Thread: Outrage of the Decade: U.S. Soldiers going Unpaid for Months due to Bureaucrats

Outrage of the Decade: U.S. Soldiers going Unpaid for Months due to Bureaucrats

By John Galt
– March 22, 2012
Posted in: Breaking News, U.S. Politics



by John Galt
March 22, 2012 19:45 ET

As long as America has been going to war, problems have emerged paying our soldiers promptly, properly, and sometimes at all. However, in this age of direct deposit and the ability to change or modify any individual’s payroll with a few keystrokes on a computer there is not excuse for the outrage soldiers and those soldier’s with families are enduring now under two administrations while serving on active duty in the fraudulent “War on Terror.”

Unfortunately, some soldiers stuck in the winter hell known as Afghanistan may have gone unpaid for months due to the inept bureaucracy inside the beltway. This is not an “Obama problem” but instead a continuation of the Bush administration’s inconsiderate ineptness and unwillingness to clean the rat’s nest known as the Pentagon out of its antiquated ideology of allowing the next rubber stamp to find a solution to payroll problems for active duty and deployed military personnel.

The story from the e-magazine Government Executive suggests this issue is so severe that in some cases, soldiers have experienced delays in not just regular pay but combat pay and bonuses for MONTHS after their assignments began (from the article):

A joint House and Senate Oversight committee heard testimony from Defense Department officials and an Ohio Army National Guardsman on Thursday. The guardsman, Lt. Col. Kirk Zecchini, said pay problems have become “a normal part of Army life.”

Zecchini described the pay problems he experienced during 28 years in various military capacities — as a traditional guardsman; a full-time, active-duty soldier; and a federal technician.

During his first deployment to Afghanistan in 2003, Zecchini volunteered to serve an additional six months. Although this extension was published, his military pay stopped at the end of his original order. He served for more than a month in Afghanistan without pay until the issue was resolved.

After a series of posts throughout Southeast Asia, Zecchini waited one and a half years for special allowances such as hostile fire pay and hardship duty location pay that he was entitled to because of the nature of the missions. The pay finally came after he wrote a memo to Ohio’s inspector general. Later, while deployed in Iraq in 2005-2006, Zecchini’s unit was told that tax was being withheld from their paychecks and additional paperwork would be involved to have the money refunded.

Zecchini told the panel that pay problems have continued since he received an honorable discharge from the Ohio Army National Guard.

Excuse me? Some fat assed brie eating bureaucrat inside the massive Pentagon offices goes home, gets paid leave and vacation, while we have men and women eating MRE’s, facing IED’s on their drive back to base instead of other tub of lard bureaucrats on the interstate, and even after a honorable discharge they still have their pay screwed up?
The military should be ashamed of this beyond belief. Generals should become Corporals. Colonels should be demoted to private and I do not mean private first class. The civilians involved should be fired and replaced by anyone who can fog a mirror and pass a pee test. This is an obscenity that in this modern age of computers and automation the incompetent boobs in the District of Columbia can not correct this mistake.

I just wonder how a one star General would feel if he had to personally deliver the news to a widow with two children of her husband’s combat death in Afghanistan and she replied to him through her tears, “Does this mean I’ll finally get the six months of back pay he is owed?”

Of course has been resolved because in 2009 the Messiah was elected President and he cured all government ills and problems.

To read the entire article, go to the story by Amanda Palleschi at Government Executive by clicking on the title below:

Outrage of the Decade: U.S. Soldiers going Unpaid for Months due to Bureaucrats