Originally Posted by
thrust
And it will start small- higher tricare co-pays, lower COLA adjustments, etc. We've already seen the surveys about how younger generations would prefer a 401k type plan to the pension... where the majority of folks who serve but don't stay for an entire career will still get "something". Eventually it'll change so that you can retire after 20 years of service (or maybe less), but not collect until you're 60 or whatever. Match the guard/reserves. There's already a dwindling incentive to stay to 20 when you still have 20+ years of working age after your mil retirement to think about. Zero incentive to stay if you have to start a new career without the pension to provide health care and a mortgage payment backing you up.
IMO first-term military members get sweet education benefits instead of retirement vesting, and it should stay that way.
The cliff-vesting could be adjusted after that, but what's fundamentally necessary to maintain our military strength is that we have young people who have an incentive to work their butts off for 15, 20, 25 years and then get discarded right about the time they start to lose their youthful vigor. They have to know they're going VFR-direct to a soup kitchen.
You could accomplish that with a "transition" benefit immediately following separation/retirement which would start large and taper off after a few years and eventually switch back on after age 60-ish.
401k sounds nice to folks who don't know much but it would suck if you hit HYT or some force-shaping initiative when the market and economy happened to be down.
Originally Posted by
thrust
Yes, it would fundamentally change retention across the military. I don't particularly think our "leaders" really give two $#!+s. And maybe that's a good thing- maybe we as a nation need to get away from the military as a career. But that's a different conversation.
As technology drives ever-more-complex weapons (and systems of weapons) we are going to need more, not fewer, people to stay in longer.