"The Pentagon brass made a last stand Tuesday in the months-long battle for military compensation reform, imploring senators to back plans to trim troops’ pay raises and benefits in the fiscal 2015 budget.
They‘ve already lost on the other front of the fight, with members of the House Armed Services Committee last week rejecting the proposed compensation changes in its initial draft of the annual defense authorization bill.
If the Senate follows suit later this month, that will all but doom defense officials’ plans to cut about $2 billion from personnel costs next year and redirect the money into training and modernization programs.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and six fellow four-stars — his own deputy, the four service chiefs and the head of the National Guard Bureau — argued that those savings are crucial to preserve military readiness and modernization accounts, a refrain they have repeated to lawmakers ever since the budget proposal was unveiled three months ago."...
