I don't get it. What, exactly, are they giving up? The ability to work for 20 years, retire, and have a guaranteed pension for the rest of their lives after working as a supply clerk who never even fired a weapon? What is proposed is exactly the same kind of system that every other person that doesn't work for the government in the United States gets. It isn't unfair. It makes perfect sense. Any other plan has been shown time and again to be a bankruptcy waiting to happen for the guarantor of such defined-benefit plans.

I'd be all for giving whatever we want to give to vets who have actually faced down and enemy and seen real peril and combat in their tour, but the guy who lives down the street from me, has for 15 years, and hasn't ever deployed because he is a BX manager at the local airforce base shouldn't be treated any different than a mall manager in the private sector.

In a nutshell ... what they are getting is an incentive to leave the service. Unless the stay at least 20 years this retirement is nothing more than a shit sandwich. And with today's volatile stock market might not even 'taste' that good ...

Oh, and regardless of what i may personally think of the fobbits serving in pogadishu (whose worst memory of deployment is Burger King running out of chicken nuggets) I must remember that those whom cook, sweep, manage BX's, shuffle papers or fly desks serve too ...