An Army of One Costs $99,000 -- and Counting

For months now, Pentagon officials have resisted growing political pressure to add more soldiers to the nation’s overstretched fighting force. To understand why, meet the $99,000 soldier.

That’s how much, on average, each active-duty service member cost in 2002 in pay and benefits, the Congressional Budget Office said this month. And it is what makes defense officials quake at the prospect of putting more men and women in uniform.

For as the costs of paying troops soar, so does the pressure to save money elsewhere -- a trend defense officials fear could bleed money from other needs close to their hearts: modernizing weapons systems, maintaining military equipment and conducting costly arms research.

Since the mid-1990s, when defense officials and politicians responded to declines in military recruitment and retention by increasing pay and benefits for war fighters, Pentagon spending on medical care has more than doubled, and Congress has voted to give troops two major pay raises and a host of new retirement, housing, child-care and disability benefits.

Benefits aside, members of the military average $43,000 a year in pay, and most won’t stay long enough to reap retirement money. But all the entitlements wreak havoc with the defense budget’s bottom line -- and raise the stakes of increasing the size of the military.

“There’s a whole range of costs related to adding people to the military, and there’s talk of adding still more” benefits, said Steven M. Kosiak, director of budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan defense think tank in Washington. “The end result is that an increasing share of the U.S. defense budget is on automatic pilot, so the amount of money you have left over to use for modernization and research and development becomes smaller and smaller.”

Between 1988 and 2002, Pentagon spending on healthcare -- adjusted for the overall rate of inflation -- tripled, while salary per active-duty service member increased by 39%, the CBO said. That far outstripped the gains by other federal employees.

If Congress approves the Pentagon’s budget request for fiscal 2005, the amount being spent to pay the nation’s soldiers will increase still more. According to budget documents disclosed Friday, base pay for members of the military would rise by 3.5 %.

No politician is on record as begrudging the surge in pay and benefits for service members, who since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have coped with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- which have meant long, arduous deployments -- and the deaths of more than 500 of their fellow troops in Iraq alone.

But the same wars that have increased the hardships on troops, and the public resolve to make sure they are fairly compensated, are adding to the pressure to boost the size of the fighting force.

The Army is so strained that it has pulled up more than 100,000 reservists for long stretches, doubled the length of deployments for regular military and ordered tens of thousands of soldiers to remain in the service involuntarily. With some commanders in Iraq complaining publicly that they are short the soldiers they need, more than two dozen House Democrats have backed a bill to add about 82,000 troops -- 40,000 soldiers, 27,000 airmen and 15,000 Marines -- to the congressionally approved limit of 482,000.

This week, in an unexpected move that military officials say will relieve some of the stress on the force, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld invoked emergency orders authorizing the Army to grow temporarily by 30,000 troops.

But defense officials insist that the increase, expected to be in effect for about four years, should not be permanent.

“There are real fixed costs here, and I can understand why the tops of the heads blow off the budgeters at the Pentagon when they think of adding people. But you cannot fight the reality that this is a labor-intensive war, and we’re in it, and I don’t know anybody that has the ability to predict when we’ll be out of it,” said Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Alamo), one of the bill’s sponsors.

Such talk is precisely what worries administration officials. If Congress votes to approve the Pentagon’s 2005 budget request for $401.7 billion, a 7% jump, it will be the seventh straight year of Pentagon budget increases -- a string unseen since the end of World War II. “There’s good reason to think that this ride won’t go on indefinitely, and that if we increase end strength, that we might be left with a larger force structure that we don’t have money to modernize,” a defense official said.

Much is at stake. Current Pentagon projections call for more money for a host of programs between now and 2009, among them the Navy’s DDX destroyer and littoral combat ships, the Army’s Future Combat System and Joint Unmanned Combat Vehicle, and for the Air Force, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the F/A-22 combat jet.

Under Rumsfeld, the Pentagon has accelerated investment in all those programs -- part of his push to “transform” the military with new technologies. There is plenty of political pressure behind such programs, much of it from the weapons producers and their employees in places like California.

But the political pressure to make sure troops are well-compensated is also intense.

Base pay, bonuses, special pay and allowances for things like food and on-base housing -- plus the advantage troops receive because some allowances are not subject to federal income tax -- typically make up only 43% of a service member’s total compensation.

The other 57% is made up of subsidized goods and services that can be used immediately, such as medical care, groceries and child care, along with the accrued cost of retirement pensions, healthcare for retirees and veterans benefits.

In 2002, Congress, flush with a budget surplus and with its eye on elections, voted to extend free medical coverage to 1.5 million military retirees beyond the date they would become eligible for Medicare.

The military’s managed healthcare plan, known as Tricare, covers retirees who served at least 20 years in the military and their spouses. It covers most medical expenses without co-payments or a premium and includes a substantial prescription drug benefit. Until the expansion of Tricare, the retirees were dropped from the plan as soon as they became eligible for Medicare, and their only additional coverage was limited access to a shrinking network of military hospitals and clinics.

The military has estimated the program’s cost at more than $60 billion over 10 years.

The same year, another law passed restoring military pensions to 50% of base pay after 20 years of service, rather than 40%.

And last year, President Bush signed a bill repealing a 19th century law that barred veterans from collecting full military retirement along with disability pay. The new law will add to the income of a quarter-million disabled veterans to the tune of $22 billion over the next decade.

All that translates into a daunting array of future costs.

But, Tauscher said, “we’re in a box here. You can walk around all day saying, ‘I am really worried about that problem we’ll have when we have too many people in the Army in five years.’ I am cognizant of that. But, my God, look at the problems we have today!”