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CBO: Evaluating Military Compensation

Evaluating Military Compensation, April 28, 2010. Testimony before the Subcommittee on Personnel, Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate.

  • “The best barometer of the effectiveness of DoD’s compensation system may be how well the military attracts and retains high-quality personnel. Between 2005 and 2008, the services periodically had trouble recruiting or retaining all of the high-quality personnel they needed. To address those problems, the Congress authorized increases in both cash compensation (such as pay raises and bonuses) and noncash compensation (such as expanded education benefits for veterans and their families). All of the services met their recruiting and retention goals in 2009 and are continuing to do so in 2010. However, the relationship between specific changes in pay rates and benefits and the amount of recruiting and retention is not clear, and changes in recruiting and retention may be too gradual or too ambiguous to guide all decisions about compensation. In particular, a variety of factors—including economic conditions—may have significant effects on DoD’s ability to recruit and retain personnel during a given period. Therefore, it is difficult to determine the appropriate increase in compensation
    solely on the basis of recent patterns of recruiting and retention.”
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