About a week and a half ago, I posted a comment to a diary by lebkuchen regarding the pay problems that I encountered while on stop-loss shortly after the 9/11 attacks. I was asked by AllisoninSeattle to write a diary about my trials and tribulations with the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS). Although it has taken me some time to actually find time to research and write the diary you are reading, I have been looking forward to sharing this information with the DKos community ever since Allison suggested I write it (Thanks Allison!). The Republicans have consistently charged our side of the aisle with being weak on defense and, more egregiously, of not supporting the troops. I hope that this diary will clarify just how little they actually support the troops regarding one aspect of military life: pay.
If you were to ask 100 enlisted members of the United States Armed Forces why they had joined the military, an overwhelming majority of them would respond that it was directly related to money and/or other financial benefits (i.e. - The Montgomery G.I. Bill). The ratio between military pay and overall defense spending in this country is astounding and appalling as is the military pay gap. For many careers it is common for military members to make as much as 40% less than their civilian counterparts for the same exact job. I'm not going to concentrate too much on how military pay raises are calculated by Congress in this diary but, suffice it to say, it is a convoluted and predominantly unfair process. The point, though, is that our men and women in uniform are having to suffer through humbling, infuriating, and, often times, humiliating ordeals regarding their pay.
Military pay is a somewhat daunting jumble of different compensations based on a number of factors including, but not limited to: time in the military, rank, career field, location, deployment, and many other circumstances. All military members, be they active duty, guard or reserve receive what is called base pay. Base pay is an arbitrary figure which is consistent across all branches of the military and is based on 2 things: time in service and time in grade. Time in service is the total amount of time that one has been enlisted in the military. Time in grade, on the other hand, is the length of time that one has held their current rank. The pay scale increases as these two numbers do. Therefore, the longer you are in the service and at any given rank (or a higher rank), the more you get paid. A service member's base pay is augmented by a series of added compensations based on a number of factors. Several of these factors are experienced by all members but they fluctuate based on location and the living arrangements of the member in question. Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) is one such compensation. Many single (predominantly young) enlisted members live in dormitories on base and, therefore, do not receive this entitlement. Basic Allowance for Housing is an added compensation designed to allay some of the cost of housing one's family (or self) off-base (rent/mortgage payments). It is pro-rated by location using the local cost of living as a gauge for increasing or decreasing the entitlement from year to year. Along the same lines is the Basic Allowance for Subsistence (BAS) which is an entitlement to assist in allaying the cost of food to feed the military member (ONLY the military member, families are not factored into this entitlement). All members receive some amount of BAS whether in the form of actual dollars on their paycheck or free meals at the chow hall (most enlisted members who live in the dorms on base receive all meals at the chow hall for free). These two entitlements and some others like them are also augmented by an annual Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) which reflects any upswing in the local economy where one is stationed. Along with these entitlements that affect virtually everyone, there are also special pay categories which can be related to one's career field (i.e. - Flight Duty Pay) or one's deployment status (Hostile Fire/Imminent Danger Pay). I am only going to cover a few of these here for the sake of brevity but a more comprehensive list may be found at Military.com.
The most pertinent special pay categories in today's military, given the alleged War on Terror, relate to being deployed to a combat zone. One such entitlement is Hostile Fire/Imminent Danger Pay. HF/ID pay is a subsidy to one's income that is accrued for every month that one spends in a combat zone. Currently, serving in a hostile forward area amounts to an additional $225.00 per month. The other related special pay category is the Combat Zone Tax Exclusion. This is a directive that states that, under the order of the Commander in Chief, an area can be declared a non-taxable combat zone. Should one be deployed to such an area, taxes are not extracted from the member's pay for every month that they spend any amount of time in the zone (even if it's only a single day). More to the point, there are incentives provided for volunteering for hazardous duties as there are in any civilian enterprise involving a potentially hazardous work environment (although these entitlements are typically much larger in the civilian sector).
All military pay is currently handled by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service. Founded in 1991 by the Secretary of Defense, its stated purpose was to cut down on the cost and logistical issues of having several different agencies handle military pay for the different branches and locations. Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, DFAS is supported directly by their "customers" rather than by Congressional or DoD appropriations. In other words, DFAS is big business (as it says in the history section of their website). I would argue that the implementation of DFAS into military pay has, in many cases, done the opposite of its stated goals by actually making military pay more convoluted and difficult to understand.
If you're still with me and awake, I shall attempt to put all of this very dry information into some perspective regarding the absolute disregard shown for the military member within the pay system in the military. These problems are ongoing and, as every study and report shows, very prevalent.
September 11, 2001 was a day that, like most Americans, I will never forget. I was deployed to Moses Lake, Washington (state) on what was supposed to be my last temporary duty assignment (TDY) in the military. I had 19 days until I was scheduled to begin my terminal leave and complete my military service. I had turned on the news while getting ready for work that day and was half-heartedly ironing my uniform while catching up on the previous days events. Most of you already know what came next in the form of a breaking news story out of New York. As I watched that second plane slam into World Trade Center 2, I let out a string of very loud obscenities which prompted several of my neighbors in the hotel to call the front desk. I knew, instantly, that I wasn't going to be going anywhere except probably back to the sand box (a clever military euphemism for the middle east). Alas I was correct and, within 3 days, the President enacted stop-loss for all military career fields. For those of you uninitiated in the ways of the military, there is a little publicized section of fine print in one's enlistment contract that covers contingencies for maintaining the integrity of the forces during wartime. Stop-loss, when enacted by the Commander in Chief, prevents any service member in an affected career field from either separating (getting out of the military without having served 20 years or more) or retiring from military service (more than 20 years of service). There are currently thousands of troops in all branches of the military being held under stop-loss (the back door draft that we heard so much about during the Kerry campaign last year). At any rate, I wasn't going home to my daughter and the rest of my family which was, to say the least, distressing. I was held under stop loss for nine and a half months during which time I was deployed twice.
The military has always tried to stay ahead of the rest of the world technologically and have almost consistently failed to do so. From Arpanet to virtually every other military endeavor, civilian industry has virtually always proven more efficient. This is most definitely the case when related to the DEERS computer system which is utilized by the military's Accounting and record keeping sectors. DEERS is an automated system that keeps track of all of a service member's pertinent records including rank, awards/decorations, pay, entitlements, dependants, and many other seemingly mundane details of the member's life and status within the military. When the software which governs the DEERS system was written in the early `90s, its most important feature was the ability to automate many aspects of a service member's records thereby allowing for reduced manpower requirements. As such, there were a number of stored procedures written into the program to allow the orderly room and/or finance personnel to know virtually nothing about the service member in question. I was on the receiving end of one of these procedures and it made my life hell for that last almost 10 months of my military service. In fact, I spent more time at the orderly room and the finance office in those 10 months than I did working. The old finance departments had, apparently, experienced some problems with service members drawing pay after their date of separation (after they had gotten out of the military). To fix this problem, they instituted a fail-safe into the program that would (and still does) automatically delete a member from the pay rolls seven to ten days after their official date of separation which is listed within DEERS. Unfortunately, they forgot to factor in the possibility of stop-loss when they contracted the software. It's important to note that there is no way for orderly room personnel to change one's date of separation permanently within the system. The best they can do is update it locally which is a temporary fix. In other words, for ten months straight, I was forced to spend hours in the finance office filling out paperwork every two weeks in order to be able to get them to cut me a paycheck (rather than using my direct deposit). This occurred both at my home station and while I was deployed to Afghanistan and Oman. This was hours of time that could have been spent accomplishing the mission rather than playing "hurry up and wait".
My situation is, by no means, an isolated incident either nor have they addressed any of the issues. There have been rampant reports of pay anomalies and errors over the last three years (since I have separated) particularly dealing with National Guard/Reserve members called up to active duty to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locations. Approximately forty percent of our troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan (although more so in Iraq) are National Guard and reserve members. These are citizen soldiers that work regular civilian jobs but are also part of the military. When they are deployed to a location such as Iraq, their status is actually changed to active duty for the time of their deployment but their pay and entitlements remains basically unchanged. From August of 2002 to January of 2004, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) studied eight Army Reserve units deployed in support of the War on Terror. Their findings were, to say the least, distressing. They found that of 348 soldiers audited, 332 (95%) of them had experienced at least one significant pay error. In addition to their being problems, many of these problems were not addressed for long periods of time (as long as a year in some cases). To quote the case-study, "Further, nearly all soldiers begin receiving their tax-exemption benefit at least 1 month late." It is important to also note that many of the individuals in question have already taken a significant pay cut (some soldiers have lost tens of thousands of dollars) from their civilian jobs in order to be deployed in support of the military effort. The GAO study found several areas to be severely deficient including the following: tracking pay status through Guard/Reserve to Active Duty and back, After-the-fact report reconciliation, unclear procedures for applying certain pay requirements, insufficient resources allocated to key unit-level pay responsibilities, inadequate training of finance personnel, and poor customer service. This is a travesty of the highest order and it is being completely ignored by many of the brass and all of the civilian overseers of the military.
This brings me to the Republican meme that Democrats don't support the troops. In his 2006 budget, President Bush proposed what amounts to an approximately 2.5 percent pay raise for most enlisted military members. This is the lowest military pay raise implemented by a Commander in Chief since 1994 and at a time of war no less. At a time when CEO paychecks are skyrocketing, the fact that our government thinks it's more important to reinitiate the nuclear arms race by holding a $10 Billion contest to see who can build a better nuclear mouse-trap than to pay our troops a real living wage should be very telling. Who, you may ask, is leading the charge in dealing with these problems and attempting to ensure that our troops are being paid what they are entitled? I can assure you that very few of them have an "R" next to their name. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has, just this month, proposed a formal audit of Department of Defense pay records to account for pay problems for wounded and injured U.S. servicemen and women returning from Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other locations around the globe. His proposal, to the credit of all members of the committee, has made it out of the committee with unanimous consent but I would be lying if I said that I thought the Republicans would allow to actually come to a vote (I could be wrong but, fool me once...yada yada yada). Senator John Kerry (D-MA) has also been outspoken on this and many other issues affecting the military. In short, the other side of the aisle can bluster and rage and call us all the ugly epitaphs they wish but it won't change the truth. They don't support the troops. The troops, in their eyes, are simply another weapon to be used (or abused as the case may be) in the pursuit of their far-reaching, megalomaniacal, and imperialistic goals for world hegemony.
Sources:
GAO Highlights
HARKIN PROPOSAL TO ADDRESS PAY PROBLEMS FOR WOUNDED
What Does the Military "Pay Gap" Mean?
Bush Has Abandoned National Guard and Reserve