THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 15, 1995 TAG: 9509150510
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
A protest movement led by the nation's senior military leaders has headed off Republican plans to reduce the federal deficit by trimming the future retirement benefits of more than 600,000 active duty and reserve service members.
An alternative proposal announced Thursday by Rep. Floyd D. Spence, chairman of the House National Security Committee, instead would lop $650 million off the deficit through the sale of what Spence said are excess items in the Pentagon's stockpile of war materials.
A spokesman for Spence, a South Carolina Republican, said the sale items would include mineral and metal stocks judged not essential to national security. Details are expected to be presented to the committee next week, the spokesman said.
Rep. Owen B. Pickett of Virginia Beach, the senior Democrat on the personnel subcommittee of the National Security Committee, said the asset sale had been discussed by the committee last month. But ``the answer was that (the military) doesn't have anything to sell. Evidently, someone's found something to sell'' since then, he said.
Dividing largely along party lines, the committee agreed last month to change the way retirement benefits are computed for service members who joined the military before 1980.
The proposal, which has become known as ``High 1,'' would have tied retirees' monthly pension checks to their average pay for their final year of service. Currently, those benefits are based on the members' pay at their retirement dates.
Though the change appears minor, it would have trimmed benefits substantially for those who retire soon after receiving raises.
For example, a Navy senior chief petty officer retiring this year after his 26th anniversary in uniform would receive $1,753 per month; 8.4 percent less than the $1,914 he could expect under the current formula.
Those who have joined the military since 1980 are covered under another retirement plan, which bases their retirement pay on their average salary for the three years in which they earned the most.
When the ``High 1'' plan was announced and adopted by the committee last month, Spence cast it as necessary to meet the panel's responsibility to help trim the deficit. But the idea soon came under fire at the Pentagon, as the chiefs of all the services released a letter complaining that the benefit cut would be a ``break of faith'' with troops.
In a letter of his own this week to Defense Secretary William J. Perry, Spence complained that the Clinton administration was more interested in using High 1 to embarrass the GOP than in protecting the retirees' benefits.
The Pentagon ``was conspicuously unresponsive'' in working with the committee earlier this summer to find alternatives to High 1, Spence wrote, adding, ``I hope the decision was an aberration.''
But Defense Department spokesman Ken Bacon insisted that the military was taken by surprise when High 1 was announced. ``We had been talking with them for months before this, trying to head this off,'' he told reporters.
by CNB