Retention. A trailing spouse often can’t easily work/find a job at new duty stations every few years, so married service members get paid additional to compensa

Retention. A trailing spouse often can’t easily work/find a job at new duty stations every few years, so married service members get paid additional to compensate for that. Being married to a servicemember is extremely tough — without that financial benefit, many married people would leave the service since the base pay is nowhere near enough to support a family not compensate for the difficulty faced by military families. That then creates a problem with retention — it is very expensive to train soldiers and very difficult to gain real world experience — so decreasing retention results in a far higher cost in both real dollars as well as readiness. We could ask ourselves instead why service members are vastly underpaid. The average salary/benefits for a US soldier works out to about $44,000 per year, exactly the same as a mailman. Yet a mailman works defined hours and, except for the occasional angry dog, doesn’t have a real risk of being severely injured or killed, nor separated from family for months or years at a time. The mailman also doesn’t suddenly get deployed to foreign hellholes for months or years. Yet, we pay the mailman as much as soldiers. When I was a lieutenant, my pay was $36,000 per year — that’s with a college degree and having been an E4 before that. That was officer pay and it is about the same level of pay as an entry level teacher. And we didn’t get summers off. I am not complaining — I knew what I signed up for, but asking questions such as what additional value a married soldier provides is interesting because do we question what extra value pregnant women provide a company? Because paid maternity leave is effectively paying them more money since they are getting paid to not work. Which means they get more compensation per unit worked than a woman who had not become pregnant. Should we question the additional value provided by offering paid maternity leave?