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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, October 15, 2001

Military Update
$100-a-day deployment bonus nixed; sea pay rises

Military Update focuses on issues affecting pay, benefits and lifestyle of active and retired servicepeople. Its author, Tom Philpott, is a Virginia-based syndicated columnist and freelance writer. He has covered military issues for almost 25 years, including six years as editor of Navy Times. For 17 years he worked as a writer and senior editor for Army Times Publishing Co. Philpott, 49, enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1973 and served as an information officer from 1974-77.

By Tom Philpott

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 ITEMPO 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 sea-going service members.

The sea-pay improvements, which Congress already had authorized, are to be retroactive to Oct. 1, Navy officials said. The new monthly rates were not available in time for this column, but were to be published by Oct. 12 on the Bureau of Naval Personnel Web site. That address is: 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 sea-going billets.

All sea-going 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 money — $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 ITEMPO pay in 1999 to force the services to better manage deployment schedules to prevent member 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 roundly have criticized ITEMPO 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 ITEMPO pay for national security reasons. The war on terrorism and mobilization of the reserves, Wolfowitz suggested, make "uniform application of this [pay] authority" 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 persons 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."

Concurrent receipt

As it did last year, the Senate this month passed a floor amendment offered by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that would end a century-old ban on career military retirees receiving both their full retired pay and disability pay to compensate for service-related injuries or illness.

Under current law, military retired pay must be offset, dollar for dollar, by the amount a retiree draws each month in tax-free disability pay.

Opponents of the so-called "ban on concurrent receipt" argue that career military retirees, in effect, are forced to pay for their own service-connected disabilities.

Like last year, the big hurdle for the Reid amendment to become law is how to pay for it.

The estimated cost is $2.9 billion the first year, $54 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The House version of the 2002 defense authorization bill contains language that supports lifting the ban on concurrent receipt — if the Bush administration comes back next year with the necessary legislation and a plan to offset the costs. The chance of that happening is slim; the Defense Department, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has opposed lifting the ban.

Indeed, Defense officials have commissioned another study on concurrent receipt, a fresh look from some outside benefit experts. But it won't be completed until next spring, too late to influence the Bush team's 2003 budget submission.

The Senate defense authorization bill had the same kind of conditional language found in the House version — until Reid got his amendment passed. A House-Senate conference committee will select between the two, or bang out a compromise. One compromise might be to phase out the ban on concurrent receipt but over a number of years.

Another might be to grant full concurrent receipt only to the most severely disabled, perhaps those with disability ratings of 80 percent. Service groups once proposed an inverse ratio formula: a retiree rated 100 percent disabled would see no dollar-for-dollar offset; a retiree rated 90 percent would see a 10 percent offset and so on.

There are signs that support for Reid's amendment might be shaky going in conference. Senate leaders chose not to include Reid's bill in a package of noncontroversial measures pulled together for a single "unanimous consent" vote. They left Reid to push his bill as a separate amendment. That could mean Senate leaders don't plan to fight hard over this one.

Also, Reid declined to seek a roll-call vote on his amendment, which is perhaps another signal support is squishy despite 74 Senate co-sponsors.

Steve Strobridge, director of government relations for The Retired Officers Association, said retirees see how the nation has come together for the war on terrorism. They will be very disappointed, given that environment, if real progress can't be made on the concurrent receipt issue.

"A lot of these people have served in two or three wars," Strobridge said, "and got their disabilities that way."

Questions, comments and suggestions are welcome. Write to Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA 20120-1111, or send e-mail to: milupdate@aol.com.