Pension

#Reviewing Twenty Years of Service

#Reviewing Twenty Years of Service

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? 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.