Bacon expects the first hearings of the quality-of-life panel will focus on pay issues. While service members get an annual raise -- including a 4.6% increase this year that was the largest pay bump in 20 years -- the lawmaker said the across-the-board raises have exacerbated a pay gap between junior and senior personnel.

Exactly how to fix that will depend on what the panel finds in its hearings, but Bacon suggested the possibility of reforming pay scales or adjusting stipends such as the Basic Allowance for Subsistence.

"We want a concrete plan on pay. For me, that would be a tremendous success. If I can ensure that our junior enlisted are not on SNAP or food stamps, right there is a huge success," he said. "I talk to a junior enlisted guy and he says he's on SNAP, that pisses me off. That should piss everybody off, make us all angry. A guy's serving our country and he has to have his family on SNAP. That's unacceptable."

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is the formal name for food stamps. The Basic Needs Allowance created by Congress two years ago was meant to address food insecurity among service members, but critics have said it falls short.

Issues with pay and food insecurity are just one potential point of concern for service members, concerns that in the aggregate may be contributing to the issues the military is facing with recruiting.

"Most of our services are not making their recruiting goals, they're not making their retention goals. There's a whole whole array of reasons why," said Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general. "I'm focused on quality of life. ... It's not the whole issue with recruitment and retention, but it's a big subset."

The Army last year missed its recruiting goal by about 15,000 soldiers, though there are signs this year will be better. The other services squeaked by to meet their recruiting goals, though in some cases they used tactics that could make meeting future benchmarks difficult such as dipping into their pool of delayed-entry applicants.

Bacon said he approached House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., about six months ago with a plan to tackle military quality-of-life issues, initially with the hope of being the chairman of the committee's personnel subcommittee.

The timing of the delivery of the tanks and supporting armored vehicles is also unclear. Berlin said Wednesday the first Leopards from Germany could be deployed in Ukraine in two months, but there has also been talk of that slipping into April. The Ukrainians would prefer them earlier for an offensive before the seasonal rains and the spring thaw when muddy conditions — known as bezdorizhzhia (roadlessness) in Ukrainian and rasputitsa in Russian — make the movement of troops and heavy armor more difficult.

On the plus side, training will already have been underway for weeks. Earlier this month, the U.S. military announced it was expanding combined warfare training for Ukrainian forces in Germany with the goal of honing the battle skills of the Ukrainians to better move and coordinate company and battalion-sized units and ensure all the fighting arms are operating in synch to reach their potential. But with the tanks not physically in Ukraine before April, the Ukrainians may not be able to preempt a Russian offensive.

Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukraine’s defense ministry, complained Thursday that Western countries have still made “no clear indication” to Kyiv about how many tanks will be given to Ukraine. He told the BBC: “We need 300 to 400 tanks for this to be a game changer. This tank coalition consisting of different countries, we have no clear indication of how many tanks each country will provide. We have communicated to our partners that this is the number that we need.”

That’s further hampering Kyiv’s battle planning as it remains unclear how many Leopards the Ukrainians will end up getting. Judging by pledges and hints so far, they may get only two-thirds of their ask and end up with between 100 to 200 of the tanks. Would that amount to a collective game changer? What can you do with 200 or so Leopards in defense or attack?

“The tanks will help Ukraine defend its positions with fewer casualties,” said John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now at the Atlantic Council think tank. “They will also prove invaluable if Moscow launches a major offensive from Belarus or elsewhere — something that Ukraine’s intelligence services expect.”