The Pentagon says we are paying our troops too much

[MsRobyn]

@kdeus

Military pay is a sticky wicket.

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.

Yup. Many spouses are not in one place long enough to establish a career and are forced to settle for crap jobs that pay lower wages. Even though the Defense Department is making efforts toward getting spouses into more flexible careers that allow for long-distance telecommuting and priority for federal employment, it’s still a difficult sell for most employers. I also know many spouses who can’t stay in one place long enough to get a marketable degree, so they’re stuck in the low-wage service economy.

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?

Renting can also be difficult because there may be tight rental markets that mean higher rents and waiting lists for decent housing. There are also landlords who take advantage of the situation and charge military families higher-than-market rents because they know the family is good for it. It’s not supposed to happen, but it does.

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.

Agreed. You can also include the exchange system, which is great for military-specific items like uniforms and big-ticket purchases, but lousy for everything else. And even big-ticket purchases are dicey, because I’ve found better prices in the civilian sector, even when you factor in sales tax. It’s also a hassle to get on base, so it’s not usually worth it.

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.”

We’re a Guard family, so we buy into the Tricare Reserve Select program. It’s much cheaper than insurance in the private sector, even employer-sponsored insurance. Tricare is also easy to deal with; the provider files the claim and Tricare pays it. But it’s another useless benefit if you don’t live in an area that has Tricare providers.

Even though I’m biased, I don’t think our troops are making too much. Given the burden that the military places on its members and their families, it’s actually a fair wage.

[Ravenman]

@MsRobyn

Even though I’m biased, I don’t think our troops are making too much. Given the burden that the military places on its members and their families, it’s actually a fair wage.

If it is a fair wage, then does that mean you’d be okay with only sustaining current benefits (education, health care, etc) and not creating new ones? Would you be okay with the pay increases being linked to inflation, not half a percentage point over inflation?

(And I mean “okay” not in the sense that you’d turn down more pay in benefits if they were offered, but okay in the sense that if they were not offered, you’d have no major problem with that.)

@Mekhazzio

Recruiting is not just new enlistment, it’s also keeping the people you already have.

The Army keeps saying it has met all its retention goals for the last eight years. In any case, for retaining critical skills/experience, there are reenlistment bonuses of up to $100,000.

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?

Because the replacement of those military personnel happened decades ago. We don’t keep large numbers of troops on the payroll to be ready to deploy at a moment’s notice to go peel potatoes. A long time ago the decision was made that if we needed potato peelers, it’d be better to contract them and pay them for the time we needed them, rather than have them be in uniform all the time, earning extensive benefits. Once again, contracted potato peelers are not replacing military potato peelers, because there are no military potato peelers, because it is more valuable to have the would-be military potato peelers be infantrymen, because you can’t go out and hire an infantryman on a moment’s notice.

(I’m speaking somewhat metaphorically, obviously there are cooks in the service, there just aren’t large numbers of them waiting around looking for something to do.)

Ironically enough, the reason we don’t have large numbers of military personnel doing the jobs of contractors is that the benefits paid to military personnel add up to so much money, it’s generally cheaper in the long term to pay contractors.

Example: let’s say a soldier who is a mechanic makes $55 thousand. He may stay in 20 years and retire with good medical benefits and let’s say half his pay. So when this guy retires at age 40, the government will send him a paychecks for $25 grand every year for the rest of his life.

Now, let’s say there’s a contractor mechanic who gets paid $125,000 by some big defense firm. The military knows that over his 40 year career, we may only need his services for maybe 5 years during times of war. When we don’t need him, we don’t pay him. We also don’t pay for his health benefits.

Which do you think is a better deal for Uncle Sam? That’s why you see more and more contractors, too.

[Ravenman]

One other thought for debate: does it make sense to pay our troops the same, more or less, without regard to the job they do?

Let’s take two officers, each earning similar base pay and benefits. One’s in personnel management, the other is a pilot. The pilot will probably average about $500 more a month throughout his career, or about an extra $6,000 a year, for flight pay, plus whatever retention bonuses he might get.

Riddle me this: granted they are different jobs than the closest private sector equivalents, but I doubt very much that an airline pilot makes $6 grand more than your average HR guy with similar years of experience. I wouldn’t be surprised if a pilot makes 50% more than an HR guy in the private sector.

Should military pay continue to be mostly linked to rank and years of service? Or should field of expertise pay a larger role in determining pay?

[alphaboi867]

@Ravenman

…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…

The Afghan and Iraq Wars have gone on for nearly three times the length of US involvment in WWII. There are soldiers who’ve spent more time in combat that the average WWII veteran spent in uniform. Sure nobody know how long WWII would last, but at least they had an idea what would constitute an ending. Iraq may be winding down, but there’s no end in site for Afghanistan.

[Camus]

@Ravenman

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.

Today’s wars are very different in nature though - therein lies the differing strains on being deployed. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are, more or less, guerrilla wars in which there are no clear front lines and thus no place is definitively “safe.” Depending on the areas, troops can just as likely be ambushed while on a supply run as on an actual movement to contact patrol, all by insurgents that look exactly like civilians.

Even in WWII, units were rotated on and off the front lines to rest, recuperate, and refit. In this case, the practical equivalent to that is coming back to the States.

[Lynn_Bodoni]

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.

When my husband was in the Air Force, there WERE significant limits on routine health care, at least for dependents. I had to buy antibiotics on a regular basis from a civilian pharmacy, because someone (I’m not sure who) made the decision not to stock that particular antibiotic at the base pharmacy, despite the fact that the base doctors regularly prescribed it, and it was the treatment of choice. This was one of several medicines that the pharmacy wouldn’t stock at all. Someone also made the decision not to offer a lot of medical services for dependents at that clinic/hospital, we had to go to civilian doctors, and the military insurance didn’t cover much of the fees.

Now, this was twenty to thirty years ago, but at that time, there were quite a few limits for amenities.

[aruvqan]

@kdeus

Military pay is a sticky wicket.

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.”

I will chime in speaking as a Navy dependent of a 20 year career enlisted submariner.

While he was at a sea billet [USS Spadefish, USS San Juan, USS Miami, he did 1 tour on the Spadefish and 2 each on the San Juan and the Miami.] he would be at sea ranging from as short as 3 days to as long as 6 months. He would be home for as short as 1 day to as long as 2 months. In his last year on the Spadefish he literally spent NO holiday at home - the main joke on the boat was that the CO hated his wife and kids. When he had shore duty, he worked an average of a 60 hour week. He never had a shore posting with a duty rotation of less that 4 day rotation [every 4th day having to spend the night as the duty petty officer. That means leaving the house at 630 to muster at 7 am, and not getting home until 6 or 7 pm the day after. ] On average this duty schedule meant that at least 3 weekends of the month he would have to spend one day and night on base on duty. At one point he and the guys in his office at RADCON figured that they made the equivalent to under $1 per hour after taxes.

Medical as provided by the military for dependents consisted of literally waiting until I was basically able to be admitted to the hospital by any competent civilian ER - one fine episode was 5 months in to a bout of pneumonia. I had to drive myself the 30 miles to base, go pick up my records and wait in the base ER until they could bother to see me for chest pains. I waited over 3 hours to be told that my chest pains were pleurisy, and was coming down with bronchitis - and prescribed penicillin. Despite the screaming hot pink medical folder with PENICILLIN stamped on it in 2 inch letters indicating I am allergic to penicillin, and the INCH thick stack of records indicating ongoing treatment of pneumonia, which was also mentioned in the intake paperwork. I gained 150 lbs in 3 years, and when trying to get it diagnosed, the doctor assigned to me sat there and informed mrAru and I that I was fat because I sat on my ass eating bonbons all day - despite having been diabetic for 14 years at that point in time. The main consensus of military medicine to the dependent spouse is we are hypochondriacs looking for attention because our husbands are away all the time.

Trying to get a job in a military area is almost impossible, In general what is available is fast food, convenience store and mall jobs. People do not want to hire the military spouse because they will just be moving away in a year or so. If you do manage to actually get hired, the pay offered is lower than if you were not a dependent because you will not be staying long enough and they will have to hire someone else and go to the expense of training them. Many military housing complexes are a joke, you have to sign a waiver saying that you will accept substandard housing. There was a housing complex in Oceanea called Roach Motel where literally the place was infested with roaches. They would come out in broad daylight.

Fine, our military are overpaid. Lets see a civilian put up with this shit and see how it flies.

By the way after 20 years in, base pay for him was $2000 a month. Add a $900 per month housing allowance, and a princely $250 a year uniform allowance. That is what you get when on shore duty.

[gonzomax]

Brigadier Generals make 102, 585 dollars a year. Are they taking a cut too?

[aruvqan]

@Ravenman

Example: let’s say a soldier who is a mechanic makes $55 thousand. He may stay in 20 years and retire with good medical benefits and let’s say half his pay. So when this guy retires at age 40, the government will send him a paychecks for $25 grand every year for the rest of his life.
.

mrAru retired after 20 years, as an E6, Machinists Mate/submarine service - effectively an underwater glow in the dark diesel mechanic/plumber. His retirement pay is $1000 per month.

Not an income one could live a life of luxury upon, or even manage to live without another job.

[Monty]

@Ravenman

Example: let’s say a soldier who is a mechanic makes $55 thousand. He may stay in 20 years and retire with good medical benefits and let’s say half his pay. So when this guy retires at age 40, the government will send him a paychecks for $25 grand every year for the rest of his life.

Let’s say half his base pay. When I retired, that’s what I got. Retirees also get Cost Of Living Allowance increases for our retirement pay some years. For this year, we got no COLA increase to our retirement pay.

[Ravenman]

@alphaboi867

There are soldiers who’ve spent more time in combat that the average WWII veteran spent in uniform.

Excellent point. I retract my statement about that guy being hyperbolic, and say merely that I think service members in WWII had it harder - again not trying to minimize the difficulties faced by current service members. I say that WWII vets had it harder because I think it does make a difference because I think there have been big improvements in the quality of life at forward bases – air conditioning, email, XBox 360, DVDs, etc. are widely (though not universally) available, and many bigger bases in Iraq and Afghanistan have Burger Kings and Subways for that taste of home. Things are just a lot different.

@Lynn Bodoni

When my husband was in the Air Force, there WERE significant limits on routine health care, at least for dependents.

I wasn’t referring to the quality of care, just that Tricare fees basically have not changed in 10 years. I know the Pentagon had proposed annual enrollment fees of something like $300 for dependent health care, and that’s been rejected several times by Congress.

Monty and aruvqan: you’re right that I highballed the basic pay of senior enlisted, but however you do the math, it is hard to argue that paying a contractor more for much shorter periods of service, with no obligation to pay for other benefits (health care, education, relocation, etc) during or after the contractor’s service is a major reason why hiring contractors for some things probably makes more dollar sense over the long term than taking on lots of new service members to replace the contractors we use now. The basic point is that when we’re done with a contractor doing something in Iraq, we stop paying them. When we’re done with a service member in Iraq, we have to make sure they have a place to live and work on some base back in the US, and be prepared to pay a lot of associated bills for a long time, not the least of which includes VA benefits.

And I’m talking about the contractors that we intend to use temporarily overseas, not the guys who are pretty much always attached to the armed forces to do whatever. I think a good number of those pretty-much permanent contractor jobs ought to be changed to USG civilian positions.

[AClockworkMelon]

@Ravenman

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

But most people join up because of the pay and benefits, not out of patriotism. There’s a reason recruitment is way, way higher in poverty-stricken areas.

[Lantern]

Yeah you have to wonder whether the current success with recruitment is just a matter of the weak economy and liable to reverse when the economy recovers. Secondly it’s not necessarily a waste of money to pay enough to attract more people than you need. This allows you to be more selective and get better people. You could argue that the newer counter-insurgency strategies require a better educated type of soldier.

[Ravenman]

@Lantern

Yeah you have to wonder whether the current success with recruitment is just a matter of the weak economy and liable to reverse when the economy recovers. Secondly it’s not necessarily a waste of money to pay enough to attract more people than you need. This allows you to be more selective and get better people. You could argue that the newer counter-insurgency strategies require a better educated type of soldier.

What’s the use of having the best educated soldiers in the world if we can’t afford to buy them decent weapons?

[Boyo_Jim]

Are we buying them decent weapons, or are we buying them high-tech toys that are way more than is needed to actually do the job? Or even worse, high tech toys that DON’T do the job? Like the Raptor, the Osprey, much of the Start Wars technology…?

[DigitalC]

Sure we are paying too much, we are also asking too much.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

In what sense does the Raptor “not do the job”? It’s the least observable manned aircraft in the world. It will be essentially invincible for at least 15 years, and possibly longer? We don’t need it, but it does everything it’s designed to do very well.

Regardless, the Pentagon only spends about $80 billion a year on R & D - a drop in the bucket.

I will say that we spend way too much on pricey Air Force toys and not nearly enough on the stuff that we actually need in the post-Cold War era, like helicopters and guns.

[robby]

I wrote the following in this thread a couple of months back:

@robby

…I also think that money could be saved by taking a hard look at military salaries. While I think that anybody getting shot at should be well compensated with increased combat pay, there are a lot of people in our military serving their time and getting paid far more than is warranted. Between bonuses, untaxed allowances, and superb benefits, military personnel are very well-compensated–too well compensated, IMHO. I left the service eight years ago, and took a drastic pay cut, even taking a job as an engineer. Correcting for inflation, I didn’t actually catch up to my military salary until this year. Looking at current military pay rates, I see that they have increased at a faster rate than that of inflation since I got out.

@robby

While I was a nuclear submarine officer, I was teaching at a military school for my last few years of active-duty service, so I wasn’t receiving any sea pay or the like, nor was I receiving the nuclear retention bonus because I was planning on getting out of the service. If I had been serving on a submarine instead of teaching (and receiving all of those additional incentives and bonuses) I would have been making about $20K more than the $70K I was grossing in 2002.

I was actually not counting any pay other than what any other active-duty O-3 (Army Captain or Navy Lieutenant) was getting who lived in my area. This included my base pay, housing allowance (which took into account the cost of housing in my area of the country), and Basic Allowance for Subsistence (BAS). The latter two made up about one-third of my gross pay, and were not counted as taxable income. Note that the housing allowance is increased if you have any dependents, such as a spouse.

In 2010, an O-3 (whether Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine) with 8 years of service grosses about $65K in base pay, and $25K in untaxed housing allowance and BAS (in this part of the country), for a total of $90K not counting any other incentive pay, sea pay, sub pay, etc. As I stated pay has increased by a larger amount than inflation. Military base pay was increased by 3.4% this year over last year, for instance.

I think that $90K a year is a lot of money to be paying to Navy Lieutenants/Army Captains stationed on shore/stateside.

Navy Lieutenants with 8 years of service and serving on a submarine are making well over $100K a year.

I also think that the retirement benefits are very generous. In few other jobs can you retire with a full pension with only 20 years service. Military retirement also includes lifetime free medical care for yourself and your dependents.

On the other hand, I’ll also note that going through my initial training (nuclear power school, nuclear power prototype, etc.) and serving on a submarine was the hardest, most stressful job I’ve ever had in my life. And this stress was nothing compared to the stress on those serving in a combat zone.

[aruvqan]

@robby

I

I also think that the retirement benefits are very generous. In few other jobs can you retire with a full pension with only 20 years service. Military retirement also includes lifetime free medical care for yourself and your dependents.

Don’t know who’s tricare you got but I have co-pays, I don’t get anything for free … and a number of the meds I need to be on are not in the Navy pharm system so I have to source them in a civilian drugstore.

[Ravenman]

@aruvqan

Don’t know who’s tricare you got but I have co-pays, I don’t get anything for free … and a number of the meds I need to be on are not in the Navy pharm system so I have to source them in a civilian drugstore.

IIRC, if you’re in Tricare you pay copayments for prescriptions or doctor visits, but no monthly or annual fees. Is that still true? If not, how much do you pay for your medical?

ETA: it seems that there is a $230 per year payment to remain in Tricare after retirement. Is that right?