Patchwork Raises

How're you gonna keep the boys in uniform after they've seen high-pay help-wanted ads? Ever since Korea, that has been the U.S. armed forces' multibillion-dollar-a-year question. Cooks, truck drivers, and professional privates re-enlist at a brisk rate, but such specialists as radar and missile technicians usually get out when their first hitches are up, taking along with them into better-paid civilian jobs the expensive training that the U.S. Government has given them.

Last week Defense Secretary Charles Erwin Wilson issued an order designed to make military service a bit more attractive to skilled enlisted men. Highly qualified technicians--about 350,000 men in all--will get "proficiency" boosts of one or two pay grades ($12 to $50 a month) without stepping up in military grade.

Too Many Cooks. Apart from technicians who thought they would qualify for the raises, nobody seemed very happy about the Wilson order. Missouri's Democratic Senator Stuart Symington, onetime Secretary of the Air Force, rapped it as "patchwork." Less publicly, Pentagon brass agreed with him. Trying to solve the nagging re-enlistment problem with so skimpy a measure seemed like trying to bail out a leaky rowboat with a beer can. What the military leaders wanted to see was adoption of the newly released Cordiner report, a thoughtful pay-revision plan drawn up by a military-civilian advisory committee chaired by General Electric's President Ralph J. Cordiner. Disappointed with Wilson's pay-boost directive, Cordiner warned him in a letter last week that "benefits cannot be achieved by half measures which adopt the terminology but kill the substance of the recommendations." The substance:

P: Widen pay gaps between ranks so as to give able men more incentive to seek promotion and to stay in service. Under the Cordiner plan, privates and second lieutenants would get the same base pay as now, but a master sergeant's base pay would rise from $206 a month to $300 and a colonel's from $592 to $850.

P: Abolish the moss-backed longevity system under which a sway-backed corporal with 24 years of service can collect more on payday than an ambitious, youthful master sergeant.

P: Establish a "proficiency pay" system (as Wilson did last week), and create two new enlisted pay grades above the present ones so that top noncoms could qualify for proficiency pay. Wilson's directive left master sergeants and chief petty officers, already in the top pay grade, with no hope for proficiency raises.

P: Improve the quality and efficiency of personnel, e.g., by refusing re-enlistment to yardbirds and retraining some of the too many cooks to do more vital duty.

Too Much Money. The real killer of the Cordiner report's substance was not Secretary Wilson but the great 1957 cut-that-budget brouhaha. Wilson himself approved much of the Cordiner plan, sent a modified version of it to the Bureau of the Budget for approval. Budget Director Percival Brundage, boggling at the price tag of roughly $250 million in fiscal 1958, turned down all pay boosts except the comparatively cheap ($50 million) proficiency raises. Cordiner & Co. claim that adoption of the total program would save $5 billion a year by 1962, notably by upping re-enlistment of skilled technicians and thereby cutting the high cost of constantly training new men. But 1962 savings do not help balance the 1958 budget.

Bucking cut-that-budget pressures, Missouri's Symington and Arizona's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater (an Air Force Reserve colonel) co-sponsored a bill to make the Cordiner recommendations the law of the land. Military leaders hope the bill passes. So does Ralph Cordiner. And so, probably, does "Engine Charlie" Wilson.

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