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By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Mar 10, 2009 21:12:58 EDT

Representatives of the nation’s largest advocacy group for military officers said the 2.9 percent basic pay raise for 2010 proposed by the Obama administration would insult service members in the short term and could lead to serious retention problems in the future.

The Military Officers Association of America has fired the latest volley in a fight over whether the 2010 military pay raise should match private-sector pay increases or continue a decade-old trend of closing the gap that grew in the 1980s and ’90s between average military and private-sector wages.

The dispute involves a modest 0.5 percentage point increase that MOAA and other military-related associations want added to the 2010 pay increase. This would add about $347 million to the cost of the 2010 military pay raise.

But the government’s costs could be far greater if Congress follows its usual policy of providing the same pay increase to federal civilian workers that is given to the military. The Obama budget calls for a modest 2 percent pay raise for federal workers, with some lawmakers already looking to boost that to 2.9 percent for all federal employees.

If the military gets the 3.4 percent raise called for by MOAA and other military groups, federal civilian supporters in Congress likely would like follow suit with a similar proposal that would add about $1 billion more to federal payroll costs.

The military pay gap reached a peak of 13.5 percent in 1999 because military raises were capped for years at below the average annual increase in private-sector pay. Under a congressional mandate, the pay gap has been reduced to just 2.9 percent today.

“It is unseemly to quibble over a half-percentage point in time of war,” said Steve Strobridge, MOAA’s government relations director and a former Air Force compensation director.

Getting military pay equal to private sector wages is a principle that shouldn’t be stopped short of its goal, Strobridge said. “Every time we abandoned pay comparability in the past, it has been the start of a slide to retention problems,” he said.

Retired Vice Adm. Norb Ryan Jr., MOAA president, said in statement that the 2.9 percent raise requested by the Obama administration is a disappointment. “Who can look the soldier walking patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan in the eye and tell him in good conscience that he hasn’t earned at least that small token of national gratitude?

“The reality is that today’s troops continue to pay a residual price in every paycheck because the government inflicted severe pay raise caps on the military throughout the 1980s and ’90s,” Ryan said. “This is not the time to abandon Congress’s 10-year commitment to restore military pay comparability. It would take a 5.8 percent raise to wipe out the pay gap completely, but we’ve never asked to do that in one year. We’ve supported Congress’ fiscally responsible effort to do it over a number of years.”

A decision on the 2010 military pay raise will be made by lawmakers later this year as part of the defense budget process. The House Armed Services Committee is likely to be the first congressional panel that will have a say about the size of the raise when it writes its version of the 2010 defense authorization bill, probably in May.