MILITARY UPDATE
War bill includes special-pay raises
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, 50, enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1973 and served as an information officer from 1974-77.
By Tom Philpott
The wartime defense supplemental bill that President Bush signed April 16 raises military Family Separation Allowance by $150 a month and Imminent Danger Pay by $75 a month, retroactive to Oct. 1, 2002.
Almost 200,000 service members drawing Family Separation Allowance will see pay increase by $100 to $250 a month. Anyone eligible for FSA since October will receive back pay as soon as military finance centers can implement the change.
At least 250,000 military personnel draw Imminent Danger Pay of $150 a month. That will rise, by 50 percent, to $225, and again the increase will be retroactive to October.
These increases are a kind of $800 million thank you to service members from a grateful Congress. Rather than limit their gratitude to the warriors who drove Saddam Hussein from power, however, Congress raised the pay of any member assigned to a dangerous area overseas or forced to live away from family longer than 30 days at a stretch.
Many of the eligible will include attendees at stateside service schools, on temporary duty assignments or deployed aboard ships or with aircraft squadrons, regardless of theater. For that reason, the Senate designed the special pay increases to expire Sept. 30, 2003, unless the Armed Services committees, which will have more time and expertise to study the cost and logic of these changes, agree to make them permanent when they shape the fiscal 2004 defense authorization bill later this year.
Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, introduced the special pays amendment as part of the $79 billion wartime supplemental bill. He did so in part to head off more costly proposals from colleagues eager to show their support for the war.
The measure has been described as a compromise made to avoid touching off a bidding war among legislators who want to show who could do the most for the troops.
The House wartime supplemental made no mention of special pay increases but House members embraced the Senate plan when a conference committee met April 12 to work out bill differences.
In the end, Congress added $4 billion to the $74.7 billion emergency supplemental sought by President Bush. Twenty percent of that added cost can be traced to special pay raises.
The supplement also broadens in two ways service authority to assist members who become ill or injured in the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
The first allows the services to buy for ill or injured returnees up to $250 in clothing, either because civilian attire is needed to return home on commercial aircraft or because uniforms were destroyed in combat or during medical treatment. The $250 is a procurement cap, not an allowance.
A second clarifying provision allows payment of travel allowances to family members who visit loved ones hospitalized for wounds or illness suffered in the war.
Both clarifying provisions apply to members in support of Operations Noble Eagle, Enduring Freedom or Iraqi Freedom.
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