jousteagle

They'd probably grandfather it if it were to change...but then again, that'd take 20 years to change. By then, we'll be well in the red.

jousteagle

If you think about it, they've been doing this all along by pushing more work to the Guard/Reserve. It's cheaper to pay guys part time and delay (or reduce) their retirement by letting them have a civilian job in addition to Reserve duty.

Imagine the cost of doing what we do with an all active duty military??? What are the side effects of this "creative financing?"

Hacker15e

If they removed the immediate retirement payout, I'd be gone.

jousteagle

-Two same.

Clue32

This system currently exists. It is called the Warrant Officer and the army uses them effectivly as cheep labor. You get to eventually track as a standardization, maintenance, or safety officer and avoid staff work for many many years.

BDGERJMN

INHO, the WO program isnt' really 'cheap' labor if you consider the big fiscal picture. The retirement pay isn't really where the gov't spends its money. The healthcare is and there is no difference in the cost of a E-7s health care vs an O-6 to my knowledge. It's the same reason the military outsources contract maintenance in the production sources(TRACOM/FRS). It's way cheaper to pay a company a set fee than it is to plan for those retirements or a percentage of them down the road.

Clue32

Point taken on the bennefits packages.

However, if a service needs, say 20,000 pilots (about the number of Army WO's), it needs 20,000 pilots regardless of the rank and all bennefits will be the same across the board. If you bring two officers in off the street, make one an branch officer and one a warrant officer then by the four year mark the branch officer (by then a CPT) will be earning in the neighborhood of $1200 a month more than his warrant officer (CW2) buddy with exactly the same flight training. Only difference is one guy is going to focus on flying first and doing staff work second, and the other is going to be a manager/commander/staff officer first and aviator second.

Continue that out over a career and the branch officer will always make $12-1700 more per month. That doesn't take into consideration higher BAH either. Now multiply that over the course of a year and over 20,000 aviators and you've got quite a cost savings.

Additionally, I know many WO's who would make fantastic company commanders or staff officers and who work just as hard, if not harder, than their branch officer counterparts.

BDGERJMN

It's $8.16 billion(over 20 years for 20,000 WO's @1700/month) to be exact and while yes that is an enourmous amount of money it is peanuts considering the amount of our annual defense budget.

You're point is well taken however, just that the Navy or the AF in my estimation couldn't do business that way given their current construct.

sigtauenus

I would have highly considered staying in there was a pilot only track versus a command track. How many of us know dept heads, recently promoted to O-4, that work 2-3 hours more a day than the O-3's, and fly less than us. I didn't fly enough as it is, and certainly didn't want to get promoted into that. If I could have stayed an O-3 (with semi annual longevity raises), and only taken flying tours, that would have kept it fun enough for me to have stayed in.

And, with me staying an O-3, it would've kept some of those costs down mentioned above.

Opteryx

If they take away 20 year retirement for new recruits, the number of new recruits would not go down much I wold venture to guess. But the number of expensively trained, hard to replace folks at the 8 to 12 year point that would elect to continue on to 20 or more would drop to the single digits, or nearly that I would think. There goes all that experience. And the tax payers would keep paying for new training, and we'd have a force of newbies all the time.
Of course the numbers do depend on the economy at the time.