About military retirement benefits

Recording my own message board thoughts here:

While the retirement benefits do suck the education benefits are pretty good, I think. Not many places will pay for your college education. Does that not balance out a bit?

It seems that the military is designed to encourage young recruits that will leave after 1 or 2 hitches to go get 'real jobs'. This would provide a steady stream of young 'cannon fodder' (I really can't think of a better term, sadly) while keeping officer levels and career people a bit more rare.

This looks to be intentional.

Should retirement benefits be better? Maybe. Perhaps even certainly. But would that change the entire makeup of the armed forces, sliding the median age of the soldier to a higher (and perhaps less acceptable from the standpoint of a general) age?

Just some random thoughts here, feel free to correct me.

later

I was just trying to point out the law of unintended consequences in this case. Namely, it may turn out that a glut of people would stay longer than what was the norm in the past in order to get those increased benefits, changing the makeup of the military as a whole.

In order to counterbalance that, you may need to come up with new procedures to get rid of the glut of people that you will no longer need. Otherwise, you may create yet another government bureaucracy out of the armed forces middle management. *shrugs* This could all not be true though... what do I know? :-)

To be honest, I always thought the military was seen as a mostly short term thing, to be done to serve your country as a young man or woman, and then to be left behind unless you are one of the few that wants to make the ultimate sacrifice for your country and become a career man.

I think, like teachers, that people going into military service should never do so for money or benefits, but for something a little more noble... because those benefits just won't be that great, especially in the long-term.

Posted by Reid at October 4, 2002 08:04 PM | TrackBack