After 23 Frozen Years, the Pentagon's Hazard Pay Raise Is a Quiet Admission About Where Troops Stand

For the first time since 2002, the War Department is raising hostile fire pay and imminent danger pay — the extra money troops earn for serving where people are actively trying to kill them. For roughly a generation of service members, those rates never moved while the cost of everything else did. The decision to finally unfreeze them tells you something official statements won't: the government now expects dangerous deployments to be a sustained feature of military life, not an exception.