Posted on: Monday, June 27, 2005

MILITARY UPDATE

By Tom Philpott

At least one member of the Joint Chiefs supports alternatives to the military's prized 20-year retirement plan, urging adoption of more modern ways, found in industry, to compensate ambitious, skilled workers.

Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, said the 21st century Navy needs to protect its "intellectual capital" of highly trained sailors with a different mix of pays from what worked during the Cold War, including more retirement options and a less "paternalistic" approach to compensation.

"What I've told our sailors is, 'Look, we'll spend whatever we need for every sailor we have to have to provide for the kind of national security the United States needs. But I don't want to spend one thin dime for an individual that we really don't need,' " Clark said during a June 20 address at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

With more capable sailors needed to crew a smaller, higher-tech fleet, Clark said, "we're going to have to remunerate them in different ways ... be more innovative. We're going to have to do some things like this: instead of having a one-part retirement system, I think we're going to have to do what the really progressive companies are doing in industry. They have a 'cafeteria' kind of remuneration system and people get to pick the kind of benefits that they want. So I'm talking about going down to the baseline and starting over, with one simple goal in mind: How do I get the intellectual capital that is going to be required to win in the future?"

A Navy official later said Clark doesn't want Congress to lower retirement benefits for current sailors. But he does endorse giving them more options than a rigid retirement plan that pays no annuities and provides no vesting in benefits until members serve at least 20 years.

Clark, who will retire in late July, said the military lacks a "human capital strategy" to sustain a high-tech, all-volunteer force in the new century.

"I believe that we have to change our belief in what a (military) career even looks like. (Some) want to make the world the way it was when I came into the Navy, and today's world isn't like that," Clark said. "You go out into industry and you don't find very many people who have been with the same company for 37 years like I have. ... We've got to focus on a system that allows you to bring the skill sets into play that we need, not to cling to some architecture that fits a model that was really great in the Cold War."

Clark said the percentage of sailors re-enlisting has been higher over the last several years than at any time in recent Navy history. Clark cited the Navy's commitment, since he became Chief of Naval Operations in 2000, to sailors' growth and development.

When he entered the Navy in 1968, Clark said, it was rare for an enlisted member to have a college degree. Today, 56 percent of top enlisted — the fleet and force master chiefs — have college diplomas.

"This is a different world," Clark said, and "if we're not competing economically, we're going to let that incredible intellectual capital walk out the door and the nation is going to be the loser."

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