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Personnel chiefs balk at cost-cutting proposals

In a bullets-or-bonuses debate about financial pressures facing the Defense Department, service personnel chiefs ceded no ground to the competing needs for weapons modernization.

At a Nov. 17 forum sponsored by the Military Officers Association of America, the Air Force, Army and Navy personnel chiefs rejected the idea of a joint medical, legal and chaplain corps to save money on training and management, insisting on the continued need for service-specific training and duties.

And while they expressed a willingness to consider altering the military retirement system so that people don’t have to serve 20 years to earn some form of retirement benefit, they balked at the idea of doing so while the nation is at war.

“Let’s tread very carefully in this area while we are at war,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle, the Army’s personnel chief.

That could mean putting off change for some time. At the same forum, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs said he did not foresee a quick end to conflict.

“The belief of the Joint Chiefs is, we are entering an era of persistent conflict,” said Marine Gen. James Cartwright, who warned of hot spots “broadly spread across the planet” that are “difficult to solve and move on.”

On consolidating officers corps that appear to have common duties across the services, Lt. Gen. Richard Newton III, Air Force personnel chief, said he doesn’t see the need.

Rochelle and Vice Adm. Mark Ferguson III, the chief of naval personnel, agreed.

Cartwright described the issue facing the military as not just personnel programs pitted against hardware, but a three-way balancing act because of the continued high operating costs of global deployments.

He did not talk about ways to cut personnel costs, but said buying weapons systems that are adaptable and have lesser support needs could reduce hardware and operating costs. A prime example, he said, is unmanned aerial vehicles that can be used for a variety of missions, quickly adapted to new requirements and sent overseas with little or no ground support.

Ferguson said one reason that personnel costs are rising is that the military benefits package now ranks the Defense Department among the top 50 employers in the U.S.

Personnel costs are up 31 percent since 2001, he said.

Another panelist, Charles Abell, a former Pentagon personnel chief who also served as staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has argued in the past about benefits being too generous, but said the services cannot cut existing benefits, especially in wartime.