The Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission has offered extensive analysis to back up its assertion that the 83 percent of service members who leave the military short of 20 years of service would be far better off under the commission's proposed "blended" retirement compensation system.

But a deeper dig into the data underlying the proposal brings to mind the adage: "The devil is in the details."

A particularly rosy assumption is embedded in the data: The commission's figures assume that over time, service members will receive average annual basic pay raises of 3.5 percent.

But military raises haven't come close to that since 2009's 3.4 percent increase; every annual raise has been under 2 percent since.

The historical record is a shaky indicator of what course military pay raises will take in the future because slight changes in perspective and time frame yield much different pictures. Annual military raises have averaged just 2.3 percent over the past decade, largely as a result of capped pay hikes in response to broader federal budget pressures that show no near-term signs of abating. In contrast, over the previous decade, annual raises averaged a robust 4.1 percent in an era when Congress and the Pentagon were frantically responding to a serious military recruiting and retention crisis.

All told, annual military raises over the past 20 years have averaged a little over 3.2 percent, very close to the 3.5 percent figure used in the commission's assumptions. But if average future raises stay well below that level, that obviously would reduce the cumulative dollar amounts reflected in these examples.

The commission's model also suggests service members should expect to see an average annual investment return of about 7.3 percent on their savings accounts. That figure matches the average return for public pension investments over the past decade, according to the National Association of State Retirement Associations. However, financial professionals always emphasize that past financial market performance is no guarantee of future returns.

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