washington scene
The medical evaluation board phase of the four-step process was the major bottleneck. Staffing shortages and increased workload were blamed for failing to meet goals.
The GAO recommended DoD and the VA conduct a business process review of IDES, improve the accuracy of case information at the point of data entry, and consider alternative approaches to measure satisfaction.
MOAA finds the report extremely disappointing. It provides yet another example of why we must keep drawing attention to the continuing problems our wounded, ill, and injured troops and their families and caregivers experience.
Something's Happening: Wake Up!
Stomach-churning cuts are ahead.
You don’t have to be of the Vietnam generation to remember the Buffalo Springfield lyrics, “Something’s happening here … what it is ain’t exactly clear,” as it’s been replayed on radio, on TV, and in the movies for almost 50 years.
But if you’ve been observing military budgeting over that period, then it doesn’t take a flashback to see what’s going on now.
As every war has wound to an end, there’s been a rush to gain a “peace dividend” by cutting the military — reducing forces, capping pay raises, closing bases, cutting benefits, and so on.
And whenever we’ve run into periods of national budget austerity, it’s been the same story.
Think of it as a roller coaster.
In the early 1970s, we moved to the all-volunteer force and plussed up first-term military pay. After the war, we whacked military people programs until retention crashed in the late ’70s.
Then we scrambled to fix that by plussing up pay and benefits in the early 1980s, only to resume capping pay raises, cutting retirement, downsizing forces (after Gulf War I), delaying COLAs, and kicking older retirees out of military health care over the next 15 years until retention problems cropped up again in the late 1990s.
For the past decade-plus, Congress has worked to redress those problems — restoring pay comparability, restoring military health care coverage for older retirees, and repealing the ill-advised retirement cuts for post-1986 entrants.
That sensitivity to military needs has been compounded because we’ve also been at war for the past decade, with the sacrifices of military service prominently reflected in every morning paper and evening news broadcast.
That empathy has led to a variety of additional major improvements, including dramatic compensation upgrades for disabled retirees and surviving spouses and major new GI bill benefits that can be transferred to family members.
So much for the past 50 years; let’s focus on right now.
Today’s troops and families have borne a vast burden of wartime sacrifices not experienced since World War II.
But from a compensation and benefits standpoint, most of them have known nothing but improvements — rather big ones, at that. They’re pretty happy with the current package and are mostly oblivious to the years of legislative battles it took to get there.
38 MILITARY OFFICER DECEMBER 2012
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