Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel met with troops face-to-face Tuesday for the first time since he introduced a defense budget proposal that cuts service members' pay and benefits.
In a town hall meeting with soldiers at Fort Eustis, Va., Hagel said that "what we're proposing we think is fair" to slow the growth of pay and benefits to allow for improvements in readiness and modernization in a smaller force after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His remarks were greeted respectfully by the soldiers. There was no applause, but the questions put to Hagel were direct and unemotional.
Hagel cited the Basic Allowance for Housing as an example in the Pentagon's first overall effort to pare back benefits in the all-volunteer era of the military.
"You all get 100 percent" in the BAH, Hagel told the troops. "You don't pay anything." In the coming years, troops would be asked to pay five percent of the BAH under the proposals in the Pentagon's Fiscal Year 2015 budget, Hagel said.
Hagel noted that up until the late 1990s, service members paid 18 percent of BAH.
Hagel stressed to the troops that there will be no pay cuts and, in fact, "there will be pay increases." However, the pay raises will not come at the rate troops had come to expect when defense budgets soared after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
In another cost-cutting measure, the proposed budget called for merging the current three Tricare Prime, Extra and Standard programs into one.
Hagel said "it just makes sense" that the Tricare proposals also included a "slight, modest increase in co-pays for families and working age retirees" in the range of 8-11 percent that would be worked in gradually.
A sergeant in Hagel's audience asked how the nation would respond with a smaller force "if another war kicks off."
No comments:
Post a Comment