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Please, for those of you who fly airplanes, perhaps the fate of Sitka 43 will not be in vain... please watch this video...

There is a huge difference between working in the military vs. working in government or the private sector. Yes, the military is voluntary but once you sign on the dotted line that is it and you have given up a lot of your freedoms to serve. As a pilot you are looking at 10 years minimum before you can get out. You are subject to deployments, TDY's, frequent moves etc that can seriously degrade your quality of life. I personally have had a nice ride so far and I can think of 10 friends/acquaintances without breaking a sweat who are no longer with us most of whom died in the cockpit. Can you really tell me that this life should be compared to the private sector? Do you really think that the military should be willing to give up their retirement benefits when a lot are faced with what I have outlined above? How many times has a CEO or a bureaucrat been stopped in a store or airport and thanked for their service to their country? What those in the military do is important and is a service to the country. By taking the retirement away you are slapping the proverbial face of the military and saying that we don't think you are worth it. I guarantee you that if the retirement is taken away retention will be very low. Where would the military be then? The other thing is that the retirement is not really anything that you can reasonably live off of in your 40's without working another job anyway. Most will still have to find other jobs to support their families and put their children through college. I would then kind of think of the retirement as a supplement to ones income after they left the military and as a way of saying thanks for serving and we hope that you can still do ok in the private sector being that you are now in your mid 40's and might have a hard time finding a good paying job. I am also reminded of what Obama wanted to do to shortly after he took office. He tried to take away tricare/healthcare benefits from military members who had been wounded in battle after they had left the military. His response was, "They volunteered for it. We need to put that money other places." This notion of taking away military retirement or delaying it smells the same to me. This is a way for the liberals to weaken the military and to take money away from it. I also tend to think that when a liberal government takes money from one place that they don't use it to pay off debt. They use it to pay for something else that they think is more important. I guarantee you that if the military retirement is taken away that those funds will be used to pay for more entitlement programs and won't be used to reduce the national deficit. So, NO it is not reasonable to ask military members to give up their retirement benefits. When Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and all other government workers give up their retirement benefits then maybe... no, no the answer will still be no. The members of the military didn't make this mess and we shouldn't have to take a bite of the sh!t sandwich then either.