Armed Forces News

More than fifty retired veterans and active duty military personnel who are divorced have sued to overturn a federal law that enables their ex-spouses to share in their retainer or retirement pay. Their group, the ULSG, LLC, was founded to challenge the constitutionality of the Uniform Services Former Spouses’ Protection Act (USFSPA) in court after legislative efforts to amend it failed. For more than 20 years, state divorce courts have added veterans’ retainer and retirement pay to the pot of assets to be divided among divorced persons, says the ULSG. It wants to return to the policy applying before 1981, when the United States Supreme Court ruled in McCarty v. McCarty that divorce courts could not touch veterans’ retainer or retirement pay. The USFSPA undoes that Supreme Court ruling. The lawsuit is titled Adkins, ULSG, et al. v. Rumsfeld. Visit http://www.ULSG.org for more information.