The Pentagon is losing the battle to convince military families that it has their best interests at heart when it comes to compensation reform. A survey released last week by the advocacy group Blue Star Families and Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) revealed that clear majorities of military spouses, veterans, and service members are seriously concerned about pay, benefits, and changes to retirement. If Defense Department (DoD) leaders hope to achieve their goal of updating the current compensation system, they will have to assuage the doubts of at least some members of these critical constituencies. Right now, it looks like senior officials may be in for a hard-fought campaign.
Across the board, the Military Family Lifestyle Survey’s respondents—seventy percent of whom were spouses—described compensation as their top concern. Fifty-nine percent of those polled expressed doubts about receiving healthcare post-retirement, fifty-six percent were skeptical about disability benefits, and fifty-three percent were not confident about pension payments—a figure that is surprisingly high given repeated assurances by both the president and senior uniformed leaders that currently serving troops will be grandfathered into the existing system.
Much of this pessimism is likely fueled by the increasingly vocal stance defense officials have taken about the need to implement changes to military compensation. In 2013, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel declared that the DoD “can no longer put off compensation reform,” arguing that, “we all know we need to slow the cost of growth.” Similarly, in a statement before Congress in May, the Joint Chiefs testified that “current and future funding levels require adjustments to pay and compensation now to avoid further degradation of the readiness and modernization.”
Respondents were asked to rank issues by level of concern, divided by active duty, veteran, and active duty spouse sub-groups. All three groups identified military pay/benefits and changes in retirement as the most significant future challenges. (Source: Blue Star Families, “2014 Military Family Lifestyle Survey,” September 2014.)
Todd Harrison, a fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), has calculated that the average cost per active duty service member grew by seventy-six percent between 1998 and 2014. A combination of factors are responsible for the increase, including military pay raises that are greater than the national average and expansions of the DoD’s health services without a concomitant rise in fees. The National Defense Panel, a bipartisan group assembled to evaluate the DoD’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, highlighted compensation expenses by warning that “a failure to address the increasing costs…will likely result in a reduction in force structure, readiness, modernization, a decrease in benefits or a compromised All-Volunteer Force.”
The DoD’s leadership has responded to these fiscal pressures with proposals in the president’s annual budget requests aimed at reducing personnel expenses. While some minor adjustments have managed to make it through Congress—such as a provision that capped service member pay raises at one percent for 2014—lawmakers have rejected the most comprehensive reforms and seem to show little enthusiasm for approving similar measures in the future.
A major reason for their reluctance is the strength of military advocacy organizations, including the Military Officers Association of America (MOAA) and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). These groups have strongly opposed previous proposals to rein in personnel spending and have a considerable presence on Capitol Hill. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, MOAA has spent over $7 million on lobbying since 2010. During a debate earlier this year over reducing pension payments to working-age military retirees, the group’s members flooded legislators with more than 297,000 messages critical of the proposed measure. The item was hastily stripped from legislation, causing some observers to compare the effectiveness of the MOAA-led advocacy campaign to the gun lobby.