Congress authorized pay for servicemembers who deployed too long. The Navy implemented it in a way that almost no one can collect. The USS Gerald R. Ford is the latest proof.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co. | The Military Family Justice Project
On May 16, 2026, the USS Gerald R. Ford returned to Naval Station Norfolk after 326 days at sea — the longest carrier deployment the United States Navy has seen since the Vietnam War. Nearly 4,500 sailors came home after eleven months operating across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Atlantic.
Whether those sailors received the additional compensation Congress authorized for exactly this situation is a question that deserves a direct answer from Navy leadership. The evidence suggests most did not — and the reason has nothing to do with the 2001 waiver that suspended the original high-deployment allowance. It has to do with a separate structural problem in how the Navy implemented the compensation system that would have prevented many of them from collecting it, regardless.
That problem existed before the waiver. It will exist after the waiver is lifted, unless Congress specifically addresses it.
This piece is about that second problem — the one that existed before the waiver and will exist after it’s lifted, unless Congress specifically addresses it. It is the mechanism by which a squadron of naval aviators who moved their families across the Pacific, flew jets from Washington State to Japan via Hawaii and Midway Atoll, spent a week training on Iwo Jima, and then deployed for another five months accumulated well over 240 days away from home in a single year and received nothing.
What Congress Authorized
The FY2000 National Defense Authorization Act established the high-deployment allowance under 37 U.S.C. §436. It authorized up to $1,000 per month for active component servicemembers who exceeded specified deployment thresholds. The original statute set two separate triggers: 191 or more consecutive days deployed, or 401 or more days out of the preceding 730 days.
The aggregate threshold — 401 days out of 730 — was designed to catch exactly what the name implies: servicemembers who were deployed more days than not over a two-year period, regardless of whether those days came in one continuous stretch or several shorter ones. Congress understood that modern deployments don’t always look like a single unbroken tour. Rotational forces, surge deployments, back-to-back cycles — the aggregate threshold was the safety net for the servicemember who was perpetually gone, even if no single deployment crossed the consecutive threshold.
Separately, 10 U.S.C. §991 established a high-deployment threshold of 220 days out of any preceding 365, requiring advance approval from the Secretary of Defense — or a delegated flag officer — before a servicemember could be ordered to exceed it.
Three numbers, three distinct purposes: 191 consecutive days triggered the monthly allowance. 220 days in 365 required advance waiver approval. 400 days in 730 was the two-year aggregate trigger for the allowance.
That is what Congress wrote.
What the Navy Implemented
Hardship Duty Pay – Tempo (HDP-T) is the compensation instrument the Navy uses in place of the original high-deployment allowance, which was revoked when the 2001 waiver suspended the statutory thresholds. It is governed by MILPERSMAN 7220-075.
Under that policy, HDP-T eligibility requires 221 or more consecutive days deployed outside the continental United States. Days spent in CONUS or non-foreign OCONUS locations — including Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Guam — do not count toward the threshold at all. And the consecutive clock resets to zero whenever a servicemember’s deployment is interrupted: by leave, by a temporary return to the United States, by a PCS move, by a training period, or by any other event that breaks the unbroken chain of foreign OCONUS deployment days.
The aggregate threshold Congress wrote into 37 U.S.C. §436 — 401 days out of 730 — does not appear in MILPERSMAN 7220-075 as a compensation trigger. The safety net Congress designed for the perpetually-deployed servicemember has been replaced, in Navy implementation, with a single consecutive-days test that the structure of modern naval operations routinely defeats.
The result: a servicemember can be away from their family for the majority of a year, exceed the 220-day threshold Congress intended to limit, and collect no HDP-T — because no single unbroken stretch of foreign OCONUS deployment days reached 221.
VAQ-141: The Case Study
Between May 2011 and November 2012, the sailors and aviators of VAQ-141, a naval electronic attack squadron, lived this problem in precise detail.
The sequence, reconstructed from CAPT Mehdi Akacem’s PERSTEMPO record and his own account of the period:
In May 2011, VAQ-141 departed on an operational deployment that lasted 211 days, ending in December 2011. By any reasonable measure — and by the aggregate standard Congress originally authorized — that deployment alone put the squadron’s members deep into high-tempo territory.
What followed was not a rest period. The entire squadron — families included — packed up their homes and relocated from Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington, to Naval Air Station Atsugi, Japan. The move itself took two to three weeks, with most families living in hotels or temporary lodging during the transition. The aviators who flew the jets across the Pacific spent four to five days in transit, with overnight stops at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii and Midway Atoll due to mechanical issues. The squadron then spent approximately a week on Iwo Jima conducting pre-deployment training.
None of that time appears in the PERSTEMPO record. The PCS move fell outside the system’s event categories. The Pacific ferry transit wasn’t logged. The Iwo Jima work-up wasn’t captured. And critically — each of those interruptions reset the consecutive-deployment counter to zero.
Then, in May 2012, VAQ-141 deployed again for 62 days, followed by a third deployment of 92 days beginning in August 2012.
Total days away from home across the full period from the start of the 2011 deployment through the end of the 2012 deployments: well over 240 days in a rolling 365-day window, by Capt. Akacem’s accounting. Possibly more, given the unrecorded transit and work-up time.
Total HDP-T compensation received: zero.
The 211-day first deployment was the longest single consecutive stretch — and it fell short of the 221-day threshold by ten days. The subsequent deployments were shorter still. The aggregate total far exceeded what Congress intended to protect. The consecutive-days test, as implemented, caught none of it.
“Everyone in VAQ-141 who made that 2011 deployment and moved to Japan in 2012 got screwed by the HDP-T consecutive requirement,” Capt. Akacem said. “We had well over 240 days away from home in a 365-day period, but no one chunk was long enough to get us paid.”
Why the Loophole Exists
The consecutive-days requirement is not an accident. It reflects a deliberate implementation choice by the Navy, documented in MILPERSMAN 7220-075, that narrowed the compensation Congress authorized in ways that Congress did not require.
The statutory text of 37 U.S.C. §436 authorized the allowance for members who exceeded either the consecutive-days threshold or the aggregate threshold. MILPERSMAN implements only the consecutive-days trigger. The aggregate safety net — designed specifically for the servicemember who is perpetually away without crossing the consecutive threshold — was quietly dropped in implementation.
The CONUS exclusion compounds the problem. Days deployed in Hawaii, Alaska, and other non-foreign locations do not count toward HDP-T eligibility. For a naval aviation squadron conducting integrated training at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada before deploying, or cycling through Pearl Harbor during a deployment, those days are invisible to the compensation counter even if the servicemember never set foot in their home state.
The practical effect, as Capt. Akacem observed, is that the compensation structure is far more favorable to ship-based deployments — where a carrier or surface combatant remains continuously at sea for an extended period — than to aviation squadrons, special operations forces, or expeditionary units whose operational patterns involve multiple shorter deployments, rotational presence, and frequent movement between CONUS and OCONUS locations.
“Deployments on a ship are different lengths than, say, a squadron or SEAL team flying in and out,” he noted. “Easier to manipulate the consecutive days.”
The Ford Sailors
The Ford’s 326-day deployment makes this not a historical footnote but a documented, completed policy failure with nearly 4,500 names attached to it.
The Ford departed Naval Station Norfolk on June 24, 2025, and returned May 16, 2026 — the longest carrier deployment since Vietnam. At 326 days, the deployment far exceeded the 221-day consecutive threshold that triggers HDP-T eligibility under MILPERSMAN 7220-075, meaning Ford sailors were technically eligible for HDP-T, assuming their consecutive foreign OCONUS deployment days were correctly logged and certified by their commanding officers each month.
But the original high-deployment allowance Congress authorized — up to $1,000 per month under 37 U.S.C. §436 — remains revoked by the 2001 waiver. HDP-T pays a maximum of $495 per month. Congress authorized twice that. The 2001 memo cut it in half, and the cut has never been restored.
Whether Ford sailors actually received HDP-T — and whether the Navy ran the monthly over-220-days certification process that MILPERSMAN requires commanding officers to generate — has not been publicly confirmed. The policy requires it. The question deserves a direct answer from Navy leadership, particularly given that the Ford’s deployment was the longest since Vietnam and was extended multiple times beyond its original parameters.
The Connection to Family Court
The HDP-T loophole is not only a compensation problem. It is a documentation problem with direct consequences for military-connected families in custody proceedings.
A servicemember who was away from their family for 240-plus days in a year but received no HDP-T has a federal record that, in one sense, confirms the absence — the PERSTEMPO events are logged. But in another sense, the record actively misrepresents the situation: the compensation system’s failure to trigger suggests, to anyone who doesn’t understand the consecutive-days loophole, that the servicemember’s deployment tempo didn’t meet the threshold that Congress set. A family court judge looking at a PERSTEMPO record and a pay stub showing no HDP-T might reasonably conclude that the servicemember wasn’t deployed as heavily as claimed.
That inference would be wrong. But nothing in the federal record corrects it. And as established in Part 6 of this series, neither of the two military family law specialists who represented Capt. Akacem, in his own custody proceedings, had ever heard of the Touhy doctrine — the federal process by which a servicemember’s military records can even be requested in a state court proceeding. The record is incomplete, the compensation counter shows zero, and the legal mechanism for introducing either into evidence is unknown to the attorneys who specialize in exactly this problem.
The loophole doesn’t just cheat servicemembers out of pay. It corrupts the evidentiary record of their service.
What Congress Should Do
Two specific fixes follow directly from the documents:
Restore the aggregate threshold.
Amend 37 U.S.C. §436 to reinstate the aggregate compensation trigger — 401 days out of the preceding 730 — as an independent basis for HDP-T eligibility, alongside the consecutive-days trigger. A servicemember who was home fewer than half the days in a two-year period should not need to prove that all those days came in one unbroken stretch to qualify for the compensation Congress intended.
Restore the full allowance amount.
The FY2000 NDAA authorized up to $1,000 per month. MILPERSMAN 7220-075 caps HDP-T at $495. The difference was created by the 2001 waiver and its implementing guidance, not by any subsequent congressional action. Congress should restore the original ceiling as part of any NDAA that reinstates the suspended thresholds.
A third fix is structural: the CONUS and non-foreign OCONUS exclusions should be revisited for aviation, special operations, and expeditionary forces whose operational patterns routinely require extended time in Hawaii, Alaska, and other non-foreign locations as part of a deployment cycle that is, in every practical sense, continuous service away from family.
None of these requires new authority. They require Congress to reassert the authority it originally wrote into law — and to ask, plainly, why the Navy’s implementing policy narrowed that authority in ways that Congress never sanctioned.
This is Part 7 of the Military Family Court Exposé Series. Part 6, “The Government Has Been Counting the Wrong Days,” established the structural gaps in the PERSTEMPO system. Part 8 will examine why commanding officers responsible for implementing the program were never trained on it.
Sources
- CAPT Mehdi Akacem, USN — personal PERSTEMPO report (BUPERS Online, May 25, 2026) and correspondence with author.
- MILPERSMAN 7220-075, Guidelines for Hardship Duty Pay – Tempo (HDP-T), CH-49, November 18, 2014.
- OPNAV Instruction 3000.13E, Navy Personnel Tempo and Operating Tempo Program, January 27, 2021, Enclosure (1).
- DoD Instruction 1336.07, Management of Personnel Tempo, December 28, 2020, §3.5.
- Congressional Research Service, Defense Primer: Personnel Tempo (PERSTEMPO), IF11007 v.17, May 5, 2026. Kristy N. Kamarck, Specialist in Military Personnel.
- Deputy Secretary of Defense Memorandum, “Suspension of Statutory Requirements for Personnel Tempo (PERSTEMPO) Management,” October 8, 2001.
- 37 U.S.C. §436; 10 U.S.C. §991.
- GAO-04-534, Military Personnel: DoD Needs to Address Long-term Reserve Force Availability and Related Mobilization and Demobilization Issues, 2004 (cited in CRS IF11007 v.17).
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