Posted on: Monday, June 7, 2004

MILITARY UPDATE
Analyst presses for revamping of military

By Tom Philpott

Congress and military leaders point with pride to recent legislation that enhanced military retirement benefits for much of the career force, set across-the-board pay raises above private-sector wage growth and established TRICARE-for-Life coverage for Medicare-eligible beneficiaries.

Those initiatives, however, helped to boost the cost of military pay and benefits by 32 percent in just five years and probably made it more difficult to sustain a 21st-century force to fight a global war on terrorism.

That's the theme of a new book, "Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military Personnel System" from MIT Press. Edited by Cindy Williams of MIT's Security Studies Program, the book supports Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's call to transform the military with marketplace innovations.

Williams, a former senior analyst with the Congressional Budget Office, writes that the total annual cost of military personnel is now $140 billion, or $100,000 per active-duty member.

Changes needed to modernize personnel and compensation systems, making them more efficient and flexible, the book contends, include:

• Switching from a one-size-fits-all basic pay system to different bands of pay at each grade to reflect the outside market value of skills.
• Cutting military training and infrastructure costs by recruiting skilled personnel, like electronic technicians and mechanics, directly into the middle enlisted grades after private-sector training and experience.
• Replacing the rigid 20-year all-or-nothing retirement plan with a more flexible system that vest members in some benefits after five years, has separation incentives short of 20 years and entices careerists to serve well beyond 20 years routinely.
• Changing up-or-out promotion and advancement rules to allow higher-skilled individuals to continue to serve even if their supervisory responsibilities don't increase.
• Enriching career patterns for longer-serving officers by allowing longer tours in critical positions and more pay as experience grows.
• Overhauling reserve compensation in ways that reflect new realities of their direct support of active duty forces for war on terrorism.
• Transforming traditional benefits like base housing and shopping discounts into cash.
• Shifting more family support functions off base and hiring more staff, in recognition that only 30 percent of families today live on base and fewer spouses today have time to serve as volunteers.