Service members will likely get a larger pay raise next year, but there’s no reason to celebrate.
Troops will receive a measly 1.6 percent bump in 2017, a slight improvement over last year’s 1.3 percent hike. But considering that troop pay increases in recent years have been the lowest in nearly five decades, this one isn’t much better.
If it remains at 1.6 percent through the congressional budget process, it will mark the fourth consecutive year in which the military raise will fall short of average private-sector wage growth, advocates say.
In fact, pay raises for troops have not outpaced those of civilians since 2010.
To advocates, the 2016 raise and the other small bumps in recent years threaten to revive a return to the 1980s and ’90s, when a series of caps on basic pay created a military “pay gap” that reached a peak of 13.5 percent in 1999.
Defense officials long debunked the idea of a pay gap, but after recruiting and retention rates began to noticeably decline, Congress and the Pentagon spent the next decade trying to fix the issue, providing raises that outpaced the Employment Cost Index, a primary measure of private-sector wage growth.
The gap slimmed to 2.5 percent in 2013 and congressional and defense officials dropped the issue.
The small raises have come under budget pressures that led the Pentagon to reform military retirement, make cuts to basic allowance for housing and trim back health care coverage.
Those cuts, paired with small raises, are sure to affect recruitment and retention — not to mention morale.
In a growing economy, the all-volunteer military has to compete with the private sector for talent. Trimming benefits and scrimping on their pay will make it that much more difficult.
Members of Congress are always talking about how much they owe the troops who have been at war for more than 15 years. They should put their money where their mouths are — and aggressively attack the pay gap.
