heavy toll on warriors and their families. A 2012 Army study focused on soldier mental health (as detailed in this Christian Science Monitor article) found that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — the longest in the nation’s history — have created “tremendous and unique burdens on our soldiers and families as compared to the previous conflicts.” Wars waged in the past decade have been persistently intense, with little opportunity for soldiers to rest or recover, mentally or physically, throughout a deployment. As a result of these conditions, and the particular psychology of counterinsurgency — where attacks can come from any direction at any moment, enemies are difficult to identify, and host-nation relationships are rife with shifting motivations and betrayal — a disproportionate number of veterans emerge from service broken, both physically and psychologically. The documented number of disabilities resulting from the “war on terror” is approaching that seen after Vietnam, with the number likely to soar in the next few years as more and more warriors disengage and enter veteran status.
6,524 have died. 50,532 have been wounded. 670,000 are disabled. One in three returning from conflict suffers from Post Traumatic Stress. More than 2,600 have taken their own lives since 2001. More than 600,000 have called the VA’s crisis line for help in the past five years. Divorce and relationship strain have ravaged military communities. They move more often. They adapt to new conditions and face new challenges constantly. Military service has always brought with it unique adversity, but the pain of the past dozen years is evident, acute, and unique in the American experience. The segment of our society that has been directly involved in national security these past years will be suffering from it for decades.
The circumstances of the past twelve years have also been unique. America has fought two wars without declaring either of them. This allowed politicians to sidestep the strenuous national test intended by the framers, thereby allowing war to proceed without Americans at-large feeling its effects. Taxes were not raised. Conscription wasn’t used. Most members of Congress did not feel the effects of the war in their own families. In fact, most families in America didn’t feel the effects at all, with less than one half of one percent of the population engaged in military service.
While one writer has eloquently proposed that the most lavish benefit of all is the all-volunteer military force that has secured the US since the end of the Vietnam War, I’d suggest that even more lavish for politicians is the free hand given them by the American people. This allows them to employ a force that can’t complain — because it volunteered — in order to advance an activist foreign policy, in turn allowing politicians to look tough on defense without advertising or demanding their constituents pay war’s true costs. Tragically, hiding such costs doesn’t make them go away. As that becomes more evident, there will be a temptation to satisfy them via the path of least political resistance. Rank-and-file military servants don’t own large corporations. They don’t make large political contributions. They don’t run political action committees. This makes them an easier target than others for budgetary predations.
With this context now established, a discussion of military versus civilian compensation is easier to conduct, because it is revealed as wholly invalid. There is no parallel between military and civilian service at this peculiar moment in our history, and to entertain any discussion framed in this way is to lend it undeserved credibility. This is not a lightly-made assertion. To make it inheres an obvious danger of driving a wedge between America’s military and the society it serves. But the simple fact is that 73% of the active duty military serves in grades E-1 to E-6, with most of these junior enlisted members manning posts in the Army and Marine Corps. They live in the dirt and occasionally conduct missions where their primary duty is to conduct violence against other human beings. There is no civilian equivalent for this. DoD’s quadrennial pay study can’t be of much use in addressing military budget issues given that the entire document is predicated on the fallacious assumption that military and civilian pay scales can be equated. They simply can’t.
I’ve written elsewhere that today’s military personnel, though they’re not asking for additional compensation, would be a bargain at twice the current rate. Given that the $189B in total compensation paid to American servicemembers last year equates to less than 2% of the adjusted gross income of America’s top 1% wage earners — who have not been asked to dig into their pockets to fund the defense of the free enterprise system that has allowed them to amass considerable wealth — military manpower is actually amazingly affordable. DoD’s concern that retirement benefits could consume $3.85T in obligations two decades from now is valid, but misplaced. Rather than worrying about how to pay for it, DoD should worry about how to reinforce to the American people, who voted for and endorsed a war in Iraq that has a price tag approaching $6T, that war is expensive; the cost can be delayed, but must eventually be counted. Whatever the bill for veteran services in the future, it’s part of the price tag of a war already fought, and there is no moral way to avoid settling up.
This is not to suggest there isn’t real bloat resident in the nation’s defense spending, or that it shouldn’t be approached. There are countless alternatives to slashing compensation. Most would require legislators and executives to commit to the complex and messy business of real reform. Each would require politicians to confront resistance. But make no mistake, there is massive inefficiency lurking in the DoD, and the pressure of sequestration provides a unique opportunity to ferret out waste under an unusually protective political cover. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Consolidate air power. The nation founded an independent Air Force in 1947, yet each of the other services continues to field its own air force. This is incredibly expensive. The motivating reason for this is the failure of the Air Force and its sister services to organize and present forces in a way conducive to genuine integration. Ending this structural redundancy could eliminate multiple bureaucracies and management layers, creating massive savings.
2. Reduce the number of general/flag officers. The services have added nearly 100 senior officers since 9/11, an increase of more than the 11% that has swelled the general officer ranks to their highest level since WWII despite a much smaller military force. This happened even as two of the services drew down, dramatically reducing the span of control for each general. It also happened as the services struggled to contend with an adversary known for decentralized operations. Rather than pushing authority down to the lowest level to contend with this new enemy, the services have aggregated power at the top, reducing adaptability and efficiency while growing new staffs.
3. Audit deployments. Despite the end of one war and the imminent closure of another, operational tempo has not slowed. Servicemembers are still getting sent to the Middle East or Central Asia for up to a year at a time, sometimes to do things that could be done from a computer terminal in the states. This is an especially egregious practice considering the toll it takes on already worn down warriors and families. It grows from a broken deployment management process that treats individual servicemembers as interchangeable commodities, reducing direct commander involvement. This process is also costly. With each warrior costing the US taxpayer $1M per year deployed, every billet should be closely scrutinized by an independent auditor for necessity.
If done with care, modest compensation reforms should also be considered. Many deployed members serve in places that have not been held at risk by adversaries for years (if ever they were), and yet receive combat pay and tax exemption at the same levels given to those enduring hostile fire on the Afghan frontier. This is not only morally abhorrent, but wasteful. It has long been seen by deployed servicemembers as a cynical tactic to prevent a drop in morale while asking many to serve longer deployed tours than should be considered reasonable given the objectives at stake.
Retiree health care should also be carefully examined for change. A small adjustment in co-payments and premiums for those able to pay would go a long way toward resolving the budgetary equation. Means-testing for retiree health care is not unreasonable, and might not be controversial if it leaves current retirees untouched and focuses a few years into the future.
Sometimes, pressure is healthy. It clarifies purpose, forces economy of action, and brings out the best in people and situations. Other times, pressure can warp things, compelling false moves and leading to ruin. The trick when responding under pressure is to contend with a short-term crisis without creating undesired long-term consequences. Policy makers face a stark choice. Either get down into the weeds of real reform and buck the attendant political and bureaucratic headwinds as required to do the right thing, or take the less resistant path.
How we treat those who do our fighting says an awful lot about us as a society. America will always have warriors willing to defend it, but it can only have virtue if it takes care of them in a way their honor deserves. With solid decisions, policy leaders can ensure we attract and retain those best qualified to contend with the most complex endeavor known to man. They can also preserve our national soul. Expediency, on the other hand, is likely to provide short-term political satisfaction in exchange for a long-term hollowing of our defense establishment. No one in their right mind will join or remain serving a military that asks of its warriors what has been asked in the past dozen years … and then targets their compensation before the guns have even fallen silent.
Paying our warriors and their families what they deserve is part of the committed cost for the wars we’ve already voted to authorize and endorse. It’s the more difficult of the choices before us, and the correct one.
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