The Last Hooyah

The next big, impossible debate in the budget boondoggle is defense. The president has called for reducing defense spending by $400 billion over the next twelve years. I'm all for those cuts, but, as usual, where to start? Cue the hue and cry, including mine.

"U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned on Tuesday that policymakers would face tough choices trimming military budgets, weighing cuts in pay and benefits against delays in updating aging ships and jets." (Reuters, May 24, 2011)

[QUOTATION MARKS AND SARCASM ALERT]

The Pentagon has begun a review of priorities and spending to meet the President's budget requirements. And Gates, who retires "in 2011" interviewed spoke yesterday before the conservative "think tank" American Enterprise Institute, arguing for "absolutely critical" new aerial refueling planes and F-35's for the Air Force and new ships and "eventually" new ballistic submarines for the Navy, and a "recapitalization" of the Army's infrastructure spending. And then had the nerve to offer up the following:

Part of this analysis will entail going places that have been avoided by politicians in the past.  Taking on some of these issues could entail:

• Re-examining military compensation levels in light of the fact that – apart from the U.S. Army during the worst years of Iraq – all the services have consistently exceeded their recruiting and retention goals;
•  It could mean taking a look at the rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to retirement, pay and pensions left over from the last century.   A more tiered and targeted system – one that weights compensation towards the most high demand and dangerous specialties – could bring down costs while attracting and retaining the high quality personnel we need;  and
• It will require doing something about spiraling health care costs – and in particular the health insurance benefit for working age retirees whose fees are one-tenth those of federal civil servants, and have not been raised since 1995. (DOD transcript)

As an Air Force wife (ret.) and Navy mother-in-law, I can tell you I don't want our poor pilots left fuel-less over the Atlantic nor our valiant submariners forced to find jobs on land in this economy. Nor do I want our kids in  uniform patroling IED'd roads in vehicles that offer them no protection, but that happened even when our military budget was at its highest. And, full disclosure, I sure as hell don't want the kids who have served multiple combat tours to be threatened by cuts in retiree pay, higher Tricare premiums, or reduced veteran's medical benefits just as we're bringing them home from combat zones. Therefore, I can't even write about this subject without all the marks of emphasis available on the Blogger post composition toolbar to express my sarcasm.

Because it seems to me that Gates is knowingly opening the political argument to sacrifice pay and benefits for both past and future personnel in favor of the continued development of the kinds of weapons that we once used to rattle at Russia. And he's doing it with all the timing and finesse of an Ahmadinejad. He's got his, he's preaching to the well-lobbied choir, and he knows the mood of the country has justifiably, exhaustedly, declared it ain't gonna study war no more. We've been told we won't need so many boots on the ground in wars (we won't even have to fight) in the future, because we'll have all these high-tech robotics that will sniff and snuff troublemakers for us (before they've even decided to think about attacking us) and the rest will be up to an All-Special Ops military. It's another War To End All Wars mindset.

US Navy Seals Website

I confess I couldn't bring myself to read the entire Gates speech as printed on the DOD website, so I supplemented it with the summaries of a few people who actually get paid to do this stuff. I'm afraid I only got more confused. As an example--and, by no means, the most confusing one--there's this from Bloomberg,

Gates also called for a more flexible retirement system to retain military and civilian personnel with critical skills. The current system provides full retirement benefits to those who have served for 20 years or more, giving them “every incentive to leave,” even if the military needs them.

About 70 percent of the military force doesn’t stay for retirement. 'Somebody who serves for 10 years leaves with nothing,' Gates said. 'That doesn’t make any sense. That’s not fair.'

What does that even mean? That we shouldn't let those poor, exhausted careerists go because they want to leave at the end of twenty years of sheer hell for low pay or that we should start paying benefits to anyone who re-ups past their first commitment? I would assume that, if you've survived the US military for a twenty year career, you're chock full of "critical skills," but that doesn't mean we should ask you to stay for thirty, much less that you'd agree after all the rule changes you've suffered in the first twenty. But, if we don't want to pay full benefits for a twenty year stint due to budget cuts, why discuss benefits for a ten year commitment? Gates is right; it doesn't make sense and it wouldn't be fair.

Yes, I'm just a wife and MIL, and I'm obviously missing the Big Picture. So, help me with this, Readers, because I have questions.

If we cut pay and benefits and lengthen the career commitment, who's going to volunteer for this All-Volunteer military? We'll be continuing the trend of pulling from those who, by virtue of minority status or sheer bad luck, have no other job options--only we'll be offering them less to work longer and harder. We already pay our military personnel poorly for their services at every level and rank, promising to make it up to them in future benefits and retirement pensions. If we're going to make further cuts both before and after retirement, we might as well turn the DOD over to the private sector and let them outsource this entire national security gig to developing countries. 

And make no mistake, it'll be about the pay. The last hooyah generation, the last of the kids who wanted to go out and fight for this grand country because it's just so darned grand, are within a few years of military retirement, themselves. And they've seen how this grand country values their well-being. The long, slow decline of taste for the kind of patriotism that spurs volunteers to fight some politician's wars began in the sixties and has picked up speed ever since. In an election cycle where neither party wants to go on record as being in favor of continued presence in Afghanistan, where will we find the psychological underpinnings of the gee-whizz, gung-ho attitude that helped the services meet their recruitment quotas, the attitude that still existed in some parts of the US in 1965? Which little girl's daddy is going to raise her to believe that fighting for her country is honorable work to be proud of after the exposé on the story of Private Jessica Lynch?

For today's Seal Team Six, it's about pride and country, but dick around with their families' benefits, their buddy's benefits, and pride won't be enough for them to recommend the military to their kids. The last hooyah will belong to Future Seal Team Six and the special ops personnel like them...those highly paid, highly skilled, highly educated, unimaginably well-equipped few who unquestionably have lifetime benefits that put congressional benefits to shame because there is national recognition of the Seal's comparative worth. It'll either be that down the road or the draft.