MILITARY UPDATE
Some retirees eligible for new disability pay

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

With an 11th-hour deal struck between Congress and the Bush administration, up to 33,000 military retirees with 20 or more years of service and combat-related disabilities will be able to apply next year for a new combat disability pay.

The payments, to begin six months after the 2003 defense authorization bill is signed into law, will range from $103 a month to more than $2,100 a month depending upon the severity of disability tied to combat, hazardous duty or combat training.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., who will be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee starting in January, led efforts to reach a compromise with a reluctant administration on the issue of concurrent receipt, or the receiving of both full retired pay and disability compensation. President Bush, through staff, had threatened to veto the defense bill if it eased a century-old ban on receiving both.

Military retired pay must be offset by amounts that retirees draw in tax-free disability pay from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Bush's veto threat scuttled more comprehensive and costly concurrent receipt initiatives approved earlier by the House and Senate.

Warner called the final deal, agreed to by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and approved by Congress on Wednesday, as a beachhead on this issue, "creating a very special class of deserving veterans."

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the current committee chairman, praised Warner's leadership.

For retirees with war wounds or severe combat-related disabilities, the new special pay will be equivalent to full restoration of retired pay under earlier House and Senate initiatives. Some incomes will jump by more than $25,000. Because the White House officially still opposes "double payments for the same period of service," Congress won't call this solution concurrent receipt.

Two categories of retirees are in line for the pay hikes:

• Those wounded in combat and awarded the Purple Heart. They will receive some special pay if disabilities from the wounds are rated 10 percent or higher. Amounts will match retired pay being forfeited under the concurrent receipt law for disability compensation tied to their war wounds.
• Those with other combat-related disabilities severe enough for disability ratings of 60 percent or higher. Such qualifying disabilities might result from four sources: combat; flight duty, demolition duty or other hazardous duties; combat-related training such as airborne operations, war games, hand-to-hand combat training or injuries on obstacle courses. Disabilities from normal training like jogging, calisthenics or supervised sports would not qualify; and "an instrumentality of war" such as accidental gunfire, exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange, accidents in military vehicles, Gulf War Syndrome or even accidental falls aboard ship.

Early estimates of the number of retirees who will be eligible for the new pay range from 11,000 to 33,000. Retirees will have to apply for payments once procedures are announced but that could take months. Defense officials, when finally processing applications, will have to pull service records and perhaps medical files during screening.

The cost of the deal is estimated to range between $200 million and $1 billion annually. The exact cost figure will depend to some extent on how tough the Secretary of Defense and his staff are in interpreting combat-related eligibility.

Retiree and veterans groups reacted with mixed emotions.

"We're disappointed that, with 90 percent of Congress supporting something much broader, the administration drove the legislative train so we couldn't get what either chamber passed," said Steve Strobridge, director of government relations for The Retired Officer Association. But as the 107th Congress drew to a close, Strobridge said, there was real danger of no defense bill and no gain at all on concurrent receipt.

The good news, he said, "is that for people who qualify, it's a huge victory. Our concern is that a lot deserving retirees won't be eligible."

He said the battle will continue next year.

This is the second step by Congress in recent years on concurrent receipt. Under a provision approved two years ago, 33,000 military retirees now draw special disability compensation of $50 to $300 a month because they got a VA disability rating of 60 percent or higher within four years of retirement. Many of these retirees will qualify for higher payments under the combat-related disability pay. To do so, they will have to forgo the smaller special payments. The new pay has no four-year rule.

Among those left out are disabled retirees with fewer than 20 years of service, including those who accepted voluntary early retirement during the post-Cold War drawdown.

Robert Goldich, an analyst for the Congressional Research Service, said there are no statistics on combat disabled retirees so this will not be an easy benefit to administer. Officials, he said, will have to construct databases, look at individual military and VA records and sort through many gray areas.

"It will be some time before this operates on a routine basis," he said.

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