Military Resources: Guides, Pay, Benefits and Reference

This is the most useful habit to bring to any military reference material, this site included.

Durable: how a structure is organised, what decides eligibility, which authority makes a determination, what a term means, what a process consists of and in what order. These change on a scale of decades, and a page written five years ago is usually still right.

Perishable: any rate, cap, threshold, table or limit; the name of an installation; the current strength of a formation; which specialties are open this month. These change annually or faster, and a page that prints them without a year is not merely out of date — it is confidently misleading, which is worse.

When a page you are reading anywhere gives a figure without saying which year it applies to, the correct response is to treat the figure as unknown and keep the mechanism. That single habit prevents most of the avoidable mistakes people make about pay, entitlements and eligibility.

Several things a military reference site normally carries are missing here on purpose. There are no current pay figures without the year they apply to, no recruiting-office lists that go stale within months, and no claims about what a specialty is like that could not be traced back to a published source. Where a number changes annually, the page names the body that publishes it and the year of the version described, and leaves the current figure to that body. Where a subject is genuinely contested, the disagreement is described as a disagreement rather than resolved by picking a side quietly.

Where a page here defers to an outside authority, it names the authority as opposed to linking to whichever version of the document is currently reachable, because those addresses move and the publishing body does not. That is deliberately less convenient and considerably more durable.

One caution applies to every official source listed here. A regulation on a government site is the current edition, and a question about something that happened in the past needs the edition in force at the time, which is a different document and is often harder to find than the current one. Where a date matters, the version matters with it, and the archived edition is the one to cite rather than the current page at the same address.

Every page in this section reduces a set of official documents to the questions people bring to them, and it is worth knowing where the originals live, because the original is what decides a dispute.

Department-wide rules are issued as DoD directives, instructions and manuals by the Executive Services Directorate. Each service publishes its own on top of those: Army regulations through the Army Publishing Directorate, Air Force and Space Force instructions through the Air Force e-Publishing site, Navy instructions through the Department of the Navy issuances system, and Marine Corps orders through the Marine Corps publications library. The statute behind most of them is Title 10 of the United States Code. Veterans' benefits are governed separately, by Title 38 of the Code and the regulations issued under it, and administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is why a question about an entitlement after service is answered by a different body from the one that answered it during service.

Two documents govern most of what affects a household. The DoD Financial Management Regulation sets out how pay and allowances are calculated and paid; its seventh volume covers military pay. The Joint Travel Regulations, maintained by the Defense Travel Management Office, cover moves, temporary duty and the allowances that come with them.

Service regulations are revised often and are identified by number and date. A citation that names a regulation without its date may be pointing at a version that has since been superseded, which is why the pages here name the issuing body first and the document second.