May
19
Dollar-Driven Recruitment
By Allen McDuffee
April 10 was a telling day for military recruitment in Washington, even if the words “military recruitment” were barely uttered.
The end of two days of intense Congressional testimony from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a speech from George Bush and testimony from Defense Secretary Robert Gates in front of the Senate Committee on Armed Services triangulated the point we subconsciously knew all along. The troops aren’t coming home.
They informed us that troop levels in Iraq won’t drop to 100,000 by the end of the year, that Petraeus will have “all the time he needs” to contemplate additional withdrawals and that there would be a reduction in tour time from fifteen to twelve months for those deployed in the future–not an offer for the troops currently engaged, many of whom are in Iraq or Afghanistan for their second, third or fourth tour.
Calculating this imbalanced equation of maintaining troop levels while reducing tour duration should have led to the question, Where will the troops come from? Instead, this three-front assault kept media and Congress primarily focused on the ethics of withdrawing from Iraq–an argument the Bush Administration is much more comfortable having than one on the human costs of invasion and occupation.
In the midst of that April 10 speech, Bush boasted that “recruiting and retention have remained strong during the surge.” Of course he neglected to mention how the Army, because of low numbers of new recruits, was forced to refashion its enlistment criteria over the course of the last few years, allowing them to say at this moment that they were meeting their 2008 recruiting goals of 80,000 in the active Army and 26,500 for the Army Reserve.
Read more here.
May
12
New York Times editorial on veterans cites Three Trillion Dollar War
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May 11, 2008
The Suffering of Soldiers
Several years into a pair of wars, the Department of Veterans Affairs is struggling to cope with a task for which it was tragically unready: the care of soldiers who left Afghanistan and Iraq with an extra burden of brain injury and psychic anguish. The last thing they need is the toxic blend of secrecy, arrogance and heedlessness that helped to send many of them into harm’s way.
“Shh!” said the e-mail in February from Dr. Ira Katz, head of mental health services for V.A., to a colleague. “Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”
Dr. Katz’s hushed-up figure was nowhere near the number he gave to the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee last year; he said there had been 790 suicide attempts in all of 2007, and denied there was a suicide epidemic. The veterans affairs secretary, James Peake, apologized for Dr. Katz’s “unfortunate set of words” and promised more candor and transparency.
Give some credit, anyway, to Mr. Peake for realizing that there is no hope of denying or wishing away this problem. As the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes made clear in “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” their analysis of Iraq, the medical toll of a war rises in a swelling curve for many decades after the shooting stops. The current suicide figures include a large proportion of aging and ailing veterans of Vietnam. Suffering for that long, on that scale, will not be covered up.
A study by the Rand Corporation last month found that nearly one in five service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, or about 300,000, have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression. About 19 percent reported having a possible traumatic brain injury from these bomb-afflicted wars.
Alarmingly, only half have sought treatment, the study found, and they have encountered severe delays and shortfalls in getting care. The V.A.’s inspector general has faulted the agency’s case management of brain-injured veterans, and a federal lawsuit by veterans’ groups in San Francisco seeks to force the V.A. to streamline and improve treatment.
Fortunately, the solutions are clear: more money for mental health services, closer tracking of suicides and more aggressive preventive efforts, more efficiency at managing veterans’ treatment and more help for their families. If this country gave back to wounded troops even a fraction of the commitment and service that it has received from them, they will be well cared for.
May
9
Linda Bilmes, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Rieckhoff (IAVA) speaking at Harvard University
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May
9
John Cusack & $3 Trillion
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Yesterday John Cusack of Hollywood fame blogged about our book on DailyKos — here’s an excerpt:
$3 trillion is the projected cost of the Iraq War according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes. That’s a whole lot of zeroes, but what does it really amount to? How many homes would it buy for Americans who’ve fallen victim to the subprime meltdown? How many debts would it pay off for developing nations? As it turns out, one whole hell of a lot of all those things combined.
May
6
Why are so many veterans attempting suicide?
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By Lisa Desjardins, CNN Radio
The suicide rate among veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is at an all-time high. Some of the possible reasons include the length of deployments (15 months per tour, often extended involuntarily), the lack of safety while in theater (soldiers can be attacked any time, any place — several have been electrocuted in the shower due to faulty electrical wiring by underpaid foreign contractors), and the lack of support for veterans and their families when they return.
You would think that the Department of Veterans Affairs would be shouting from the rooftops: “WE HAVE A CRISIS: PLEASE HELP US FIX IT”. You would think the VA would be desperately recruiting help from Congress and the veterans organization. But instead, the VA is covering up the magnitude of the problem — even refusing to provide the basic statistics to Members of the Veterans committee in Congress unless they file “freedom of information act” request.
This pattern of obfuscation, denial and defensiveness has been the conduct of the VA for several years. Read this article to get a flavor of what’s going on here:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The chairman of the House Veterans Committee blasted the Veterans Affairs Department on Tuesday, accusing the agency of criminal failure to respond to evidence of rising suicide rates among former soldiers. Read more here.