Panel backs military pay-for-performance
Switch would help civilians joining the military later in their careers to earn salaries on par with those of their longtime military counterparts.
Military service members may join their civilian counterparts in the Defense Department in a move to pay for performance.
The Defense Advisory Committee on Military Compensation, appointed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in March 2005, released preliminary suggestions last week, which included an increased focus on performance.
As it stands now, soldiers are paid according to their grade and time served. Some are promoted ahead of schedule into the next grade because of good performance. But when their peers inevitably are bumped into the higher grade as a result of longevity, they earn the same salary.
The committee's recommendation is to begin paying soldiers based on the time they have spent in a specific grade, instead of overall time in the service. That way, a soldier promoted early into a higher grade will earn more than the people he left behind, even once they are bumped into the grade automatically.
Committee members said they see the promotion system as the single best way to measure performance in the military, and want to attach it more strongly to pay.
The committee's recommendation also would benefit civilians moving to the military at later points in their careers. A problem now, the committee found, is that civilians with advanced degrees and experience who join the military are placed in an advanced pay grade. But their overall time-in-service is still very low, which keeps them from earning salaries on par with longtime military members. Switching to a time-in-grade pay system would solve that problem.
Another way to skew the system more toward performance would be to bump up the housing allowance of single soldiers to match those of soldiers with families. There can be as much as a 25 percent discrepancy between the two.
The seven-member committee is made up of retired military members, academics and private compensation consultants. Retired Adm. Donald Pilling, who serves as its chairman, is the chief executive officer of the government consulting firm Logistics Management Institute and previously was vice chief of naval operations.
The committee plans to publish its final report in April, at which point Rumsfeld can choose to accept or reject any of the recommendations.
About 650,000 civilians in the Defense Department are on the verge of transitioning to a performance-based compensation system. The department is creating a system in which in-depth performance evaluations will be used to determine annual pay raises. The system has been slowed, at least temporarily, by last week's court ruling that some of the rules illegally undermine civilian workers' rights to collective bargaining.