..."Any low-hanging fruit has gone away, at the very least," says Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank. Blakeley points out that housing allowances were never intended to simply be bonus cash for troops, even if many soldiers now use them that way. BAH was originally intended to cover only about 80 percent of a soldier's housing costs, she said—it's now designed to cover 99 percent [5]—and the Senate's changes are an attempt to make such stipends "a little more true to what their purposes are. If you want troops to be able to have $400 in their pocket more every month, a better way to do that is to look at the actual pay."..
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