602
Opinion of the Court
various statutory provisions that made the retired officers "a part of the army" for purposes of determining eligibility for the increase. Tyler, 105 U. S., at 245-246. The Court described "a manifest difference in the two kinds of retirement, namely, retiring from active service and retiring wholly and altogether from the service." Id., at 245. The latter group were ineligible for the pay increase because their connection to the service had been completely terminated. In interpreting the applicable statutory provisions, therefore, the "uniform treatment" of active-duty officers and the one class of retired officers was crucial to the decision; Tyler thus cannot be taken as establishing that retirement benefits are for all purposes the equivalent of current compensation for reduced current services.
Moreover, although McCarty referred to Tyler, it did not expressly approve Tyler's description of military retirement pay. To the contrary, by declining to hold that federal law forbade the States to treat military retirement pay as deferred income and resting our decision on another ground, we reserved the question for another case. To punctuate this point, we noted that, despite Tyler, the state courts were divided as to whether military retirement pay is current income or deferred compensation. See McCarty, 453 U. S., at 222-223, nn. 15 and 16. We also stated that although military retirement pay bears some of the features of deferred compensation, two indicia of retired military service include a restriction on activities and a chance of being recalled to active duty. Hence, "the possibility that Congress intended military retired pay to be in part current compensation for those risks and restrictions suggests that States must tread with caution in this area, lest they disrupt the federal scheme." Id., at 224, n. 16 (emphasis added).
In urging States to be cautious in treating military retirement pay, McCarty thus should not be read to consider Tyler as settling the issue. Indeed, our handling of the community property dissolution issue suggests the opposite. In Mc-
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