The Military Advantage 2015 Edition

Revised and updated every year, The Military Advantage, 2015 Edition is the most reliable benefits guide for Americans who have answered the call to serve in the military. These benefits amount to billions in scholarships, educational benefits, home loan guarantees, and military discounts. The 2015 edition includes TRICARE Prime and pharmacy updates, 2015 pay and allowance rates, active duty education program changes, new Navy sea pay charts, new veteran support resources, expanded service member protection policies, and changes in service member life insurance.

The Military Advantage, 2013 Edition, written by Terry Howell, Managing Editor for Benefits for Military.com is the essential annual reference guide to military and veteran’s benefits. Published in partnership with Military.com, the nation's largest military membership organization with over 10 million members and its parent company, Monster.com, the nation’s largest career and job website, this latest edition is the most reliable benefits guide for the over 30 million Americans who have answered the call to serve in the military. These valuable benefits include billions in scholarships, educational benefits, home loan guarantees, and military discounts. Due to the drawdown of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and required budget cuts, the Department of Defense plans on reducing military forces by as many as 100,000 troops over the next five years. In response, the 2013 edition of the Military Advantage will focus on the rights and benefits available to assist service members, veterans and their families as they transition to civilian life in record numbers.

Revised and updated every year, The Military Advantage, 2017 Edition is the most reliable benefits guide for Americans who have answered the call to serve in the military. These benefits amount to billions in scholarships, educational benefits, home loan guarantees, and military discounts. The 2017 edition includes new TRICARE regions and policy updates, new military retirement and matching 401k options, changes to military education benefits, new resources for transitioning service members and their families.

From the experts at Military Advantage--operators of Military.com--comes a uniquely comprehensive guide to military and veteran benefits. Charts & graphs throughout.

This is the first comprehensive book on Military Cost-Benefit Analysis and provides novel approaches to structuring cost-benefit and affordability analysis amidst an uncertain defense environment and cloudy fiscal prospects. Lifting the veil on military Cost-Benefit Analysis, this volume offers several new practical tools designed to guide defense investments (and divestments), combined with a selection of real-world applications. The widespread employment of Cost-Benefit Analysis offers a unique opportunity to transform legacy defense forces into efficient, effective, and accountable 21st century organizations. A synthesis of economics, statistics and decision theory, CBA is currently used in a wide range of defense applications in countries around the world: i) to shape national security strategy, ii) to set acquisition policy, and iii) to inform critical investments in people, equipment, infrastructure, services and supplies. As sovereign debt challenges squeeze national budgets, and emerging threats disrupt traditional notions of security, this volume offers valuable tools to navigate the political landscape, meet calls for fiscal accountability, and boost the effectiveness of defense investments to help guarantee future peace and stability. A valuable resource for scholars, practitioners, novices and experts, this book offers a comprehensive overview of Military Cost-Benefit Analysis and will appeal to anyone interested or involved in improving national security, and will also be of general interest to those responsible for major government programs, projects or policies.

Revised and updated every year, The Military Advantage, 2016 Edition is the most reliable benefits guide for Americans who have answered the call to serve in the military. These benefits amount to billions in scholarships, educational benefits, home loan guarantees, and military discounts. The 2016 edition includes updated TRICARE copays, fees, and cost-shares; 2016 active duty and reserve pay charts; active duty, veterans and family education program changes; updated VA disability and Pension rates; veteran support resources; expanded service member protection policies; and the latest on VA provided health care programs.

The idea of military necessity lies at the centre of the law of armed conflict and yet it is less than fully understood. This book analyses which legal limits govern the commander's assessment of military necessity, and argues that military necessity itself is not a limitation. Military necessity calls for a highly discretionary exercise: the assessment. Yet, there is little guidance as to how this discretionary process should be exercised, apart from the notions of 'a reasonable military commander'. A reasonable assessment of 'excessive' civilian losses are presumed to be almost intuitive. Objective standards for determining excessive civilian losses are difficult to identify, particularly when that 'excessiveness' will be understood in relative terms. The perpetual question arises: are civilian losses acceptable if the war can be won? The result is a heavy burden of assessment placed on the shoulders of the military commander.

Since the end of the draft, the U.S. Army has prided itself on its patriotic volunteers who heed the call to “Be All That You Can Be.” But beneath the recruitment slogans, the army promised volunteers something more tangible: a social safety net including medical and dental care, education, child care, financial counseling, housing assistance, legal services, and other privileges that had long been reserved for career soldiers. The Rise of the Military Welfare State examines how the U.S. Army’s extension of benefits to enlisted men and women created a military welfare system of unprecedented size and scope. America’s all-volunteer army took shape in the 1970s, in the wake of widespread opposition to the draft. Abandoning compulsory conscription, it wrestled with how to attract and retain soldiers—a task made more difficult by the military’s plummeting prestige after Vietnam. The army solved the problem, Jennifer Mittelstadt shows, by promising to take care of its own—the more than ten million Americans who volunteered for active duty after 1973 and their families. While the United States dismantled its civilian welfare system in the 1980s and 1990s, army benefits continued to expand. Yet not everyone was pleased by programs that, in their view, encouraged dependency, infantilized soldiers, and feminized the institution. Fighting to outsource and privatize the army’s “socialist” system and to reinforce “self-reliance” among American soldiers, opponents rolled back some of the military welfare state’s signature achievements, even as a new era of war began.