Pentagon’s Spin On GI Bill Is ‘Offensive Nonsense’

Posted by Jon Soltz, Think Progress at 4:42 PM on May 7, 2008.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress highlighted the latest reason from the Bush administration to oppose a real GI Bill for troops, offered by Senators Webb and Hagel. The Pentagon spokesperson said, in part:

[W]e are certainly concerned that this would be eligible to them after only two years of service. We think pegging it to a longer period of service — the number we have in mind, at this point, is six years of service — that the longer you stay in, the sweeter the benefits are to you. Six years would show a commitment to service. … The last thing we want to do is provide a benefit — or the last thing we want to do is create a situation in which we are losing our men and women who we have worked so hard to train.

Third is that if the administration was serious about retention, they would focus on the role of contractors, who continually snatch up troops, offering them up to 10 times their military pay to do a similar job in Iraq. That’s a much bigger threat to retention than offering a service-member the chance to get a quality education.

Personally, it took me months after I got back to get contractors to stop calling me, offering me six-figures, tax-free, to do work for them in Iraq. I didn’t take them up on it, but there are far more who do leave to make money. I do not blame the troops for this, by the way. They have families to provide for, and if they’re going to take on a dangerous task, it’s far more attractive to do it for a lot of money, which they can leave to their families.

But the fact is that the administration hasn’t taken on contractors – it’s embraced them. The administration continues to dole out bloated contracts to private contractors, instead of increase the size of the military, or address how the war in Iraq has overextended our forces. The result is that those contracts are spent, in large part, to lure away members of the military.

So, the latest spin by the Pentagon isn’t just nonsense – it’s offensive nonsense, because it insults the intelligence of the service members who recognize that the administration has never been serious about retention. Otherwise, they would have done something about contractors a long, long time ago.

You can read all about this issue, and how the troops and veterans are reacting, over at www.VetVoice.com

Tagged as: veterans, vote vets, gi bill, senator webb