Money quote(s):
"Career-minded active duty military members are no doubt watching the ongoing discussions about military retirement compensation with avid interest. This interest is due to the recommendations of the Defense Business Board, made up of 20 exquisitely educated, very successful and highly paid consultants, CEOs and entrepreneurs. Fully twenty percent of the board’s membership – according to their bios – have actual military experience, and one among them served long enough to be eligible for a military pension. They may not know that much about life in the uniformed services, but they know loads about profit and loss, cutting costs and quarterly shareholder returns.
This makes them experts.
Basically, the board recommends junking the military’s defined pension benefit plan as anachronistic, recommending that DoD instead move to an industry standard 401k style contribution. The 401K system would allow the services to permit first tour enlistees to receive certain benefits after leaving the services – they get none today – and save loads of money on out-year obligations to grizzled warriors far into the future."
Because a military career is just like working at Dunder Mifflin.
"(H)hundreds of thousands of other peoples’ sons and daughters, each of whom will make their own career calculus in their own way, the effect of which will doubtless ripple across the force and at least potentially affect war fighting readiness in ways that are not easy to calculate.
But we’ll save a lot of money."
Wars cost more than money. The precise term is "blood and treasure."
"(E)ventually the worm may turn, as it almost always does. And when it does, we may find that re-writing service retirement regulations and commodifying the force has unintended second and third order consequences which will manifest themselves long after the current crop of four stars have gone on to serve on their own corporate boards."
8/22
