Twenty Years of Service: The Politics of Military Pension Policy and the Long Road to Reform. Brandon J. Archuleta. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2020.
When crafting strategies to checkmate their great power competitors, strategists always need to keep in mind that in war, unlike in chess, the game pieces are not supplied. In this struggle, one has to sculpt one’s pawns, knights, and rooks. Enter Brandon Archuleta, an Army strategist and Council on Foreign Relations fellow, to remind us that, with an all-volunteer force, personnel details matter enormously. An unattractive retirement compensation plan will fail to recruit and retain service members, but a too-generous military pension makes a standing military prohibitively expensive, crowding out other defense investment. For Fiscal Year 2020, the military services paid $21.8 billion into the Military Retirement Fund which in turn paid out $62.3 billion in retirement benefits to several million military retirees and survivors.[1]
For a chewy policy book about a usually anodyne subject, pension reform, Archuleta’s Twenty Years of Service was an electrifying read. Published in 2020, two years after the Department of Defense implemented the first substantive change in its military retirement pension policy in seventy years, Twenty Years of Service asks, and deftly answers, two questions. First, why did the military’s pension system remain unchanged for so long when almost everything else about the military’s personnel policy had changed since World War II? These personnel policy shifts included radical changes such as moving from conscription to an all-volunteer force, racial integration, opening up combat roles to women, and allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. Throughout the interim period between 1945 and 2015, many well-meaning political leaders and scholars, Archuleta notes, recognized that the military pension system needed reform for reasons of fiscal health and to calibrate incentives. Yet, the generous and expensive twenty-year retirement pension system of fifty percent pay-for-life survived numerous attempts to alter it, even in the face of sweeping labor trends away from defined benefit pensions in the private sector.
Second, Archuleta asks why and how a change to the military pension system finally occurred as it did when President Obama signed the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act into law in November 2015. Since World War II, there have been numerous failed attempts to reform military pension policy. So, after all that time, what was the catalyst that overcame the inertia? And what can policy entrepreneurs learn from this episode?
Twenty Years of Service provides a deeply fascinating profile of how this system evolved and how it deflected military pension reform without meaningful opposition for so long.
Drawing on his public-policy scholarship and sixty detailed interviews, Archuleta describes the autonomous policy subsystem that influences military personnel policy as a small set of Pentagon bureaucrats, think-tank scholars, congressional staff, and lobbyists for veterans service organizations. Twenty Years of Service provides a deeply fascinating profile of how this system evolved and how it deflected military pension reform without meaningful opposition for so long.
The House and Senate Armed Services military personnel sub-committees in Congress are the elements of the policy subsystem that have the power to make changes. But, Archuleta points out, members of congress and their professional staff rotate frequently or do not care much about the arcane details of military pensions. In wishing to maintain favor with influential veteran’s service organizations, like the Military Officers Association of America and Veterans of Foreign Wars, legislators make a point of consulting them to ensure their votes do not break faith with the troops. Because Pentagon bureaucrats maintain the relevant information about personnel and pay, and military service chiefs have gravitas, congressional members listen to them, too. Archuleta writes that these aligned interests end up concentrating benefits for the few retirement-eligible service members while billing future taxpayers for the costs. Competitive elements that might have driven reform by offering alternative proposals, different information, or alternative voices of gravitas are missing in this policy subsystem.
Blue-ribbon commissions are the foils to the autonomous policy subsystem of Archuleta’s narrative. Not usually considered heroic, these lengthy studies sponsored by congress or the president are universally understood as either covering fire for politicians retreating from an issue or an elaborate fandango that feigns action through inaction. Archuleta counts no less than twenty different task-forces or advisory groups commissioned since 1948 to study and make recommendations for military pension reform. As a testament to the policy subsystem’s durability, none of those blue-ribbon commissions created lasting reform. Archuleta selects three illustrative commissions to demonstrate how policy insiders derail or undo changes.
Through his study of the highly successful Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission, authorized by Congress in the Fiscal Year 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, Archuleta uncovers what he believes are necessary criteria for successful blue-ribbon commissions. He finds that a strong chairman, an inclusive information gathering process, and a coherent political strategy are the necessary conditions for blue-ribbon commissions to outmaneuver policy subsystems.
Created in response to a political maelstrom that arose in response to a bipartisan budget plan proposing to slow the rising costs of military pensions, the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission conducted over fifty listening sessions at military bases and hired RAND to analyze the impacts of various recommendations on the all-volunteer force.[2] These key actions had two purposes, Archuleta notes. First, the commission held the moral high ground by speaking for the troops instead of being charged by veteran’s service organizations with abandoning them. Second, it held the readiness high ground by producing non-partisan analysis showing that its proposed reforms would not hollow out the force. The commission’s chairman, Alphonso Maldon Jr., sought consensus among his committee members, which included titans like Bob Kerrey, Pete Chiarelli, and Dov Zakeim. Archuleta rightly emphasizes Maldon’s political strategy, whereby each committee member evangelized their findings and recommendations to influential people in their networks. Committee members’ proactive door-to-door campaigns won over support for the commission’s proposals and steered clear of the blunder of letting the report speak for itself. The latter is a danger inherent in every commission and study, Archuleta notes.
Alphonso Maldon, Jr. (DoD Photo)
Congress ultimately enacted into law the core of the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission’s recommendations—reducing the twenty-year pension benefit from fifty to forty percent pay and introducing matching contributions to troops Thrift Savings Plan retirement accounts—as the new Blended Retirement System. The story of military pension reform, however, did not end with President Obama signing the Fiscal Year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act. Archuleta’s reference to the long road in his subtitle has a subtler meaning. He explains that the implementation and details of the Blended Retirement System’s defined benefit and defined contribution system were as critical to its success as the ideas and politicking behind it.[3] Reform requires follow-through.
Twenty Years of Service walks a thin line between two distinct audiences: scholars trying to understand how policy evolves and entrepreneurs trying to make a policy change in Washington, D.C. Archuleta often shifts between academic jargon and a compelling narrative, slowing the book down at times. Still, I recommend Archuleta’s work to any national security professional trying to inject new policy ideas into an ossified system. Understanding how reformers changed a seemingly entrenched policy like military pensions offers a lot to those that build the pieces for the strategists’ great games.
Tobias Switzer is a U.S. Air Force officer and is currently a military fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a visiting fellow at National Defense University. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: Military Retirement System (Getty)
Notes:
[1] Department of Defense Military Retirement Fund, Fiscal Year 2020 Military Retirement Fund Audited Financial Report, November 2020, 1, https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/afr/fy2020/DoD_Components/2020_AFR_MRF.pdf
[2] Asch, Beth J., et al., Reforming Military Retirement: Analysis in Support of the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1022.html.
[3] Junor, Laura J., et al., Military Retirement Reform: A Case Study in Successful Public Sector Change, Joint Forces Quarterly, 86, 3rd Quarter, pp. 73-80, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/1220592/military-retirement-reform-a-case-study-in-successful-public-sector-change/