MILITARY UPDATE
Little time to restore pay hike for Iraq duty
By Tom Philpott
Defense Department officials have characterized as "absurd" the notion that they support a pay reduction Oct. 1 for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But at a press conference Aug. 14 , officials couldn't explain in detail how U.S. occupation forces would avoid a pay cut if Congress follows the Bush administration's advice and allows up to $225 a month in special pay raises to expire.
In July, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and staff corresponded with the chairmen of the armed services committees to give guidance to House-Senate conferees on resolving differences in separate versions of the 2004 defense bills. Among items Rumsfeld and staff opposed were "unrequested" increases in pays and allowances including a $150-a-month increase in family separation allowance, or FSA, and a $75-a-month increase in imminent danger pay, or IDP.
Congress enacted both raises in April as a reward for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and made them retroactive to October 2002. The increases are set to expire Sept. 30 unless Congress extends them.
The Senate version of the defense bill would make the FSA and IDP increases permanent. The House would keep them only until Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, in Afghanistan, ended.
Defense officials said the special increases were inefficient as an award for troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, because the extra money also goes to tens of thousands of service members deployed elsewhere.
David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and Larry Di Rita, the department's acting spokesman, held a news conference to try to defuse the issue. Di Rita called reports that the administration supported pay cuts for those in Iraq and Afghanistan not just wrong but absurd.
Chu said the administration was committed to protecting pay levels for troops facing combat. However, the pair still left unanswered how the Defense Department could protect pay levels for troops in two countries while urging Congress to allow the special pay increases to expire.
"There is an open issue about how we're going to do that," Chu said. But the department "has a variety of pay and allowance powers" to make it happen. He referred to a possible increase in hazardous duty pay, which presumably would require legislation. He also referred to a new assignment incentive pay. But the Department of Defense hadn't proposed funding either initiative earlier.
Regardless of what Congress or the Bush administration intends to occur Oct. 1, the special pay hikes of April could disappear from paychecks for at least a month, even for troops in Iraq. That's because Congress left town in August with increases in the separation allowance and danger pay still set to expire Sept. 30.
October checks could reflect a return to pre-Iraq pay levels, at least temporarily. If so, higher payments could be restored again in November and made retroactive to Oct. 1.
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