I don’t know any civilians experienced in urban warfare or IED detonation, though I’d bet all my MS Flight Simulator experience would be helpful if they would let me fly a Predator.
What this boils down to is that the military is saying they only get so much out of the Federal budget, and they’re spending such a large percentage of it on personnel costs that they don’t (or won’t some time in the future) have enough for hardware or operations. Rather than the classic “guns or butter” debate, they’re now having a “bullets or bodies” debate.
It’s my opinion that we are NOT paying our soldiers too much since we have begun a never-ending war on “terror”, and we have forcibly held many of our soldiers in the service well past their expected enlistment period.
To me, this is evidence that al Queda, stupid shoe and ass bombers or not, is making substantial progress on its goals in taking on America. Very early on Bin Laden talked about America breaking itself financially in pursuing this fight, and it may still happen. I think we’re not particularly close yet, but the dam has begun to seep a bit, so to speak.
Does anyone have numbers handy, to compare military spending in the latter part of the cold war with spending we’re doing now aginst guys with rifles in holes in the ground?
I found it interesting that 51 billion went to health care alone. Health care is bankrupting our entire economy. Business, private citizens, the military & governments are all suffering from it.
However meaningful reform that would actually lower prices tend to take market share away from powerful companies. So no public option, no price negotiations, no reimportation, etc.
Well I should hope so. I think they call it “combat pay.”
Right from the beginning of the war the Pentagon has not treated our members of the military decently. They didn’t have the most protective clothing or vehicles. They had to serve too many tours of duty with promises broken about when they could go home. Stories were made up for publicity purposes. Those who were killed in accidents or who died from suicide or illness were not listed among the war dead on the Pentagon’s web site. It was as if the Pentagon was at war with the enlisted.
The numbers in the WaPo story don’t even take into account that all military income received while a service member is deployed is federal income tax free and additional combat pay is given to service members who are deployed in a combat zone. Not to mention the Army has (and other services have or are in the process of starting) a student loan repayment program that offers to pay back 1/3 or $65,000, whichever is higher, of a Soldier’s student loan balance in exchange for 4 years of service. The numbers also do not reflect all the free, non-pay benefits that service members receive such as free gym access, medical/dental benefits (which were mentioned), reduced cost groceries, free space-A travel under certain circumstances, reduced cost lodging at government-owned facilities world-wide, Montgomery GI Bill/911 GI Bill, and so on.
These days, the troops are well paid. Rather than focus on money, what would solve a great deal of the stress, family, and suicide problems facing the military is to take advantage of the Iraq draw-down and mandate that all service members have at least a 2 year bar from being deployed again upon completing a deployment.
Al Qaeda is not interesting ‘taking on America’. It’s objective is to rid the Middle East of foreign occupation and in so doing make sure that American’s wherever they go will fear a bomb attack.
To make them scared every time they see a middle eastern with a rucksack in the Metro, or see anything lying around unattended in a cafe in Times Sq. To have your bomb squads on alert 24/7. To make sure Americans never sleep in a hotel room in major cities soundly.
I think they have achieved all of those goals.
Your soldiers don’t deserve any extra money so I agree with the Pentagon. If they are stupid enough to go fight a war on a country that they most likely could never have found on a map before they recruited, and have no idea why they are there, then they deserve what pay they get.
Maybe the Pentagon want to save money so they can increase what they give to the taliban.
When I was on active duty, I was paid well (commissioned officer, 70k+ in the early 2000s). I paid very little taxes because much of my pay was tax-free allowances. However, my wife is a musician: every time we moved, it took her two years to get re-established in the local music scene (5 moves in eight years). And my schedule was completely unpredictable, so I could not contribute to childcare in a predictable enough way to support her employment efforts.
Also, military members are subject to the whims of the housing market. If your company or even certain federal agencies require you to move for your job, they will buy your house (if you can’t sell it). Or, of course, you can quit. Military members get neither option. I’ve made & lost money on houses, depending on the market and the whims of the assignments people, and I do a lot of home repair & improvement. Of course, you can rent (many landlords not interested in the unpredictable military tenant, in my experience), but is that economically the best choice?
I don’t have an answer, just questions. I agree with Camus that increase support would be nice, except that every time the military tries to provide a service, they seem to screw it up 60% of the time. Examples:
“Space A” travel: great, if your schedule is completely flexible, you agree to buy a last-minute one-way ticket to come home if your return flight is unavailable, theres a chance that you won’t even make it to your destination and you live near an air base with something like a passenger terminal. Oh, and security measures make it a pain to find out the flight schedule, if any.
The Commissary: tax-free, inexpensive food, except only the basics are actually cheaper, there’s a $.05 per item “fee,” and its an hour+ drive away.
Some of the benefits are great. I was happy with the health care I received and legal assistance for stuff like Wills and Special Powers of Attorney is great. But comparing civilian and military pay is like comparing apples to “apples and you’ve got to run the farm yourself and be the county clerk.”
But you see, the article is saying that if troop pay doesn’t stop with the significant increases, and unless there’s some limit on routine health care costs for troops and their families, then there will be even less money for body armor and protective vehicles.
I think this is a really difficult question. I think folks in the military earn every cent that they get, but at some point, we have to acknowledge a market reality: we are routinely getting the numbers of men and women we need for military service (though not always the people with the right training and skills). If we are generally paying enough and giving enough benefits to attract people to join and stay in the military, one would think that if this were a market situation we’d say, “Ok, we’ve increased pay and benefits a lot over the last twenty years, let’s put a hold on new benefits and link pay to the rate of inflation.”
But there’s one quote in the story that can’t go without comment: a spokesman for the Military Officers Association of America said, “We’re extracting sacrifices from today’s forces that are just unprecedented.” Now, I think I have a good record on this board for supporting members of the armed forces, but those who served in World War II made sacrifices that are absolutely unconscionable today. You get drafted, sent off to war, and you’ll be redeployed when Tojo and Hitler are gone – none of this 18 months deployed, one year at home policy.
I’m NOT saying that troops today have it easy, but we need a dose of realism on this issue. Hyperbolic statements like that aren’t helpful.
It seems pretty simple to me: If you are attracting more qualified people than you need, then you’re paying too much. If you can attract as many qualified people as you need with less pay, then you are paying too much.
I’m pretty sure those private sector workers aren’t experiencing the same level of getting shot at. I’d argue that compensates for the lesser pay and benefits.
And John Mace makes a good point. If the armed forces were really overpaying their enlistees, they wouldn’t be having problems filling their quotas. The free market is saying we’re not paying our troops enough.
This is the key. The recent pay increases were done entirely in response to significantly low recruitment levels.
I also find the idea that military pay is too high relative to “equivalent” private sector personnel to be ludicrous. You don’t compare mess hall duty in Iraq with cafeteria duty at the corporate branch office in Iowa. All of the very many private contractors used in and around military operations overseas get compensated extremely well for the extra burden of being in a hazardous area on the other side of the world. They have to be, because otherwise nobody in their right mind would do it.
Personally I’d be willing to bet that if Army wages were still higher, they’d have enough personnel to be able to run all the REMF operations like food service instead of hiring Haliburton to do it, and thus save rather a lot of money in the long run. (And anecdotally, the military guys I’ve talked with have, to a man, said the private contractors do an inferior job anyway)
The post article says the military IS now attracting sufficient numbers of people – for the first time since the advent of the all-volunteer military, all services have met their recruiting goals.
I think they’ve made more people of Middle Eastern extraction more afraid of being kidnapped and beheaded by one of your various extremist types than any miniscule amount of American tourists could ever be. First off, you live in Egypt I gathered, why not just, I dunno, cut off the $3 billion in aid they give to your government, that in itself would be a step in the right direction.
Yes, that’s my impression as well. Bush had to up the ante for recruiting during the very difficult years of the Iraq War (ie, circa 2006 +/-). Now that we’re ramping down in Iraq, I suspect the situation is different. Although, with things getting crazier in Afghanistan, that could change again.
No. Look on page 10 of this PDF. There’s only been one year in the last 10 in which the military missed its recruiting goals, and three years in which they were OVER their recruiting goals. Let’s face it: the reason why a lot of people want to serve in the military is because they want to do something patriotic and serve their country, and don’t do it because of the pay (unless it was horrible). There’s also people who want to serve just because of the pay and benefits. If we get a lot of the first type (patriotic) and some of the second (pay), we should not be treating pay and benefits as if everyone is serving because of the pay and benefits.
(I’m leaving aside the fact that there are shortages in some military skill sets that are hard to replace, so we have enough bodies in the military, but sometimes they don’t have the right skills – like nuclear technicians and stuff.)
I’d say the high pay for military contractors is because (a) there’s no strong patriotic benefit to make your average Joe want to go overseas and work for KBR/SAIC/whatever, so they have to pay higher; (b) the contractors want to lure servicemembers with experience into private service, so high salaries go along with that; and (c) these companies aren’t paying the high salaries out of the goodness of their heart, they are charging the taxpayer for every thin dime that they pay their people. Contractors can afford to be generous with pay because it’s the American taxpayer who is coughing up the dough.
One might also argue that the use of these private contractors suppresses the wages of our military personnel, since we’d likely have to pay more to meet our recruiting goals if we weren’t using so many contractors.
Recruiting is not just new enlistment, it’s also keeping the people you already have. Every experienced person that leaves is a new one that has to be trained, at an ever-increasing expense as training cycles lengthen. An appeal to patriotism might get you a discount at picking a 19 year old up off the street, but once you’ve got your computer tech or helicopter greasemonkey, they’re unlikely to stay in the military when they’ve got the very large carrot of double, triple or even higher pay continually dangled in front of them by the private sector.
And how is this not applicable for the military? Assuming the bidding process is working properly (and that’s a big assumption, in my mind) these contractors are getting paid what they are because that’s how much is required to secure someone’s labor in a hazardous situation. There’s no question that Uncle Sam is obviously willing to pay those prices - that’s why the contractors are even there. The question is: why are we willing to pay these prices to contractors and not to the military personnel they’re replacing? You argue that it’s not a manpower problem, so what IS the problem?
Personally, I think the rise of military subcontracting started as a quick fix solution to low pay and personnel issues, but it has become huge because of political ideology spurring us to open our veins onto the altar of privatization.