Originally Posted by 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.