Military members may see changes in retirement

As an Army Reserve physician triaging the care of arriving wounded at the combat support hospital on Al Asad Airbase, Iraq, for half of 2008, Joe Heck said he saw “exactly how well joint operations can work.”

link Tom Philpott

Where the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force was based, Heck ran the hospital’s emergency support section with two other fulltime Army doctors, as Air Force and Navy physicians rotated in for shorter stints. Nurses and medics took on responsibilities, Heck said, that wouldn’t have been allowed in a civilian setting but were so necessary in war.

Back home “in any intercity level-one trauma center, it’s very easy to pick up the phone, call for reinforcements from other parts of the hospital when you have five or six patients at a time. That wasn’t the case at Al Asad,” Heck said. And yet it was “a blended purple force able to take care of anybody who came through the door.”

Now a third-term Republican congressman from Nevada, Heck vows to take the same “practical, non-parochial” approach in tackling two far different yet still critical priorities for the military while serving as the new chairman of the House armed services’ personnel subcommittee.

One will be to review, perhaps reshape, and then shepherd into law long-awaited recommendations of the Military Compensation and Retirement Reform Commission, which is to deliver its report by Feb. 1. Heck is hopeful reforms can be enacted this year, though most will be aimed at “the 100-meter target” of “the next generation” military.

“I don’t think there’s going to be any quick 25-meter fixes to try to address current budgetary constraints,” Heck cautioned.

Commission proposals on modernizing retirement, for example, will be for future service members although likely to have an “opt-in” period for those now serving if they are drawn to new features such as, perhaps, early vesting in an old age pension after five or 10 years of service.

Heck can’t be sure he will support replacing the rigid 20-year retirement system for the future force until he sees details and projected impacts on retention. But after 13 years of warfare and seeing the toll multiple combat tours have had on individuals, he sees merit in awarding some retirement benefits sooner than warriors can earn them now.

“The fact is we’re breaking these folks a lot faster than we used to,” Heck said. “We can’t think somebody is going to be able to stay in for 20 years now. To me, it’s almost unimaginable because of the op tempo, the stresses we have put them under. So the idea that somebody who serves five or 10 or 15 years is able to get a pension, I think, is critically important.”

Tom Philpott can be contacted at Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, Va. 20120-1111, or by e-mail at:

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