A Navy captain with 27 years of service audited his own PERSTEMPO record. What he found exposes a system that was never designed to measure what it claims to protect.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co. | The Military Family Justice Project
CAPT Mehdi Alexander Akacem, USN, has been a contributing source and policy collaborator on this series since its inception. He is a naval officer with 27 years of service, currently assigned to a major combat aircraft program office in the Washington area, and is co-developing — alongside Army veteran and family law advocate Erhan Bedestani — a policy paper on the systemic failures facing military-connected families in the American family court system. Their work underlies the analytical framework of this series.
This spring, while going down “several rabbit holes” in the course of that research, Capt. Akacem made a discovery about a federal system he had spent part of his career responsible for implementing — and had never once been trained on. He sent a message that reframed the entire argument of the piece that preceded this one.
Congress already requires the military to count the days, he wrote. The system is called PERSTEMPO — Personnel Tempo — mandated under 10 U.S.C. §136(d). It has legal authority, infrastructure, and tracks time away from home at the individual servicemember level. “BUT,” he continued, “as implemented, the policy doesn’t measure the things that would help understand parent-child separation, certainly not from the affected military child’s perspective.”
Then he went and looked up his own record. He pulled his PERSTEMPO report from BUPERS Online on May 25, 2026 — for the first time in 27 years of service.
What he found is the subject of this piece.
Why This Matters Before We Get Into the Weeds
Every time a servicemember deploys, the military tracks it. Not for sentimental reasons — for readiness. The institution needs to know how hard it’s running its people so it can manage the force. Congress decided in 2000 that this tracking should also protect servicemembers: if you’re away from home too long, you’re owed more pay, and your commander needs permission from an admiral to keep pushing you.
That’s the idea. The reality, as one naval captain discovered this spring when he looked up his own record for the first time in 27 years, is that the system misses large portions of time away from family, pays almost no one the compensation it was designed to trigger, and has been running on an emergency waiver signed one month after September 11, 2001 — a waiver that was never lifted.
If you’re a servicemember in a custody dispute, that incomplete record is the document a family court may never see. If you’re a judge, it’s the evidence you don’t know to ask for. If you’re a member of Congress, it’s the data you’ve been asking DoD to collect for 18 years and still don’t have.
What PERSTEMPO Is — and What It Was Built to Do
PERSTEMPO grew out of a 1996 Government Accountability Office finding that the Defense Department lacked consistent policies for tracking how much time individual servicemembers spent away from home. Congress responded with the FY2000 National Defense Authorization Act, establishing statutory definitions for deployment and high-deployment thresholds, authorizing additional pay for members who exceeded those thresholds, and requiring the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness to develop standardized tracking — all codified under 10 U.S.C. §§136(d) and 991.
DoD Instruction 1336.07 implements that mandate. It establishes a centralized database at the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), requires the military services to report all PERSTEMPO events into it, and declares that accurate PERSTEMPO information “is vital to determining force readiness.” The Navy implements this through OPNAVINST 3000.13E, signed by the Chief of Naval Operations. Individual Sailors can access their own records through BUPERS Online — through an application now simply called “PERSTEMPO.” Capt. Akacem did.
The Audit: What’s There, and What Isn’t
His record runs from 2002 to 2024. Looking at it against his actual career, the gaps are immediate and significant.
The most glaring: training between duty stations is not represented at all. This is not a data entry error. It is a structural feature of the system. OPNAVINST 3000.13E draws a precise distinction between “deployment PERSTEMPO events” — operations, exercises, unit training, mission support TDY — and “non-deployment PERSTEMPO events,” which include individual training at schools or training centers. DoDI 1336.07 contains an explicit carve-out: a member is not considered deployed “when the member is performing service as a student or trainee at a school.” Training between duty stations falls into the non-deployment category — tracked differently, counting toward no threshold, triggering no compensation.
For Capt. Akacem, that training totaled well over a year of his career. It simply doesn’t appear in his deployment record. And while he was in transit between assignments, the Navy’s own instruction notes that members in that status fall under the cognizance of Navy Personnel Command — the same command responsible for managing the PERSTEMPO program. The absence of that time from the record is not incidental. It is baked in.
He walked through a specific example from his own service record. Between a 211-day deployment with VAQ-141 (May–December 2011) and a 62-day deployment in May 2012, his entire squadron — families included — packed up their homes and relocated from Whidbey Island, Washington, to Atsugi Air Base, Japan. The move itself took two to three weeks of hotel and temporary lodging for most families. The pilots who flew the jets across the Pacific spent four or five days in transit, with overnight stops at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and Midway Atoll due to mechanical issues. Then the unit spent approximately a week on Iwo Jima conducting pre-deployment training, roughly three weeks before the May 2012 deployment began.
None of that is in his record. The consecutive deployments appear as two discrete entries with no intervening period captured. The time between them — the move, the transit, the pre-deployment work-up — is simply gone.
“There’s probably more time away from home in there,” he noted, “lost to faded memories because it wasn’t properly documented at the time. And other than the curious individual like me going and looking, there’s no way to know if something is missing, let alone get it corrected.”
That last sentence is confirmed by the policy documents themselves. OPNAVINST 3000.13E places reporting responsibility on commanding officers and requires monthly compliance certification, but establishes no mechanism for detecting systematic gaps after the fact. DoDI 1336.07 requires the services to establish procedures for servicemembers to contest specific events — but those procedures address disputed accounting of events that were logged, not the absence of entire categories that were never required to be logged.
The observations in this piece are not casual. Capt. Akacem has been formalizing them in a policy memorandum — Systemic Considerations Regarding the Treatment of Military-Connected Families in the American Family Court System — developed in collaboration with Erhan Bedestani, an Army veteran and family law advocate whose work with Rep. Michael Turner’s staff produced the FY2025 NDAA directive requiring DoD and VA to report on the impacts of custody litigation on servicemembers and veterans. That report was due August 1, 2025. It came back late and non-responsive. The memo is, among other things, an answer to that institutional silence.
The Loophole That Makes the Compensation Meaningless
Even when time is correctly captured as a deployment event, the compensation Congress authorized is structured to avoid paying it.
Hardship Duty Pay – Tempo (HDP-T) — the substitute compensation the Navy uses while the 2001 national security waiver suspending the original high-deployment allowance remains in effect — is governed by MILPERSMAN 7220-075. Under that policy, eligibility requires 221 or more consecutive days deployed outside the continental United States. Days spent deployed within CONUS or non-foreign OCONUS locations (including Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Guam) do not count.
The practical result: a servicemember who is deployed 320 days out of a 365-day period — well above the 220-day threshold Congress set — receives nothing if a single night home breaks that stretch into two periods each shorter than 221 consecutive days. Capt. Akacem confirmed he has never received HDP-T.
His 2011-2012 deployment sequence illustrates the problem precisely. Looking at the full period from the start of the 211-day VAQ-141 deployment in May 2011 through its 365-day anniversary, accounting for the transit, the move, and the pre-deployment work-up that followed, his unit was almost certainly away from home more than 220 days. But those days were accumulated across multiple events — some deployment-category, some not, some simply unrecorded — rather than consecutively on a single operational deployment event. The consecutive-deployment counter never crossed the threshold. No compensation was triggered.
“The policy for HDP-T as the Navy implements it,” he observed, “gives the service lots of outs to avoid payment.”
The Waiver That Never Ended
The consecutive-days requirement is itself a product of the larger structural failure Capt. Akacem identified. The original high-deployment allowance Congress authorized — up to $1,000 per month for members exceeding the 220 or 400-day thresholds — was revoked by a single Deputy Secretary of Defense memorandum dated October 8, 2001. One month after September 11, the thresholds were suspended for national security reasons.
They have never been restored.
This is not buried in a footnote. Section 3.3.a of DoDI 1336.07, the current governing instruction, states plainly: “The October 8, 2001 Deputy Secretary of Defense Memorandum waives deployment thresholds established in Section 991 of Title 10, U.S.C.” OPNAVINST 3000.13E lists that memo as Reference (b) and notes that the substitute approval authority for exceeding thresholds “automatically expires when reference (b) is rescinded” — and that the entire Navy PERSTEMPO and OPTEMPO program “will both be reassessed in the event that reference (b) is cancelled.” The 2001 memo has not been canceled. The reassessment has never happened.
In Capt. Akacem’s framing: “The War on Terror ended — we told the public and the world that — but we never reset this policy to protect servicemembers and their families. Eventually, we’ve been keeping everyone in the military in a 3-point stance continuously for 25 years, while claiming (at least at times) to be at peace.”
The May 2026 CRS brief on PERSTEMPO (IF11007, Version 17) makes the consequences concrete: the USS Gerald R. Ford, extended in support of Operations Absolute Resolve and Epic Fury, was on the longest carrier deployment since the Vietnam War — expected to exceed 11 months, above the statutory one-year threshold. Because the 2001 waiver remains in effect, no additional compensation is triggered. The ceiling Congress built does not apply.
Nobody Told Him the System Existed
Perhaps the most significant detail Capt. Akacem shared is not about the data. It’s about institutional knowledge.
OPNAVINST 3000.13E requires commanding officers to report PERSTEMPO events, certify monthly compliance, and — per DoDI 1336.07 — educate their staffs on PERSTEMPO reporting and management. Capt. Akacem served as a squadron department head responsible for his unit’s administrative functions, including the implementation of the PERSTEMPO program. He later commanded his own squadron. At neither point did he receive any training on the program, and it was never inspected by his higher headquarters.
“If it was reported,” he said, “it either happened automatically or because the enlisted sailors who were specialists in administrative management just took care of it.”
He recently reviewed all the training materials for the weeklong pre-command course he completed before taking command — the course itself, he notes, was not properly credited as a PERSTEMPO event in his service record. There is no mention of PERSTEMPO policy in any of those materials.
A 27-year naval officer, who spent part of his career responsible for implementing the PERSTEMPO program, discovered the system existed only last month. When he looked himself up, he found years of his service missing. He had no way to know anything was wrong, and the policy documents contain no mechanism that would have told him.
The Separation That Was Never Countable
All of this precedes the gap that originally drove his message — and that no reform to PERSTEMPO data quality will address, because it falls entirely outside the framework’s scope.
From April 2017 through November 2024, Capt. Akacem was separated from his children because the Coast Guard issued orders to his former spouse. More than seven years of parent-child separation, connected directly to military service — not his own orders, but orders issued to the other parent. None of it appears anywhere in the federal record of his service. The PERSTEMPO framework is entirely self-referential: it tracks this servicemember’s own movements pursuant to orders. It has no mechanism to track separation caused by orders issued to someone else. It does not ask whether a servicemember can actually be present for their children. The question was never within scope.
As he put it: this is “a distraction from what led me down this rabbit hole — which is that we have policy recognition of the unique impact on military families and some infrastructure to measure, but we don’t actually measure what matters, which is PERSTEMPO from the family and child perspective.”
What the Framework Could Do, If Congress Required It
The reform argument changes when you understand that the infrastructure already exists. Congress does not need to build something new. It needs to fix, expand, and actually enforce what it already mandated.
1. Restore the thresholds and make the waiver expire.
The October 8, 2001, waiver was an emergency measure. The Navy’s own instruction acknowledges it will “reassess” its entire PERSTEMPO program when the waiver is canceled. Congress should force that reassessment through the NDAA — sunsetting the blanket waiver, reinstating the original high-deployment allowance under 37 U.S.C. §436, and requiring affirmative reauthorization with congressional notification for any future suspension.
2. Fix the HDP-T consecutive-days requirement.
MILPERSMAN 7220-075 structures compensation eligibility around consecutive deployment days outside the U.S., with CONUS time resetting the counter. Congress should amend this to aggregate deployment days within a rolling period — consistent with the threshold structure Congress originally enacted — rather than requiring a single unbroken consecutive streak that operational realities routinely interrupt.
3. Require in-transit and between-assignment time to be captured.
Training and transit periods between duty stations fall under the Navy Personnel Command’s cognizance and are currently absent from the deployment record entirely. Congress should direct DoD, through the NDAA, to require these periods to be captured in the PERSTEMPO system as a distinct event category — not deployment-equivalent for threshold purposes, but aggregated for total family-separation accounting.
4. Mandate pre-command training on PERSTEMPO policy.
The current instruction requires COs to manage and educate their staffs on PERSTEMPO. That mandate is unfunded and unenforced. A commanding officer who completed his pre-command course without a single mention of this program cannot be said to have received the required education. Congress should direct DoD to require PERSTEMPO policy to be a mandatory, inspectable component of pre-command curricula Navy-wide.
5. Expand the scope to capture family-perspective separation.
An amendment to 10 U.S.C. §136(d) should direct the USD(P&R) to track and report parent-child separation days attributable not only to the servicemember’s own deployment events, but to: Family Advocacy Program determinations restricting custody or visitation; family court proceedings materially connected to military service; and orders issued to a co-parent that result in relocation of children away from the servicemember. The DMDC already holds individual-level records. The FAP generates case-level data. These systems are not integrated because no one has required them to be.
6. Direct a GAO audit of PERSTEMPO completeness.
The 2018 GAO study (GAO-18-253) found that DoD lacked complete and reliable PERSTEMPO data even within the system’s existing scope. DoD addressed those recommendations for the events the system was designed to capture. Congress should commission a new GAO study examining the systematic gaps Capt. Akacem identified: training-between-assignment periods, pre-deployment work-up time, PCS transit, and the structural absence of any cross-service mechanism to capture orders-related family separation.
The Child’s Perspective Has Never Been the Metric
Capt. Akacem put the core problem precisely in a message to me: the system fails “certainly not from the affected military child’s perspective.” Every metric in the existing framework is an institutional metric — readiness, retention, and force structure. The CRS brief’s summary of PERSTEMPO research findings notes associations between deployment and “decreased military spouse well-being, increased child problematic behaviors, and negative effects on parent-child and member-spouse relationships.” Those findings are cited as context for the policy discussion. They are not what the system measures. They are the downstream externalities of a measurement framework that was designed to answer operational questions, not family ones.
A Navy captain with 27 years of service, who spent part of his career implementing the very program in question, discovered the system existed only when he went looking for policy arguments about military families and family law. He pulled his own record and found years of his life missing — not because someone made an error, but because the system was never required to capture it. He found a compensation structure so narrowly constructed that even servicemembers who clearly exceeded the deployment threshold Congress intended to protect never crossed the technical threshold for payment. And he found that the emergency waiver that gutted the original protections in 2001 remains the operative authority, still cited by name in the current DoD instruction, still pending rescission.
The infrastructure exists. The mandate exists. The data does not — because the question was never asked.
This piece is Part 6 of the Military Family Court Exposé Series. With thanks to CAPT Mehdi Akacem, USN, and Erhan Bedestani — for the policy work, the records, and the patience to explain all of it.
Sources
- CAPT Mehdi Alexander Akacem, USN — personal PERSTEMPO report (BUPERS Online, May 25, 2026); Systemic Considerations Regarding the Treatment of Military-Connected Families in the American Family Court System (policy memorandum, May 22, 2026, co-developed with Erhan Bedestani); and correspondence with author.
- Erhan Bedestani — Army veteran, family law advocate, co-author of Systemic Considerations and contributor to the FY2025 NDAA directive on military custody litigation data.
- DoD Instruction 1336.07, Management of Personnel Tempo, December 28, 2020.
- OPNAV Instruction 3000.13E, Navy Personnel Tempo and Operating Tempo Program, January 27, 2021.
- MILPERSMAN 7220-075, Guidelines for Hardship Duty Pay – Tempo (HDP-T), CH-49, November 18, 2014.
- Deputy Secretary of Defense Memorandum, “Suspension of Statutory Requirements for Personnel Tempo (PERSTEMPO) Management,” October 8, 2001.
- Congressional Research Service, Defense Primer: Personnel Tempo (PERSTEMPO), IF11007 v.17, May 5, 2026. Kristy N. Kamarck, Specialist in Military Personnel.
- Congressional Research Service, Military Parents and Child Custody: State and Federal Issues, R43091, May 31, 2013. David F. Burrelli and Michael A. Miller.
- 10 U.S.C. §§136(d), 991; 37 U.S.C. §§427, 436.
- GAO-18-253, Military Readiness: Clear Policy and Reliable Data Would Help DOD Better Manage Service Members’ Time Away from Home, April 25, 2018.
- Michael Phillips, “After the Uniform: It’s Time to Count the Days That Really Matter,” Father & Co., May 31, 2025.
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