Proponents of strengthening Montgomery GI Bill benefits for the National Guard and Reserve say the issue is fairness. Reserve rates, frozen for years, need to be raised. Reserve benefits need to be made as portable as those for active-duty forces, their wartime deployment partners.

Not so, said a senior Defense official. The critical issue is how best to manage finite resources. There is no reason to raise Reserve GI Bill benefits as long as enough personnel join and re-enlist in the reserves.

The arguments were as blunt as that during a Sept. 27 joint hearing of the House armed services subcommittee on military personnel and the veterans' affairs subcommittee on economic opportunity. The two panels share oversight responsibility for GI Bill programs.

The Republican chairman and the ranking Democrat on the personnel subcommittee — John McHugh, N.Y., and Vic Snyder, Ark. — were in sync laying out their case for raising Reserve GI Bill benefits, perhaps next year. Snyder in particular sees two major inequities that need correction.

The first, he said, is that GI Bill benefits for reservists end when they separate after a typical six- to eight-year service obligation. That's true even now, in wartime, with Reserve and National Guard members being mobilized routinely for 16 to 18 months, and spending a year in Iraq or Afghanistan. When active-duty members leave service, they take along GI Bill benefits. Reserve benefits can only be used while they remain in drill status.

"How is it fair when two members serve side by side in combat, they return home together, both leave the service, but one will have education benefits (and) the other will not have any?" asked Snyder. "This seems to me to be unconscionable."

A second inequity is the level of benefits under the GI Bill for Selected Reserves. Payments used to be set to equal 47 percent of benefits for active-duty GI Bill users. But cost-of-living increases to active-duty GI Bill benefits have not been applied to Reserve benefits since the attacks of 9/11.

On Oct. 1, when active-duty benefits go up once again, Reserve GI Bill benefits will stay frozen and their value, relative to active-duty GI Bill benefits, will fall to 27 percent. "Shouldn't we at least bring that benefit up to where it was at the time the program was (established)?" Snyder asked Michael Dominguez, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.

Dominguez refused to concede the point, instead providing what he described as "a number-crunching, bean-counter" view. Reserve benefits were designed primarily as a retention tool to keep members in drill status.

"If we look at our recruiting and retention numbers, we're achieving the purposes for which the program was intended," said Dominguez, a 1975 West Point graduate and former assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs.