A controversial new report on military compensation reveals unusual choices among current and former service members asked to weigh the relative value of their benefits.
For example, they’d rather have more vacation days than access to commissaries and exchanges — even though most people don’t use the 30 annual days of leave they already get.
They’d be willing to pay more for dependent health care if they could get the choice of their next duty assignment.
Junior enlisted members value basic pay raises more than do senior officers by a factor of six — potential ammunition for those who favor targeted raises over across-the-board increases.
And more than 90 percent of service members would pay a $40 monthly fee for Tricare for Life — health coverage now free to retirees 65 or older — in return for an immediate basic pay raise.
Those with 10 or fewer years of service would accept a $200 raise for that trade-off, while those with 20 or more years think it would be worth a $1,224 annual raise.
The unusual study, released July 12, is based on a survey conducted by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The goal was to examine the relative importance people place on pieces of the military compensation package and see what trade-offs they’d make at a time of soaring personnel costs.
Todd Harrison, an Air Force veteran and the report’s author, acknowledged that the survey of 2,600 people — about 1,400 active duty, 700 retirees and the rest veterans, reservists, family members and a few dozen civilians — is too small to draw definitive conclusions/.../