To maintain an all-volunteer force, military pay levels must be high enough to
attract a sufficient quantity and quality of volunteers. Congress's commitment
to maintaining such pay levels has been questioned. In this article we test a
model of congressional military pay setting for the all-volunteer period, 1974-
1987 and find that Congress responds to decreases in the percentage of high-quality enlistments by increasing real military pay. Pay is not adjusted to
completely offset expected inflation, however.
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