Big blinking mess.

Tony Carr, John Q. Public
Dec. 24, 2013, 3:15 PM

"Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) wants to look tough on budget issues. In an editorial published in USA Today explaining his decision to lead the passage of a budget that reduced vested veteran pensions by an average of $84,000 to $120,000, Mr. Ryan founded his message on the urgent need to “do the right thing.”

In doing so, he created a painful irony; Ryan’s budget seeks to save $6B over the next 10 years – equivalent to less than six-tenths of one percent of projected federal spending over that period — by extracting it from compensation already guaranteed to people who earned it risking their lives and defending their country. In other words, despite his assurances to the contrary, he wants to do exactly the wrong thing.

The military and veteran population stand in awe at Ryan’s explanation. He apparently believes we are not only naive enough not to overlook the gaping moral maw between his words and actions, but also dumb enough not to see this for what it is: just the beginning.

If he can decouple vested veteran pensions from inflation while we still have people dying in combat, there will be nothing to stop him from continually enlarging the legitimacy of promise-breaking until veterans wake up one day and realize the pension package they’re getting bears no resemblance to what they and their families earned.

Ryan presents a classic false dilemma. He wants us to believe the nation must choose between keeping promises to veterans and remaining secure. He admonishes us that “since 2001, excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost per service member in the active-duty force has risen by 41% in inflation-adjusted dollars.”

What he doesn’t mention is that when the $6T eventual price tag of those wars is counted, personnel costs will define a tiny percentage of their total price tag, despite the fact that any success we register from those conflicts will have been wholly earned not by machines, but by the people who fought and died to carry out the nation’s will. Paying people isn’t something we do instead of staying secure as a nation . . . it’s the very way we stay secure. People win wars, not machines, bureaucracies, or defense contractors.

What Ryan also doesn’t mention is that part of the reason money is running short these days is that he voted to authorize and expand the two wars whose costs have now finally become so inescapable that he and others can no longer deny them.

As these costs fall due, the search is growing frantic for the most politically expedient way to ameliorate them, and politicians like Ryan are finding it easier to target troop pensions than to engage DoD in genuine reform. Mr. Ryan obfuscates his purpose by hiding behind Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and his generals, claiming their desire for pension reform vindicates his attempt to extract budgetary savings on the backs of warriors who have just endured the most punishing operations tempo in national history.

But notwithstanding that the Chief of Staff of the Air Force claims DoD wasn’t even consulted before the Ryan-Murray provision was inserted, what Ryan doesn’t advertise is that Hagel and the generals are struggling to make ends meet because Congress and the President have underresourced the department without granting it mission relief, leaving them with a problem they can’t legally solve and have a solemn duty not to abandon.

Hagel, Dempsey and the service chiefs desperately want reform, and are entitled to the presumption they’d rather not achieve reform in the predatory manner thus far undertaken. But this isn’t reform. This is the opposite — it’s the avoidance of reform. This is cheating . . . by saving money without having to engage in reform. This is back-door budgeteering. Nothing more."

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