I hope everyone's recovered from the holiday buzz and that your new year's off to a great start!

There have been plenty of scary headlines over the last month about military programs & benefits. Part of it is the new fiscal year, and another part of it is the ramp-up to submitting the new budget to Congress. The Department of Defense has been holding press converences for the last week in order to line up support before the politicians start working on their own ideas.

It's almost as bad as being glued to CNN or CNBC. Instead, I've been summarizing the headlines every 2-3 weeks with a long-term perspective on how the pendulum has really been swinging.

For example, both the Air Force and the Navy have started personnel cuts-- and the Army is not far behind. However this is a much smaller drawdown than after the Cold War and DESERT STORM, and in five years the military will still be larger than 2001. (Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe not.) Congress has authorized a 15-year retirement program, which has The-Military-Guide.com blog readers buzzing. However the 15-year retirement wasn't very successful in the 1990s and it might not even be used by the military for this drawdown.

I've put up a couple posts summarizing the latest active-duty and civil-service personnel cuts and the 15-year retirement authority. I'm working on another summary of the DoD's long-range budget proposals, and I should have that up in another week.

USAA is also working on new retirement-planning software. I'm hoping to interview Zack Gipson in a couple weeks and then review the features.

In the meantime, are there any questions for me?

Here's the posts:

http://the-military-guide.com/2012/01/16/military-careers-and-retirement-at-risk/ http://the-military-guide.com/2012/01/18/congress-changes-military-careers-and-retirements/