Proposal Would Require Active Troops, Retirees and Military Families to Sacrifice Financially By Paying More for Food, Housing and Medical Care
President Obama will present his $496 billion Fiscal Year 2015 budget next week. His cuts in the defense budget, as presented by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on Monday, will be devastating to national security and break promises made to active and retired military and their families by the government that sent them into harms way.
With a cut to 450,000 troops, the army will be at the lowest strength since 1940, a year before the outbreak of World War II. Marines will lose a substantial number of combat troops. The Air Force and Navy will lose several important weapon systems.
National Defense professionals see the Obama Defense Department as a group of amateurs who know nothing and loathe the military. The hand-picked generals and admirals who work for them are afraid to speak out because they want to keep their prestigious positions.
General Jack Keane, a highly respected career military officer, is retired and a Fox News contributor. General Keane told Fox that the proposed budget cuts announced by Hagel would “cut into the bone and the capabilities of the Army.”
He said this proposed cut in the defense budget reflects a “poor understanding of the last century of U. S. military history.”
General Keane explained that, “the assumption that’s being made in the Pentagon, and it’s almost laughable if it wasn’t so serious, is they don’t believe the United States will involve itself in a ground war of any consequence again. The fact of the matter is, those assumptions have been made after World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War, and every single time they have been proven wrong. Here we are making the same assumptions again.”
The budget will provide for the growth of Special Operations Forces by about 3,000 because they are “uniquely suited to the most likely missions of the future,” in the view of Hagel.
The Obama budget would limit active military pay raises to one percent. Service members would have to pay more out-of-pocket for housing expenses.
Retired military and some dependents of active military would have to pay more for health care. Congress intended Tricare for Life to restore the promise made to Vietnam era retirees that they would be provided free health care for life. The Obama administration apparently has plans to gut the benefit.
Hagel said the Defense Department plans to modernize the Tricare system by “consolidating plans and adjusting deductibles and co-pays in ways that encourage members to use our most affordable means of care including military treatment facilities, preferred providers and generic prescription medications,” He said the beneficiaries will just be asked to pay a little more in their deductibles and co-pays.
The President’s budget proposal will effectively end the commissary benefit that prior to the Obama Administration saved military families at least 35 percent on their grocery bills. The Defense Department pays the salary of employees of the stores. The stores were built, equipped and maintained using a surcharge collected from military family customers.
The Obama budget would reportedly cut the payroll funds from 1.4 billion to 400 million. Such a cut would force the closing of many stores or eliminating the savings for military families or both, eliminating their usefulness.
Unless Congress intervenes, the commissaries will become history and the post exchange will add a convenience store stocking a few necessary grocery items.
Commissaries are second in importance only to healthcare as a benefit for military families. Secretary Hagel demonstrated his lack of understanding of what he was talking about when he stated to reporters that, “We are not shutting down commissaries. All commissaries will still get free rent and pay no taxes. They will still be able to continue to provide a very good deal to service members and retirees.”
Military families don’t pay rent on buildings they built, paid for and maintain with their surcharge and they can’t operate with a 2/3 cut in payroll.
