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Continue closing pay gap

President Barack Obama’s first defense budget calls for a military pay raise of 2.9 percent next year, which would mark the first time since 2000 that the annual military raise would not outpace average civilian wage growth.

Congress began its string of above-average military pay increases because the gap between military and civilian pay had grown to 13.5 percent.

For the past 10 years, those robust raises have helped the services reverse a late-’90s hemorrhage of experienced troops and weather the challenge of finding and keeping enough qualified people to fight two wars.

Defense officials argue that matching civilian wage growth is now sufficient.

But it’s tough to dismiss the idea that a force still heavily stretched by wartime deployments deserves a raise that does more than merely mirror the pay of the civilians.

Boosting the proposed 2010 raise by half a percentage point would reduce the pay gap to 2.4 percent at a cost of $340 million next year. That’s 0.06 percent of Obama’s 2010 base defense budget plan.

Lawmakers have made it clear that they feel addressing the pay gap is important, especially in wartime.

They’ve come this far; they should complete the mission.