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I see the military as very different from other public sector jobs. You give up a lot of individual freedom when you make that promise to your country. That requires a different form of compensation.
My dad undoubtedly benefited from the GI bill, though he was a 17-year-old at Yale when he volunteered to serve in WWII. While money probably wasn't an issue (back then, you could work in the library or food services and make a huge difference with room/board, and tuition hadn't yet gotten out of hand), it gave him years of responsibility, and when he returned, he changed majors (which upset my grandparents to no end - he was pre-med and went into academia) and did something he loved.
FDR had the famous quote about unions in the public sector. Kennedy was the one who reversed course and set us down this path. We see the end of the path today in many municipalities. The problem is what do you do when you have a negotiating body (local and federal government) that has no incentive to control costs going up against a union that wields a certain amount of power? The result was inevitable. I can't go up to any public-sector retiree and say, "hey... you don't deserve that pension." That's absurd and mean. But the net weight of these deals has broken the budgeting process - we've spent money that our children and grandchildren need.
Can we wave a magic wand and make that debt go away? I don't know. It probably can't be done without greatly reducing the savings of those in the private sector. Either way, the government is breaking a promise made to a large group of people.
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