Over the past half-dozen years, sailors and Marines have borne the brunt of longer and longer deployments. Now, for the first time, they'll start getting paid for it.
With the deployment lengths for carrier groups and amphibious ready groups averaging eight months and up, Navy leaders are moving to reward the more than 10,000 sailors affected every year.
The new deployment pay approved Sept. 17 by the Defense Department will pay sailors and Marines $16.50 per day for each day deployed past 220 days, roughly 7 ½ months. Thousands of fleet sailors qualify immediately.
"The bonus is a great idea," said Information Systems Technician 2nd Class (SW/AW) Olivia Durrett, a sailor on the amphibious assault ship Bataan, which hit its 221st day at sea when the pay was approved. "We've been out at sea for a long time, and it's well-deserved. It's a great compensation since we were extended on our deployment for so long and not able to hit many ports."
So far, only sailors and Marines will receive Hardship Duty Pay–Tempo, which the service has sought, along with the sea pay hike, to better compensate sailors facing longer and, in recent years, more erratic deployments.
This is no ordinary pay. The Navy's new pay is the first compensation to take effect that's specifically for longer deployments, a measure that comes 13 years after lawmakers passed a bill intended to curb operational tempo by paying troops on extended deployments. But that was suspended after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Sailors and Marines with the Bataan amphibious ready group will be the first troops to receive this special pay. Officials estimate that 140,000 sailors in sea-going and deployable billets are qualified to receive the deployment pay.
It's a landmark accomplishment for Adm. Jon Greenert, who has made forward presence a central tenant of his tenure as chief of naval operations; for Adm. Bill Gortney, who made this part of his new deployment plan; for Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Bill Moran, who has worked to fill fleet jobs by better compensating sailors; and for Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who backed the proposal.
"The Navy and Marine Corps' unique ability to provide and maintain a global presence is made possible by the hard work of our Sailors and Marines," Mabus said in a Sept. 17 statement. "For some time now, these men and women have met the significant demand for our forces without waver. As the need for our presence continues, Hardship Duty Pay–Tempo is an important effort to further compensate our Sailors and Marines for their willingness to take on extended deployments and for the frontline role they continue to play in keeping our nation, and our world, safe."
How it works
Starting Sept. 17, sailors who have been deployed for 220 consecutive days qualified. That timing was critical. Navy officials pressed for approval, knowing that the Bataan's sailors and Marines qualify now, and sailors from the Bush carrier strike group will begin getting paid Sept. 24, when that four-ship CSG hits the 221-mark. The other ships of the group are the destroyers Truxton and Roosevelt, the cruiser Philippine Sea, and Carrier Air Wing 8.
But the deployment pay also applies to SEALs, Seabees, explosive ordnance technicians — anyone who leaves his or her home on a rotational deployment.
One catch: If you take emergency leave, R&R leave or any other kind of break from deployment for more than nine days, you will no longer qualify for the extended deployment pay.
As with any pay adjustment, it's going to take Defense Finance and Accounting Services time to update its systems, but Navy personnel officials say they hope to get sailors the money they qualify for by the end of the calendar year.
The pay is not cumulative. If you deployed for 219 days, came home for six months then deployed for another 219 days, you wouldn't qualify. That makes it unlikely that sailors aboard forward-deployed ships will qualify. Those ships typically deploy on patrols shorter than seven months.
Officials are considering paying sailors for cumulative time away, as well as other kinds of arduous duty, said CNP spokesman Cmdr. Chris Servello, who added that the priority had been getting HDP-T approved.
Servello said about 7,000 sailors will qualify through the rest of 2014, and he estimated that 14,000 will get it the following year. The number should be about the same in 2016, before the Navy re-evaluates the program ahead of its two-year expiration date.
If the Navy is able to cap deployments at eight months — a goal fleet and force leaders have reiterated — then most sailors will see a little over $300 extra per deployment.
It will be a bigger paycheck, though, for those who sail on longer scheduled deployments or who get extended. Each sailor and Marine with the Bataan ARG, for instance, is likely to receive $750 if they return, as expected, in November after nearly 10 months.
"This extra money will help since my wife and I are getting ready for a baby," said Yeoman 3rd Class Brett Sapp, a Bataan sailor from Alexander City, Alabama, whose wife gave birth to their baby girl, Annabelle, on Sept. 18. "This will be a great boost to our financial plan."
An uphill battle
Securing deployment pay has been an uphill battle for Navy leaders because efforts to pay troops extra for long deployments have been resisted by Pentagon bureaucrats at every turn.
Greenert and Moran earlier in the year proposed reinstating the High Deployment Allowance, which was signed into law 13 years ago. HDA allows the service secretaries to pay service members up to $1,000 a month for long deployments, defined as lasting more than 190 days. But according to officials with knowledge of the internal negotiations, the joint chiefs began to push back on that idea.
It was intended as a kind of tax on the brass for over-deploying troops. The law also requires that service members deployed more than 400 days in two years receive the pay, for which forward-deployed ships would almost certainly qualify.
But after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, DoD operatives suspended the allowance. No service member has seen a dime of it. The Army has tried to kill HDA by lobbying to have it repealed in favor of so-called "warrior pay" for soldiers deployed more than 12 months.
Defense officials wanted to give the services more flexibility in defining what constituted a long deployment and how much to pay, but ultimately HDA generated too much opposition to be approved.
Plan B was HDP-T, which is a separate authority altogether. It gives the services greater discretion to define a long deployment.
"This is a service-by-service request," Moran told Navy Times in August, after service officials decided to go with HDP-T. "Hardship Duty Pay–Tempo allows services to request it on their own, but it has to be approved by [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]. It does not mandate that the other services apply this, and there is flexibility in what amount of money can be authorized under HDP-T."
There was far less resistance to HDP-T inside the Pentagon's rings, but Navy officials had to scramble to get the pay turned on in time for Bataan ARG sailors, said a Navy official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal politics.
In the final days, Mabus and Greenert personally worked the phones to get it OK'd, the official said.
The last-minute calls had the desired impact. The new pay was OK'd for sailors and Marines on the Bataan, the amphibious transport dock Mesa Verde and dock landing ship Gunston Hall on day 221 of their cruise — the first day they could start receiving the pay.
At the 'ragged edge'
In days gone by, fleet sailors could tell their wives and husbands when they were leaving on deployment and when they would get back, roughly six months later. But those certainties — and six-month cruises — are largely a thing of the past.
Surge deployments, international crises and budget woes have overturned any sense of predictability in recent years.
Fleet leaders have since struggled to contain the escalating deployment lengths, as demand for ships overseas has spiked amid crises. To name just a few: tensions with Iran, which kept two carriers in the Persian Gulf region for two years; strikes against the Libyan regime; a standoff with Syria; and the spread of the brutal Islamic State group.
This has led to unpredictability for sailors and their families, which many say is even a more of a morale-killer than a scheduled long cruise. Leaders have had to extend ships repeatedly, in some cases.The destroyer Barry, on its 2013 independent deployment, was extended three times. The carrier John C. Stennis returned from a seven-month cruise in 2012 , then turned around and did an eight-month cruise half a year later.
The new deployment plan seeks to make deployment lengths standard at eight months, which Gortney, the head of Fleet Forces Command, has called the "ragged edge" of acceptable op tempo.
"We just sent Bush out on a 9½-month deployment; that's not a sustainable model," Gortney said in an April interview with Defense News, a sister publication of Navy Times. "We want to get it to eight months, and we think that's sustainable over a three-year period," he continued, referring to the new 36-month deployment cycle that carriers will start later this year.
But even eight months is a long deployment for sailors and families, and it's possible under the optimized fleet response plan that a carrier could do two deployments back-to-back if a surge is needed within the 14 months of the carrier's return.
With longer deployments becoming the standard, officials decided it was time to pay sailors more.
"I will tell you, those are arduous tours for sailors to be at sea that long, and we ought to pay them for that," Moran told Navy Times in February.
Still, the pay still can't replace time at home.
"It's great to know that somebody cares about us being out at sea and away from home," said Aviation Boatswain's Mate (Fuels) Airman (SW/AW) Cesar Madera, a Bataan sailor from Brooklyn, New York. "It's bittersweet, because nothing can make up for that time away from my wife and daughter. In the end, though, it does help out when you're young and getting your feet on the ground financially."
David B. Larter was the naval warfare reporter for Defense News.
