Don’t rewrite the rules for military retirement

The DBB reforms also would give the Pentagon greater flexibility in shedding people deemed redundant. The current system makes it “very difficult to release personnel with 15 or more years of service,” the DBB laments. Yet it is precisely this group — the field-grade officers and non-commissioned officers who have borne the brunt of the post-9/11 wars — who “are a likely target for downsizing.” Eliminating career troops short of 20 years, thereby denying them a promised pension, can entail costly and undesirable severance packages.

In contrast, a portable 401(k)-type system can make it easier for the Pentagon to simply hand people their walking papers — much as corporate America routinely does. Baldly asserting that today “military skills are transferable to the private sector,” the DBB takes it for granted that former service members will have little trouble finding jobs, ignoring the fact that the unemployment rate for veterans is significantly higher than the national average.

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Major savings along with greater managerial flexibility: At a time of massive budget deficits, it seems like a no-brainer. Yet as with many money-saving schemes, this one incurs hidden costs. And as used by the DBB, “flexibility” becomes a euphemism for dodging the real issue.

Conspicuously absent from the analysis is this phrase: “military profession.” Long since diluted elsewhere in American society, the concept of professionalism remains alive and well in the ranks of the armed forces, where an ethos of service and a commitment to a code of personal conduct have survived. In addition to dignifying uniformed service, the military professional ethic helps to ensure that the officer corps is apolitical. Keeping the military out of politics sustains, in part, the principle of civilian control. That is no trivial matter for a country that places so much emphasis on wielding armed might.

Whether out of malice or ignorance, the DBB would junk all that. By focusing on economy and flexibility, its proposed overhaul would commodify military service. The effect would be to transform profession into trade, reducing long-serving officers and noncommissioned officers to the status of employees, valued as long as they are needed, expendable when they are not, forgotten the day they leave — just like the workers at any GM plant or your local Safeway.

“The All Volunteer Force has proven to be an outstanding success,” the DBB declares as if stating an incontrovertible fact. Yet that force costs a bundle. Trimming retirement outlays appears to offer one way to keep that force fiscally viable. Next on the docket will be cuts in medical benefits. You can count on it.

Over the course of a decade, that all-volunteer force has proved to be astonishingly durable. With only 0.5 percent of Americans bearing the brunt of the nation’s seemingly interminable wars — and with the rest of us largely insulated from wars’ effects — politicians in Washington have had a free hand in deciding when and where that force will fight. Presidents from both parties have availed themselves of opportunities to do just that. Yet neither of the two big wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, will end in anything like a traditional victory.

Now Washington is under pressure to trim the costs of maintaining that force. Rather than reforming — which really means gutting — the retirement system for the men and women who devote their lives to defending their country, we need to reform — which really means rethinking — the all-volunteer force and what we expect it to do.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a retired Army officer. He is the author, most recently, of “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.”

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