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Continue closing pay gap

President Barack Obama’s first defense budget calls for a military pay raise of 2.9 percent next year, which sounds generous when many Americans are losing jobs.

But that proposal, if left to stand, would mark the first time since 2000 that the annual military raise would not outpace average civilian wage growth.

Congress began its string of above-average military pay increases because the gap between military and civilian pay had grown to 13.5 percent, the highest level since 1982, when the second of two huge military raises under President Ronald Reagan last established rough parity.

For the past 10 years, robust raises have helped the services reverse a late-’90s hemorrhage of experienced troops and weather the challenge of finding and keeping enough people to fight two wars.

Defense officials argue that matching civilian wage growth is now sufficient. The total military compensation package, they say, is very competitive with the private sector — and besides, the military doesn’t have to pay as much to attract and keep people in a job market as bleak as this.

But it’s tough to dismiss the idea that a force heavily stretched by wartime deployments deserves a raise that does more than merely mirror the pay of civilians.

Boosting the proposed 2010 raise by half a percentage point would reduce the pay gap to 2.4 percent at a cost of $340 million next year. That’s 0.06 percent of Obama’s 2010 base defense budget plan — not even counting the tens of billions more that will go to pay for combat operations.

Lawmakers have made it clear over the past decade that they feel addressing the pay gap is important, especially in wartime.

They should stay on course and complete the mission.