Screwing the Military . . .

This just in: DoD Panel Calls for Radical Retirement Overhaul!

Oh, this is a beaut! Essentially, the DoD, in an effort to reduce costs associated with retiree pay in years to come, recommends that Congress do away with the traditional military retirement program. Essentially, the way the current system works is that it's a defined benefit program; after 20 years military service, a person can retire and receive 40% of their base pay over the highest-paid three-year period. After 30 years service, it increases up to 60%. (Back in the olden days, it was even better, with the percentages at 50% and 75%, respectively, but that was way, way back.)

And the recommended plan is to eliminate that altogether, and replace it with a plan very similar to a 401(k) program, like most civilians have.

So . . . what's wrong with that?

How many civilian jobs, besides fire and police, include the possibility that workers may have to give their lives for their employer? How many civilian jobs require that you give up a number of rights we civilians enjoy? How many civilian jobs can send you halfway around the world, to extremely austere conditions, where there are people who are actively trying to kill you, AND keep your family in the dark about what's going on? Yeah, there's some cushy military jobs; always has been and always will be. But there's plenty of hard-core military jobs that have absolutely no civilian equivalent--infantry, armor, artillery; submarines; landing in a hot LZ or assaulting an enemy-held beach. And you can't ignore the flyboys, either; how many jobs can require you to strap yourself into a small cramped compartment, fly 18 hours

into a combat zone, bomb targets while evading SAMs and triple-A fire, and then fly 18 more hours back home?

Have we come so far away from the major sacrifices the military has made in the past that we have forgotten? More than 1.2 million Americans have died in battle since the Declaration was signed. How many other professions have had to sacrifice so much to ensure our freedoms? Yeah, we've lost nearly 5,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; but we lost over 58,000 in Vietnam, and more than 400,000 in the European and Pacific Theaters in WWII; more than 620,000 died in the Civil War to bring an end to slavery in the United States--which was more than 2% of the population of the entire nation at the time.

I remember hearing a story from a nurse, back in WWII, who landed on Omaha Beach on June 8, 1944, two days after D-Day. She was from Georgia, and saw the beach as the boat carried her and her fellow nurses to the shore. "Oh, that looks like good old Georgia clay," she exclaimed, seeing the reddish cast just beyond the waves. A colonel standing nearby told her, "Honey, that's not clay. That's blood soaked into the sand."

Is it really appropriate then to cut the admittedly generous retirement plans offered to those who have held the line, manned their posts, and kept the War on Terror away from country, away from our homes? They serve day in and day out, ready to be the ones who may have to pay any price, bear any burden, to protect our country and our way of life. Their line of work is far more demanding than ours, any of ours, and that retirement plan is one of the things that they deserve--even if it is expensive. They have earned it.