MILITARY UPDATE
Senator pushes GI Bill transfer as key to retention

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 Philpotts

As military people this month await paychecks that will reflect their largest raise in two decades, the Defense Department is floating a pay raise plan for next January that would continue to narrow a perceived "pay gap" between the military and private sector.

Under the draft pay plan, all service members would receive a base pay increase of at least 4.1 percent, which would be a half percentage point above wage growth in the private sector. An additional $300 million would be requested on top of that to provide higher "targeted" increases to career enlisted and mid-rank officers. The distribution pattern of the targeting across pay grades would be similar, though more modest in size, to 2002 pay adjustments occurring this month.

The extra $300 million would boost the 2003 average increase to 4.8 percent, Pentagon sources said, compared with wage growth in the private sector of 3.6 percent. The average military raise taking effect this month is 6.8 percent.

The proposed raises for 2003 are far from final. The services have been invited to comment, and the plan still must be approved by the White House's Office of Management and Budget. Then it would go to Congress as part of the president's 2003 budget request. Lawmakers can, and often do, change the raise amount.

One key lawmaker who likes the idea of another substantial and targeted military raise is Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., chairman of the Senate armed services subcommittee on personnel. In an interview on Wednesday, Cleland said he also will:

• "Cajole" the services to use their new authority to offer people in critical skills a chance to transfer half of their Montgomery GI Bill educational benefits to family members if the service members have at least six years in and agree to serve four more.
• Continue to fight on behalf of career retirees to lift the century-old ban on drawing both disability compensation and their full military retirement.
• Consider holding hearings on perceived inequities in the Uniformed Services Former Spouses Protection Act now that the Defense Department has delivered a long-delayed report on problems with the USFSPA.

Military people did "extremely well" in the 2002 budget, Cleland said, with a "record increase" in overall pay and bigger raises, as much as 10 percent, going to the career force. Another "sliding scale" raise that exceeds private sector wage growth sounds good, he said, particularly if targeted once again at members with skills and experience so important to a smaller, post-Cold War, volunteer force.

Cleland is especially proud of a provision in the 2002 defense authorization bill that gives the services authority to offer people in critical skills a chance to transfer up to half of their Montgomery GI Bill benefits to immediate family members.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawai'i, led the fight for GI Bill transferability in the House and a compromise first-step was passed. Though the authorization bill gives the services authority to spend up to $30 million on GI Bill benefit transfers this year, the 2002 defense appropriations bill fails to finance the program. That means if a service is tempted, or pressured, to test GI Bill transfers as a retention tool this year, it will have to find money by raiding another budget account.

Cleland, 59, has vowed to keep the pressure on, calling GI Bill transferability a "breakthrough" retention tool that should shake the old Cold War mindset on sustaining a quality force.

"For the first time, it's not only the GI we're thinking about but the GI's family," Cleland said. "The GI, of his or her own free will, can allocate some of those resources to take care of spouses' or kids' needs for a better education, thereby creating an incentive to stay in, not get out."

The logic of such an incentive is so obvious it's a matter of time before the services begin using GI Bill transfer and seeking to expand the authority beyond the most critical skills, Cleland said.

"As the service secretaries look at their challenges for fighting a high-tech war, they realize they have to have high-tech people. High-tech wars, high-tech people, minimize loss of life."

In the Vietnam war, where Cleland in 1968 lost both legs and his right arm to a grenade, the draft-fed military saw soldiers as "disposable" and "was almost pushing us out there as cannon fodder and 'Lots of luck.' I don't want to see that kind of war again," he said.

As in Kosovo and Afghanistan, he said, "I want to see a high-tech war, with high-tech people and minimum casualties on our side.''

Quality of life in the draft era "was beer in the barracks and a three-day pass," Cleland said. That won't satisfy today's military, which not only is high-tech, but most of which is married. "We need the best people in the world (and) to retain them we have to have the best opportunities for a family-oriented military."

Service members who bought into the Montgomery GI Bill when they entered service see it, over time, as a reason to leave so that the benefits aren't wasted, Cleland said. The way to change that is to allow those benefits to address an even higher priority for aging careerists, the education of their children and spouses.

With executive branch "bean counters" solidly opposed to transferability because of the potential cost, Cleland said, his three-year effort to deliver even a limited benefit has been frustrating, "like pushing a rope. But we have oversight responsibility, and I'm not going to let this dog sleep."

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