Top enlisted leader talks pay, priorities and 1980s fashion

Sgt. Maj. Troy Black speaks with his hands.

And while talking around a conference table near the Pentagon briefing room, he reached for the only thing in the room to make his point: two remotes and five water bottles.

Putting them in a row, one by one, Black made a list of enlisted personnel’s expenses: a phone bill, insurance, gas, rent, electricity, childcare, food.

“These are all closer to being requirements than they are luxuries,” he said.

Black is the senior enlisted advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and before then, he was the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps. In other words, he’s now America’s top enlisted leader to America’s top military officer. His job is to advocate for enlisted personnel, and one of the ways the U.S. can do that, he argues, is to have more empathy for the bills they need to pay, particularly those of young people.

In a late-August interview, Black discussed military pay, balancing goals in the budget and 1980s fashion as the Pentagon nears the end of its Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation, or QRMC, due early next year.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

We see Congress poised to enact pay increases for junior enlisted members, and that’s even before there are findings from the report. How do you assess what role this report still plays right now?

The role of the report doesn’t change. Looking back, the last QRMC made recommendations. It requested some further analysis. It gave options to the to the secretary and to the Congress, because it’s an executive branch initiated analysis. Some of those things you take on, some of those things you don’t. They’re recommendations, they’re not requirements.

There are always iterative things that happen between one report beginning and ending. Pay raises is a good example. It won’t be the first time a pay raise was given by our Congress while the QRMC was going on, before recommending to either do it or not to do it. We see these things as trends.

It seems that with inflation moderating, this might be somewhat less of a challenge going into the report next year. How do you factor that in?

I think the important thing to note is the cost of living never goes down, so therefore pay and compensation have got to maintain at least some pace. This is where you start seeing the imbalance. If cost of living goes up, which it always does, but pay and compensation don’t keep pace with that, then you create gaps.

Do you think the system is set up to keep pace?

The system is doing what the system is designed to do. Every four years [we] review what is the cost of living, what is pay and compensation and do those two things match federal mandates. From that sense, yes.

What’s challenging is there are many levers inside of the pay and compensation processes that you can pull in the meantime. Cost of living allowance — let’s take one thing in particular. It’s an adjustable opportunity for the services, given their funding, to do cost of living adjustments, iterative to massive pay raises or a quadrennial review. I know for a fact there’s levers that we can pull that maintain that balance. Of course, the budgets that the services receive have to facilitate being able to do that.

I think the bigger question there is the competing priorities. You have modernization efforts and then also you have taking care of people. How do you feel like that balance is being struck right now?

If you look back and get testimonies, from the service senior enlisted, the service chiefs, even the secretary of defense and the chairman spoke to this. We’re pulling back a little bit on the modernization lever in order to increase our readiness and be able to focus on quality of life. It doesn’t mean we’re not modernizing, doesn’t mean we’re not maintaining readiness and doesn’t mean we’re not taking care of our people. But a dollar’s a dollar.

Is this a case, though, where there needs to just be more money for both priorities?

A little bit of a political question, but what I would offer is that things have changed. The capabilities and capacities of the Department of Defense — really the entire interagency — have got to move in a direction to be able to compete with multiple nation state competitors. It’s easy to manage inside of regional conflicts like Iraq or Afghanistan, for instance, or manage what’s going on in the world today. All the operations the Department of Defense is invested in right now are using resources that you can’t always plan for. But in the interim you have all of these things to modernize the force, better train the force and support the force and obviously quality of life. They all compete.

It’s a long way of saying two dollars is better than one dollar.

Are there real stories about compensation from service members that you’ve seen in the last several years that have stuck out?

I can think of a number of scenarios but let me explain a little bit differently. Sometimes we don’t understand all of the responsibilities that a certain generation has that we as we get a little older think are luxuries.

If you’re in a room, you’re talking about pay and your assumption is, “Hey, why do these new service members get these expensive cell phone contracts?” Well, because everything in the world is now digital. You either have a very expensive data plan or you can have WiFi.

When I first came in the Marine Corps, we all lived in the same barracks. The barracks was right next to the armory, it was right next to the office spaces and it was right next to where you stepped off and went to the field. Now you might be working in one place on a base or installation, and your barracks is miles away. Those aren’t necessarily of luxury costs anymore. Those are real costs.

We can debate whether a junior service member should buy an expensive vehicle. But we can no longer debate whether they need to have an automobile. Those things are ubiquitous.

Is that really what sticks out to you: those things that have become different in the generations that have followed?

I’m 36 years in as a Marine. There are people right now who have been retiring that joined after I joined. So I think we should be very, very careful to say a generation can or can’t do something. What we should be talking about is a new generation of Americans are going to start putting on the uniform and serving their nation. What skills do they have? How do we adjust to that, while also making them understand this is the United States military. There are standards that have ended up in us being successful throughout our entire history.

When I first came into uniform as a United States Marine, a Vietnam veteran gunnery sergeant took one look at me and went, “Oh my gosh, if we ever have to go to war with you in a uniform with your two polo shirt popped collar, Run-DMC listening, yuppie selves.” It was just going to be different than when they were driving a ‘57 Chevy with the sleeves rolled up and a white t-shirt on.

Lo and behold, we’ve done pretty good.

Did you actually have a moment where you’re wearing two polo shirts and Run DMC headphones?

In high school? Yeah, absolutely. I had the Brian Bosworth flat top with the V’s cut in the side and all that kind of stuff … if you know who Brian Bosworth is.