By: David Rogers

American battlefield deaths in Vietnam passed the 39,000 mark in late October 1969, just days after President Richard Nixon had threatened to veto a Senate bill to raise veterans’ education benefits to $190 a month.

Draftees accounted for 30 percent of U.S. losses in that war, and manpower was less of a concern for Nixon than were inflation and a dwindling budget surplus.

“I have no option but to view with extreme concern the possible enactment of this measure,” the president wrote to then-Sen. Ralph Yarborough (D-Texas).

Together with allies in the House, the administration successfully delayed action until the following March, when a compromise of $175 a month — less than $9,000 per school year in current dollars — was reached.

Flash-forward to the all-volunteer military and today’s Washington, where Congress has just approved — and President Bush has signed — a new GI Bill promising education benefits worth almost $21,000 a year for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Despite early grumbling by the Pentagon, political support was so strong that the measure never went through a committee and therefore was never subjected to a full public cost analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

“Fat New GI Bill Approved” was the headline in Army Times, and CBO projections reviewed by Politico show that spending on veterans’ education benefits will approach $100 billion over the next 10 years — a $62.8 billion, or 170 percent, increase.

What’s happening here? Why does Congress do so much more for a volunteer force than it did for one relying on draftees? Was it just the divisive politics of the Vietnam War? Is it today’s collective national guilt for asking so few to carry so much of the burden in this post-Sept. 11 world?

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are the first prolonged test of the post-Vietnam volunteer force, and GI Bill debate reveals the emotions touched in American society. The military draft, for all its flaws, represented a time when wars were viewed as more of a “shared responsibility” for the nation: When called, young men were expected to serve. The volunteer military strikes a different bargain, yet, for all its success, poses huge costs — and new inequities given the turnover at the lower ranks.

Even before the new GI Bill, the Congressional Research Service estimated that the cost per soldier in today’s military is 60 percent higher in real dollars than it was in 1972 — with two-thirds of that growth occurring since 2000.

This creates a vicious cycle in which the high costs discourage any major expansion: Just maintaining a planned increase of 92,000 Marines and Army troops will cost $13 billion in 2013. Yet to keep up forces in Iraq or commit more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, the Pentagon must order soldiers back for multiple tours or block their exit by invoking “stop-loss” powers that amount to a virtual draft.

“The tendency is to view an all-volunteer system as an all-career system, and the United States military isn’t and never has been,” said Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), a Marine veteran of Vietnam who spearheaded the drive for a new GI Bill. “Right now, they have 70 percent of the Marine Corps and 75 percent of the Army getting out [by the end of their first enlistment]. The great leadership abyss at the Pentagon has been taking care of the noncareer people.”

Many argue that Washington is finally getting it right by going back to the historic model of World War II education benefits, which helped transform postwar American society.

 

“As far as I’m concerned, the GI Bill benefits we had in World War II should have been fully available to anybody who fought in any war,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.). “In Vietnam, people just got so pissed off at the war that they didn’t keep their heads screwed on straight. They didn’t distinguish between the war and the warrior.”

Going into November’s elections, anti-war Democrats are eager to identify with the troops; adding the cost of the GI Bill to the tab for Iraq made political sense for many. “I call this, in my own mind, the real costs of war,” said Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). And most striking was the role played by Vietnam veterans such as Webb and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who took the lead in the Senate and, in the process, added to their political credentials as potential running mates of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

“Who Speaks Up for the Rifleman?” is the title of a chapter in Hagel’s new book. Webb’s core argument rests on the fact that, as in all prior wars, the military still depends on using young recruits and then sending them back into civilian life after one enlistment.

“This was a journey to get this thing done,” Webb recalls. “It was a process of educating people up here. … There is very little comprehension that it isn’t an all-career force. It was the biggest hurdle I had.”

New York Rep. John McHugh sees the debate from his vantage point as ranking Republican on the House Armed Services personnel subcommittee.

“One of the reasons we’re increasing everything from pay to health benefits to education assistance is that it’s a volunteer military,” McHugh said. “You have to provide a robust package to maintain what has been, to this point, an enormously successful experiment. But it comes with a huge price tag.”

Webb’s initial GI Bill was projected to add almost $51.6 billion to government spending over the next 10 years. That grew to $62.8 billion after final concessions were made, to address Pentagon fears that more needed to be done to reward the career force.

This last provision — costing $11.2 billion over 10 years — is targeted at officers and sergeants, allowing them to deed their education benefits to their spouse or children. In fact, the full cost may not be evident until a decade from now. But the ability to transfer benefits is a powerful addition to the military’s retirement package, because noncommissioned officers can now finish out their careers knowing that their children’s cost of college is covered.

Lost in the discussion — but now confirmed by CBO — is the fact that this $62.8 billion comes on top of a $37 billion “base line” for veterans’ education benefits over the same 10 years. Thus, the total government investment will approach $100 billion over the next decade and could top $10 billion annually as early as 2012.

CBO projects that the Webb bill — which kicks in next August and includes a large component to pay housing costs — will be worth more than twice the $1,100-per-month maximum benefit now available under the Montgomery GI Bill dating to the 1980s.

That margin will widen over time, since the new benefit is more closely indexed to growth in education costs, which typically outpace inflation. Thus, by 2018, the new benefit will have grown to $3,000 per month, or $27,000 for a typical school year — about 214 percent of what the current benefit program would have provided had it been extended.

The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that 523,000 veterans now take advantage of some portion of the education benefits. In an interview, CBO analysts said they expect usage will increase by 20 percent to 35 percent — meaning more than 100,000 new veterans could be added.

The VA insists it has not made any projections of its own, but it is already asking Congress for $1.2 billion more to pay education benefits in the last months of fiscal 2009 — about $500 million more than CBO had estimated would be needed.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued in April for a smaller benefit increase for fear that too generous a number would discourage recruits from re-enlisting. Gates’ preferred target was $1,500 a month, or $700 less than is now approved, and a Defense spokesman said Tuesday that the increased benefit’s impact on retention “remains a concern.”

In fact, spending for recruitment and re-enlistment bonuses has already escalated dramatically since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. But because of the new education benefit, CBO is now boldly predicting big savings in recruitment and even some in retention programs. This represents a turnaround from past CBO estimates in May and appears to be due largely to the addition of the new transferability provision. By CBO’s new counting, the cost of the new benefits could be offset by a reduction of as much as $14 billion in recruitment and retention costs over the next 10 years.

“The best recruiter in the military is a veteran who is proud of his service,” Webb said confidently. “A little more turbulence on the front I don’t think is going to hurt.”

But for many, the jury is still out, and the situation remains very different from the post-World War II period, when the military was demobilizing and a generous education benefit for veterans helped to ease the transition to civilian life.

Korea and Vietnam posed a different challenge because the U.S. was maintaining a larger Cold War “peacetime” military force apart from those sent to those wars in Asia. And unlike the World War II benefit — which paid tuition directly to colleges — veterans received only a monthly stipend that was often viewed as inadequate.

By 1969, for example, Senate proponents of an improved GI benefit said the purchasing power of the Vietnam-era benefit lagged behind that for the Korean War, leading to low participation rates. Over time, the Vietnam benefit was increased in increments to, ultimately, $310 a month in 1977. But for many veterans who served in the 1960s, these improvements came too late to help with their schooling.

“When we passed the voluntary Army, I’m not sure we knew the consequences of it,” said former Vice President Walter Mondale, who was serving then as a Democratic senator from Minnesota and had battled with Nixon over the Vietnam education benefit.

“I think there is an out-of-sight and out-of-mind attitude,” Mondale told Politico.

But whatever doubts he feels, Mondale is confident the World War II GI Bill model is the right one to follow now. “As a young guy in college, I saw what they did for us,” he said. “That generation repaid the cost many times.”

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