Enlisted service members are in the 84thpercentile of pay comparable to their civilian counterparts with similar education and ages, according to a new study published by the RAND Corporation. Officers are in the 77thpercentile, the think tank concluded.
In essence, the figures show that military pay should be “equal to or greater than 70 percent of comparable civilians,” according to RAND.
The study shows that military pay increased at a faster rate than civilian pay between 2000 and 2011, before leveling out and increasing at roughly the same rate. The improvement in military pay has largely proved beneficial. The quality of recruits increased for the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force as military pay rose. Only the Army failed to show improvement among recruits, RAND stated. This was primarily because of the service’s greater need for accessions due to the rigorous operations demands caused by deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
RAND alluded to studies that show a direct relationship between high-quality recruits — who earn good scores on their Armed Forces Qualification Test and hold high school diplomas — and their performance once in uniform. However, the report cautioned that attracting these high performers comes at a price. Moreover, keeping the best of the best may require a different approach than simply giving everyone the same pay raise each year.
“It can be more cost effective to obtain higher quality by targeted incentives such as bonuses, rather than the across-the-board pay increases that have occurred,” RAND stated.
