VFW: Benefits cuts could force return of draft - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

VFW: Benefits cuts could force return of draft

The nation’s largest organization for combat veterans said the Obama administration’s plans to cut military pay and benefits could force the return of a military draft.

In a statement that ratchets up the rhetoric over proposed pay-raise caps, higher out-of-pocket medical and prescription drug costs and reform of military retired pay, the national commander of the 2 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars said “messing with military pay and benefits is a clear signal to the troops and their families that the budget is more important than people.”

“That is going to seriously hurt recruiting and retention, and potentially end the all-volunteer force, because nobody wants to work for an ungrateful employer in a vocation as inherently dangerous as ours,” said VFW leader Richard DeNoyer, a Vietnam combat veteran and retired Marine.

The Defense Department and White House have targeted military personnel programs as an area ripe for cuts because of how much they have grown over the last decade, due to efforts to improve basic pay and housing allowances and an expansion of health care benefits, especially for Medicare-eligible retirees.

Senior officials have tried to downplay the cuts, saying that current service members and their families would be largely exempt, although that is not completely true. The Pentagon is planning to limit military pay raises to 0.5 percent in 2015; there will be prescription drug fee increases as early as next year for active-duty and retiree families; anyone who retires from the military would face higher out-of-pocket costs for health care; and the force will shrink by more than 100,000 service members, DeNoyer said.

“Any proposal that negatively impacts any quality-of-life program must be defeated,” DeNoyer said.

Other military and veterans groups have complained about the proposed cuts, but they have not gone as far as the VFW in claiming these initiatives could spell the end of the all-volunteer force that replaced the Vietnam-era draft in 1973.

The House and Senate Armed Services committees will dig into the details of the Pentagon’s personnel policies beginning next week.

Retirement reform, expected to result in reduced benefits, would not apply to anyone now in the military, defense and service officials have pledged. But DeNoyer said this does not mean cuts in retired pay won’t hurt the military.

“Our concern is for tomorrow’s recruits, the young 18-year-old enlistees and new 22-year-old officers who will be fighting tomorrow’s wars with the same force challenges as today: high operations tempos, too little dwell time, and not enough troops to meet worldwide threats and commitments,” DeNoyer said.

Talk of cuts also has a chilling effect on current service members and their families who have faced turbulent years of worrying about partisan bickering in Washington, D.C., potentially affecting paychecks, he said.

“They and their families worry about getting paid on time,” he said. “They worry about what will happen if the car breaks down or if a loved one should get hurt at home or during training exercises or real-world deployments. Most of all, especially with this defense budget submission, they worry about whether the folks who give all the orders really care about the troops who do all the fighting and sacrificing.”