There has been a lot of debate of late on whether veterans should be moved to a “one rank one pension” system. I won’t bother explaining the whole deal here, I’ll let you read this brilliant post by Ajay Shah about the numbers behind the move. Now that the quant has been outsourced, I can put forth my “qualitative” arguments.
I’m not a fan of this One Rank One Pension (OROP) move. I’m not against paying our soldiers, or veterans, well – I think it must definitely pay above market rates for the skills required for the job. Yet, I think OROP is a “one delta” solution to the problem (previous post here about government’s one delta thinking on agriculture), and can lead to massive unfunded liabilities.
The problem with any kind of pension scheme is that you create liabilities today that need to be funded later on. And at a later date these liabilities might become unserviceable. From this perspective, it is important to try and fund any future liabilities today, or at least have a handle on the precise magnitude of liabilities required. OROP, being “inflation indexed” (that’s Ajay Shah’s nice model to look at it), doesn’t allow for proper budgeting and long-term planning.
It is precisely due to this budgeting issue that the government moved most of its incoming employees to the New Pension Scheme (NPS) in 2004. NPS, unlike previous pension schemes, is a “defined contribution” scheme, where your pension is paid out of a corpus you create by your own saving. From an accounting perspective, it moves liabilities from tomorrow (pensions) to today (higher salary to fund the contributions), and is an excellent move. And there is no reason for it not to apply to the armed forces.
Most of the arguments being made in favour of OROP are emotional (“how can you deny our veterans money” etc.), and not well backed up by logical or economic reasoning. One of those is that lower-level military persons retire when they are 35, and hence need a “one rank one pension” (which I absolutely fail to understand). While I understand that the rigours of the role imply early retirement, I don’t see why defined contribution doesn’t solve the problem. It will have to be matched with higher salaries (to fund the contribution required for a long lifetime of retirement), but that implies liabilities are funded today, which is superior to pushing liabilities under the carpet for future generations.
The thing with NPS is that it cannot be pushed retrospectively, and hence can apply at best to all forthcoming hires. We still need a solution for the existing employees and veterans, who are already on a defined benefit scheme. Yet, the important thing to consider is that the beneficiaries should be divided into three categories – current veterans, current servicemen and future servicemen, and we should find separate solutions for the three.
It might be argued that without defined benefit pensions, it might be hard to attract talent for a high-risk job like the military, and that is why we might need OROP. This is where the “derivative thinking” comes in. The thing about a job in the military is that there is a higher-than-civilian risk of losing life or limb. The solution to that is not blanket higher compensation – it is risk management.
What we need is generous death and disability insurance for our military, and this too should be purchased by the military from a professional Life Insurance firm. A generous insurance package can help mitigate the risks to life borne by military personnel, and should be sufficient to attract necessary talent. The purchase of such policies from professional insurers is important, for you don’t want the military to be doing an actuary’s job. More importantly, such a purchase will push liabilities to today rather than to tomorrow, and the last thing an army will want during the time of war is increased expenses on account of insurance.
The current debate about OROP has opened the door for a complete overhaul of military compensation. The government should jump at this, rather than simply get bullied by veterans’ groups. As Nitin Pai argues in this editorial in the Business Standard, compensation is an economic decision and should be made based on economic (and financial) reasoning, not based on emotion.