A Simple Government (22 page)

Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are at especially high risk for homelessness. Some have portrayed homeless veterans as very likely to have a drug or alcohol problem. In fact, that is often an incorrect stereotype. While some vets are indeed homeless because of service-related mental health issues, including addiction, others are servicewomen who, with their children, have been victimized by foreclosures. Because subprime loans were heavily marketed to military families, the rate of foreclosure in military neighborhoods rose four times faster than the U.S. average rate in 2008. Veterans’ advocates are calling for a one-year moratorium before the home of a veteran returning from combat can be put into foreclosure. I think this is a great idea; in fact, it’s the least we can do for people who have sacrificed and risked so much for the rest of us.

But not everyone, it seems, is grateful. Sometimes the homes of troops serving abroad have been seized because they were not in residence to comply with the rigid rules of homeowners’ associations. If such wrongheaded groups cannot respect the debt they owe to their neighbors in the military, who are protecting their lives, perhaps laws should be enacted to protect their absent neighbors’ property rights.

In 2009 the military vowed to end homelessness for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. As I write, it is estimated that about 130,000 of these men and women remain homeless every night. We definitely have a long way to go.

If you think the government bureaucracy will do a good job of handling your health care (that would be ObamaCare), one look at the VA system will change your mind. The existing system is both extremely frustrating and flagrantly wasteful, as you may know from your own experience or the challenges faced by family and friends. Good care is available, but only after waiting up to six months for the first appointment. Often, veterans must travel great distances to get care. The situation is worse for women than for men; as more women have joined the ranks, the system has not kept up with their needs. In general, processing of claims takes between four months and a year, while appeals of claims take, on average, two years. In the meantime, some vets are so badly injured that they can’t work and have no income.

Incredibly, the DOD’s and VA’s separate systems for health records are not yet fully compatible. Files are lost as veterans move from the DOD system into the VA. The DOD does not even keep electronic records, now considered an essential component of health records. To fix this mess, all patient records should be electronic and easily transferable between the two departments.

A further complication is that there are two parallel disability benefits systems, each with its own medical examinations and rates of compensation based upon disability ratings. There is a pilot program in place to create a single system, but it has to be expanded nationwide in order to cover all veterans.

Speaking of disability, let’s examine the effectiveness of the VA itself. Officials readily admit that almost 20 percent of its disability ratings are
wrong
. It’s also true that the outcome of a claim depends heavily on the region where the claim is decided. Believe it or not (considering the time it typically takes to process claims), the VA evaluates claims processors by how quickly they process the paperwork,
not
by the correctness of their decisions. Obviously, claims processors need better training. The VA needs to create a system that values accuracy above all, no matter where the claimant lives.

Not everything is grim for veterans, however. Just as NASA’s “race for space” led to the development of our modern world of computer technology, satellite communications, and so much more that we now take for granted, the long recoveries endured by our injured veterans have led to amazing advances in trauma care, burn treatment, and prosthetics. It is never less than heartbreaking to see the injuries of a soldier wounded in ambush or battle. Yet centers like the facial prosthetics lab at Lackland Air Force Base are developing remarkable techniques to ease the wounded patients’ transition back to normal life, when possible. “Our goal is to give them the best of the best,” says lab director Dr. Joe Villalobos. “We’re going to give them the ideal treatment.” Our veterans deserve nothing less.

The title of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, passed in 2008, suggests a creditable program. In fact, an expansion is in order. On the one hand, the benefits to pay for veterans to go to college are excellent, but these checks often arrive very late, leaving the beneficiaries scrambling to pay for tuition, food, and housing. There’s just no excuse for that. Also, other worthwhile forms of education, such as vocational schools and Internet-based learning, still aren’t covered. They should be.

As for employment, it’s proved very tough for veterans to come home from overseas and find themselves smack in the middle of the Great Recession. During 2009, the unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans almost doubled. Let us recognize and praise companies that do the right thing for our veterans by giving them opportunities for employment. And let’s offer them tax credits in return, so that other potential employers will be motivated to join in. Congress should be amenable to this idea, since it has already passed the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act, giving veterans preference in hiring for government jobs. Of course (and I hope you’re not surprised), it exempted congressional staff jobs—an act so shameful I hope it’s been rectified by the time this book reaches print.

Where employment is concerned, too many servicemen and -women don’t know their rights, and too many businesses don’t understand their obligations under law. The situation is most complicated for National Guardsmen and reservists: According to the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, businesses are required to take them back when they return home from a tour of duty, but many employers aren’t complying. Some companies refuse to hire them, period, because they don’t want the hassle of replacing them if there’s another deployment.

A veteran can pursue an employment claim based upon the law, but the burden is on him to prove that he lost the job because of his service. This is backward. The burden should be on the employer to establish a legitimate reason for not taking him back. Yet there’s another factor that discourages veterans from making a claim: Incredibly, it can take two years for such employment claims to be resolved.

In addition to the daunting employment picture for the National Guard and reserves, their overuse in Iraq and Afghanistan has been a tremendous drain on them and their families, their communities, and businesses that would have liked to put them to work. In their civilian lives, a great number of them protect us as our police, firefighters, and paramedics. But since 9/11, as you may be amazed to read, there have been times when almost half of our combat troops in Iraq and more than half of those in Afghanistan have been either National Guard or reserves.

I saw this firsthand during my ten-and-a-half-year tenure as a governor, which included serving as commander in chief of our eleven thousand men and women of the Army and Air Force National Guard. Repeated deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and domestic duty, such as helping out in the aftermath of Katrina, wore heavily not only on the guard personnel but also on their families and employers.

Forgive me for bragging here about my guardsmen, but I’m going to anyway. The 39th Brigade of the Arkansas Guard were actually the first National Guard troops to make it to New Orleans from outside Louisiana. Later, when General Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, and I were on a flight to Iraq, he told me a terrific story about the timing of their arrival. He was being quizzed by President Bush at the Katrina national command center in Texas as to when the guard would get to New Orleans. Then, at that very moment, the TV screen showed the 39th rolling into town. “There they are, Mr. President!” the relieved general shouted. When he told me the story, he said, “I will always love your guys from the 39th!”

As that event proved, we need our National Guard at home for emergencies. Did you know that at the time of Hurricane Katrina a third of the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan? This is insane, since they’re the go-to guys when disaster strikes: hurricanes, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, ice storms, earthquakes, and man-made catastrophes like the horrendous BP oil deluge. Naturally, when large numbers of the guard are overseas, our governors are less able to respond to a crisis quickly and effectively. Getting help from other states eats up precious time and requires lots of red tape. (Oh, I forgot. . . . There’s always the White House to provide a timely and worthwhile response!) Yet thank the Lord, there does exist an avenue that most people are not aware of: a very useful, efficient system known as the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). EMAC allows governors to share assets with other states on a moment’s notice without the endless, time-consuming nonsense that so often slows things down when the federal bureaucracy is involved. Governors know that EMAC, though almost never mentioned in the media, is effective, quick, and responsive. It can make the difference between life-saving response and failure.

By the way, when our guardsmen are deployed overseas, their equipment goes with them. Much of it—including items you’d think we just might need sometime back home, such as helicopters and trucks—somehow gets left over there. So these tours of duty deprive states of both the personnel and the equipment required for emergencies. And without the latter, we can’t even train new recruits.

Finally, there’s one more reason to keep our National Guard here, and that’s law enforcement, particularly along our troubled border with Mexico. It is the law, by the way, that our active-duty military and our reserves cannot participate in actions there.

“We’ll know it when we see it” may work as a definition of pornography, as a Supreme Court justice once suggested, but not as a definition of victory in a war. And if we don’t know the precise end our military is trying to achieve, we can’t focus on the means to achieve it.

For example, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve been following the strategy of “clear, hold, and build.” In other words, we do it all! That is a dangerous lack of focus. Instead, the goal given to our troops should be to clear the enemy from targeted territory—just that alone. Next, the host country’s troops and police should hold that cleared territory while civilians build, or rebuild, its infrastructure and institutions. To put it bluntly, we’ve had too many of our troops spending too much of their time painting schools and digging wells. They should be allowed to focus on killing Islamic extremists who want us all to die.

Because of this scattershot, imprecise mission, a small group of Americans has borne the brunt of these wars by deploying again and again. The problem is that the DOD is calling on them to do tasks that should instead be undertaken by U.S. civilian agencies and our NATO allies.

As the former top commander of our forces in Afghanistan and a retired army general, Ambassador Eikenberry is in a unique position to know exactly what our military should and should not be doing. For that reason, he’s asked for more civilian personnel so that our troops can concentrate on their military mission, but he’s so far received only about one civilian expert for every hundred troops—nowhere near what he needs. To carry out the many nonmilitary goals of the war in Afghanistan, the DOD needs more support from the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Justice Department, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security.

We could also use much more military support from our NATO allies, but most have shown an aversion to combat. Most of the fighting is in southern Afghanistan, but both France and Germany have been unwilling to go there. (Think there’s a connection? Oui, oui!) Okay, if NATO won’t send or effectively deploy combat troops, let it contribute to stabilizing the country by at least sending more personnel to help with training the police, building infrastructure, and establishing civilian institutions. Then we can get back to the dirty work of fighting and defeating terrorists.

Under the Obama administration, the question of whether or not openly gay men and women should be able to serve in the military has become one of the hot topics of the day. I have asked numerous military men and women ranging in rank from generals to fresh recruits what they thought about this very controversial and divisive issue, but the real question to be answered is what’s in the best interest of the military mission. The military is not about individual preferences but about cohesion of the unit. Let me attempt to address this controversy and shed some light on the likely impact of any policy change.

In 1993 Congress affirmed that the unit comes before the individual, passing legislation that argued “[since] military life is fundamentally different from civilian life” and imposes “little or no privacy,” homosexuals cannot be allowed to serve. If they were, they would create “an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.”

But President Clinton contradicted that law by introducing the absurd concept of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), which President Obama now wants to rescind. Before you applaud, understand that he does not intend to overturn a policy that allows for the recruitment of homosexual soldiers but rather to let them serve openly rather than (as now) discreetly. His aim cannot possibly be to strengthen our military, because it would do just the opposite: create unnecessary tensions, divisions, and stress among men and women who must depend on one another in order to survive. His motivation is purely political, a ploy to strengthen his support from the left. This is the liberal “core” that has been disappointed with him because they expected him to cut and run from Iraq and Afghanistan and close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo. In other words, he is using our servicemen and servicewomen as pawns in shoring up his political base.