Active-duty members, Reserve and Guard personnel, and academy cadets and midshipmen are assured a 3.1 percent pay raise in January. But other key pay and benefit gains proposed for 2006 are in limbo as Senate leaders tussle over the politics of passing a defense authorization bill.

Concern that the bill is in jeopardy deepened this month when Sens. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and ranking Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan tried to attach the bill to the defense appropriations or money bill as it neared a final vote. Tempers flared. Egos clashed. The Warner plan finally failed when his mammoth "amendment" was found "not germane" to the funding bill, on a 50-49 vote.

The House passed its defense authorization bill in June, and included the 3.1 percent military pay raise. The obvious argument then for saving the Senate bill is that inaction will kill that prized pay raise, endangering troop morale in wartime. In fact, say Senate staff members, it's not true.

The authorization bill doesn't need to be passed for the January pay raise to take effect. Authority for the raise was granted back in 1999, under the fiscal 2000 defense authorization act. That law directs that annual military raises from 2001 through 2006 be set at one-half percentage point above private sector wage growth, as measured by the government's Employment Cost Index (ECI), unless Congress again intervenes.

ECI data for setting the 2006 pay raise show private sector wages rose 2.6 percent. Under the statutory formula, the military is entitled to .5 percent more, or 3.1 percent. The Senate for years hasn't even included a military pay raise in its authorization bill, recognizing that the 1999 statute will provide one.

Money to fund the pay raise is in separate legislation — the defense appropriations bill — that the Senate passed Oct. 7. The companion House bill also funds a 3.1 percent increase, so the raise won't be an issue when a House-Senate conference committee meets this month to negotiate final details of the appropriations bill.

Though the January pay raise is secure, other initiatives important to the armed forces in wartime, and to groups of service members, retirees and their survivors, will be sidelined if a defense authorization bill isn't passed.

The Senate bill, for example, calls for opening the TRICARE Reserve Select program to all drilling reservists and families willing to pay its premiums. A similar provision was pulled from the House bill. But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., says he is confident an expanded TRICARE benefit for reservists will be negotiated this year, if the bill clears the Senate.

Service associations, meanwhile, are counting on Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., to press for his two-part amendment, which would move up by three years, to Oct. 1, 2005, the effective date of a "30-year and paid-up" premium feature to the military's Survivor Benefit Plan, and to eliminate a $993 a month reduction in SBP benefits that surviving spouses see when they accept the same amount in VA Dependency and Indemnity Compensation, payable if a member's or the retiree's death was service-related.