Pentagon’s Prescription: Big-Money Dose of Morale

Struggling to meet its demands for talent, the military is contemplating spending billions more dollars toward the elusive goal of boosting morale.

A Pentagon study panel said Wednesday that it is urging the Defense Department to overhaul its military personnel system by increasing pay, easing mandatory retirement rules and moving toward a civilian-style incentive pay system.

The group is also urging sharply increased efforts to recruit Latinos.

In a Pentagon briefing, Retired Navy Adm. David Jeremiah, the panel’s chairman, portrayed the military personnel system as an archaic, 50-year-old institution that has been frequently “Band-Aided” but now should be “looked at as a totality and restructured.”

The committee, organized earlier this year to make recommendations to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said that, to keep older military personnel with badly needed skills, the military needs to ease “up or out” rules that require enlisted personnel and officers to retire if they are not promoted.

Plans for Pay Modeled on Civilian Systems

The panel said that the military should move toward a civilian-style system of “pay for performance” and try to attract talent by making personnel in certain specialties eligible for retirement benefits before the traditional 20-year mark.

Jeremiah, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon needs to close the pay gap between military personnel and civilians who have the same skills. He declined to estimate how much this would cost, though he acknowledged the figure would be in the billions of dollars.

The study group, one of more than 20 such panels organized by Rumsfeld, was composed of retired military officers, personnel specialists, academics and other experts. It put together the report with assistance from Rand Corp., a Santa Monica-based think tank.

Officials stressed that Rumsfeld is not obliged to accept any of the group’s recommendations. Yet Rumsfeld’s approving public comments on the panel’s work, including the recommendation for change of the “up or out” system, suggest it may carry real weight with him.

The recommendations for more steps to improve compensation and morale are consistent with the goals that President Bush laid out in the presidential campaign, when he argued that the military had been mismanaged in the Clinton administration.

Many of the recommendations are ideas that have been kicked around before, Jeremiah acknowledged.

“We didn’t discover a lot of this; people have said it many times,” he said. “We’re trying to find people who will listen.”

Jeremiah painted a sobering picture of the job the Pentagon faces in recruiting talent.

He noted that, while Americans admire the military, only 1 in 20 young people is inclined to try military service as a career. He noted that the costs to the armed forces of recruiting young people surged 66% in the 1990s, from an average $6,000 to $10,000 per person.

He laid part of the blame for the difficulties on the fact that, while the recruits are far better educated, the military continues to pay them at levels appropriate for people who don’t have college or graduate degrees.

These young people were “far different” from the young people the military was able to recruit 50 years ago, after World War II, “if we were lucky and ahead of the sheriff,” he joked.

He said civilian recruiters spot these better-trained young people in the military today and quickly hire them away to higher-paying civilian jobs.

Jeremiah urged that the Pentagon step up the efforts to recruit more Latinos.

He said the armed services need to find Latino talent so that there will be Latino leaders in the services in the years ahead, when minorities will make up an increasing portion of the U.S. population.

“You want to have senior leaders who understand . . . how the juniors think and who they are,” he said. And he said the military cannot simply hope that the leadership will evolve to reflect that kind of ethnic composition because “generally speaking, that doesn’t happen unless you force it.”

Jeremiah also called for a new effort among the leadership to boost morale by stressing that military personnel are engaged in special work.

The troops should understand “that the work they do is noble work,” he said. “Subliminal compensation . . . is pretty darned important too.”

Jeremiah said the military needs to accelerate its program to improve housing and make better efforts to manage the civilian work force employed by the department. He said it must become more attentive to the needs of the reserve forces, whose members are doing more of the military’s work yet do not qualify for the same benefits.

Pay Gap Could Be $6-Billion Problem

Some outside defense analysts said the administration could run up against hard fiscal realities if it tries to eliminate what it sees as the gap between civilian and military pay.

Steven Kosiak, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan think tank, said basic military pay is about $50 billion a year. That means that if the Pentagon seeks to wipe out a 13% gap that some advocates contend exists between civilian and military pay, it would cost more than $6 billion.

Kosiak noted that whether there really is a gap has been a subject of debate.

He said that some analysts have found that the apparent gap is due to the fact that military personnel are younger than the U.S. average and are actually better paid than average civilians of the same age.