Do The Services Need a Deployment Pay?

The 9th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation (QRMC) is seeking ways to better structure military compensation to alleviate current recruiting, manning, and retention shortfalls. Structured correctly. Basic pay and special pays should provide incentives to stay in the military, to gain experience and skills valuable to the services, and to move into critical skill areas or jobs where they are most needed. No existing pays fully answer the need to provide incentives to take on jobs that require serving alone, away from home. For this reason, the 9th QRMC is considering the creation of a new pay that would compensate service members for the hardships associated with deployments. The difficulty in creating such a pay, however, is establishing consistent definitions and measures of many of the key concepts related to time away from home. Relevant issues include: identifying the goals of any new deployment pay and the hardships for which people should be compensated; defining deployments and time away; and developing a deployment pay structure. Taken together or separately, these definitional and conceptual issues must be considered when determining the structure or use of a new pay and how it would relate to existing military pays. In a companion paper, we examine in detail the largest "away" pay, sea pay. Here we summarize that paper's conclusions regarding sea pay and examine several of the other special and incentive pays that historically have been used too compensate people for hardships associated with deployments. We then examine the availability of these pays to date and assess the adequacy of these pays in meeting the military 's goals. Finally, we conclude by outlining policy options and recommending compensation changes that would better align existing pays with any newly created pays and with the military's primary goals and objectives.