Powell Says Troops Are Adequately Compensated

As if to reply to my post on November 9, Secretary of State Powell said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo for the Wall Street Journal on November 13 that he thought US troops were adequately compensated. The interview said:

• MS. BARTIROMO: Certainly the group of people who have really been paying the price for this war have been our soldiers on the front lines. We had Ben Stein, who is a supporter of yours, supporter of the Administration and a supporter of the war, on the program recently, and he was upset about what we -- at the way we compensate our soldiers.
  Do you think that we pay them appropriately?
• SECRETARY POWELL: Can you ever pay a soldier enough for putting his or her life at risk and perhaps losing his or her life? Can you ever compensate a family adequately for that kind of sacrifice? Not really. But we do a pretty good job. We have benefits available for our soldiers in case they are injured or lost in battle, and with respect to their salaries, it's a volunteer force so what we have to do is go out into the marketplace and recruit people and we have to pay them a salary that will cause them to volunteer to come into the Army. We're in a market system with respect to our military, and so the entry level salaries are competitive with what they might get in a similar capacity -- not quite identical but similar capacity -- in civilian life.
• And the fact of the matter is we're meeting our recruiting goals and we meet our reenlistment goals, so we are paying a wage that allows us to do that. Is it adequate? Would I like to see soldiers get paid more? All the time.