About Us
Mission Statement
Rules of Conduct
 
Name:
Pswd:
Remember Me
Register
 

Ask a Vet
Author: TriSec    Date: 02/08/2011 11:38:34

Good Morning. Today is our 2,883 day in Iraq and our 3,411th day in Afghanistan.

We'll start this morning as we always do; with the latest casualty figures from our ongoing wars, courtesy of Antiwar.com:

American Deaths
Since war began (3/19/03): 4436
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03): 4297
Since Handover (6/29/04): 3577
Since Obama Inauguration (1/20/09): 208
Since Operation New Dawn: 18

Other Coalition Troops - Iraq: 318
US Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 1,472
Other Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 843
Contractor Employee Deaths - Iraq: 1,487
Journalists - Iraq : 348
Academics Killed - Iraq: 448

We find this morning's Cost of War not working.

Looking at the number above, that's the "cost of war" in monetary terms only. Returning veterans face yet another challenge on the job front. You may have seen this on facebook over the weekend...the jobless rate for returning vets has spiked well above the national average to a whopping 15.2%.




The unemployment rate for OEF/OIF veterans soared to 15.2 percent in January—the highest rate recorded since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking this data in 2006. This number follows the already staggering 11.5 percent OEF/OIF veteran unemployment rate in 2010, compared to 9.4 percent for the rest of the country. More worrying still is how much worse the situation could get. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced in January that he intends to slim down the Army and Marines by 2015. This in addition to the planned drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, will create a flood of new veterans facing serious employment challenges.

President Obama’s announcement of the “Startup America” initiative this week shows the kinds of steps that need to be taken to improve veteran employment. But the message remains clear: we need a coordinated effort to ensure that every returning hero has a job.

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released unemployment data for the first month of 2011. While the unemployment rate decreased slightly to 9.0 percent for the general population, the rate for Iraq and Afghanistan-era veterans dramatically increased to 15.2 percent, up from 11.7 percent in December. Veterans make up a small segment of the population so measuring their unemployment rate can be a challenge. Nevertheless, in real numbers, 278,000 Iraq and Afghanistan-era veterans were unemployed in January.

Possible explanations for this spike include more OEF/OIF veterans entering the workforce, the winter weather reducing the amount of construction jobs, and the end of winter holiday employment. While these factors may be responsible for the uptick in the January OEF/OIF unemployment rate, these high unemployment numbers continue to trend upward with little relief in sight.

To further complicate matters, Secretary Gates, grappling with the current economic situation, announced in January that the Army and Marine Corps will begin to reduce the size of their forces in 2015. The secretary’s preliminary projections will coincide with scheduled troop withdrawals in Afghanistan and reduce the Army by 27,000 soldiers and the Corps by 15,000 to 20,000 Marines. Without a significant investment in reducing the veteran unemployment rate, both the scheduled drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan in the next few years and the reduction of the Army and the Marines will be a recipe for disaster for veterans.

President Obama’s newly launched “Startup America” initiative is an example of the type of employment program on which the government should be focusing. On Monday, the president launched this new initiative to nurture new start-up businesses and generate job creation. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will administer part of this new program focused on helping veterans launch and maintain their own businesses. According to the latest data from U.S. Census Bureau, veterans of all eras own approximately 2.4 million businesses. Many of these veterans are unaware of various types of assistance available to them such as loans, contracts and counseling sessions.

As part of “Startup America” the VA will establish two new programs to support veterans who want to start businesses. The first program will create a guide of the resources available to veterans launching new businesses. The second program will provide veterans who start new businesses with mentorship and training necessary to successfully sustain their businesses. For more information on these programs and the “Startup America” initiative, click here.

“Startup America” is a good first step by President Obama, but as more service members separate from the military and begin to look for jobs much more must be done. The federal government in partnership with local and state governments and the private sector must take steps to immediately to avert unemployment disaster. They can begin immediately by modernizing the Transition Assistance Program (TAPS) and universally requiring all service members to participate in its civilian employment training; incentivizing the hiring of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans through tax credits; and establishing a set of best practices for hiring and employing veterans that can be disseminated and adopted by all public and private organizations.


But even in bad news, there are little glimmers of hope. An organic farm near Camp Pendleton has partnered up with the Marines to offer returning vets workshops on becoming organic farmers, and the University of Nebraska has a program called "Combat Boots to Cowboy Boots. Every little bit helps, right?


VALLEY CENTER, Calif. — On an organic farm here in avocado country, a group of young Marines, veterans and Army reservists listened intently to an old hand from the front lines.

“Think of it in military terms,” he told the young recruits, some just back from Iraq or Afghanistan. “It’s a matter of survival, an uphill battle. You have to think everything is against you and hope to stay alive.”

The battle in question was not the typical ground assault, but organic farming — how to identify beneficial insects, for instance, or to prevent stray frogs from clogging an irrigation system. It was Day 2 of a novel boot camp for veterans and active-duty military personnel, including Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton, who might be interested in new careers as farmers.

“In the military, grunts are the guys who get dirty, do the work and are generally underappreciated,” said Colin Archipley, a decorated Marine Corps infantry sergeant turned organic farmer, who developed the program with his wife, Karen, after his three tours in Iraq. “I think farmers are the same.”

At their farm, called Archi’s Acres, the sound of crickets and croaking frogs communes with the drone of choppers. The syllabus, approved by Camp Pendleton’s transition assistance program, includes hands-on planting and irrigating, lectures about “high-value niche markets” and production of a business plan that is assessed by food professionals and business professors.

Along with Combat Boots to Cowboy Boots, a new program for veterans at the University of Nebraska’s College of Technical Agriculture, and farming fellowships for wounded soldiers, the six-week course offered here is part of a nascent “veteran-centric” farming movement. Its goal is to bring the energy of young soldiers re-entering civilian life to the aging farm population of rural America. Half of all farmers are likely to retire in the next decade, according to the Agriculture Department.

“The military is not for the faint of heart, and farming isn’t either,” said Michael O’Gorman, an organic farmer who founded the nonprofit Farmer-Veteran Coalition, which supports sustainable-agriculture training. “There are eight times as many farmers over age 65 as under. There is a tremendous need for young farmers, and a big wave of young people inspired to go into the service who are coming home.”

About 45 percent of the military comes from rural communities, compared with one-sixth of the total population, according to the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. In 2009, the Agriculture Department began offering low-interest loans in its campaign to add 100,000 farmers to the nation’s ranks each year.

Among them will probably be Sgt. Matt Holzmann, 33, a Marine at Camp Pendleton who spent seven months in Afghanistan. He did counterinsurgency work and tried to introduce aquaponics, a self-replenishing agricultural system, to rural villages.

His zeal for aquaponics led him to the farming class. “It’s a national security issue,” he said the other day outside a garage-turned-classroom filled with boxes of Dr. Earth Kelp Meal. “The more responsibly we use water and energy, the greater it is for our country.”


Finally this morning, even the military is capable of a bona-fide "Well, DER!" moment. For more than a few years, we've been hearing about the dangers of
"drowsy driving". Army doctors are only now starting to realize the dangers and long-term effects of chronically sleep-deprived soldiers.


Researchers are finding that longtime sleep deprivation can have devastating consequences, including chronic insomnia and psychological disorders.

Especially vulnerable are downrange troops on repeated deployments, experts say.

Army doctors now recognize that sleep-deprived troops can be a danger to themselves on the battlefield, with slower reaction times, fuzzy memories and impaired judgment. But as suicides continue to spike within the military and more servicemembers are diagnosed with PTSD, some researchers and doctors have focused on sleep deprivation as a possible root cause of those issues as well.

Lt. Col. (Ret.) Dave Grossman, a former West Point psychologist who has written and lectured extensively on the psychological impact of combat, is convinced that chronic sleep loss is contributing to the rising suicide rate in the military.

Suicide “is a very complex topic,” Grossman said. “But this chronic sleep deprivation is the new factor, a major new factor.”

Concerns about sleep-deprived soldiers in combat led Army doctors to create new guidelines last year requiring soldiers to get seven to eight hours of sleep each night when downrange. The previous guidelines recommended only half that.

But proper sleep is not easy to come by in combat, no matter what the guidelines say.

Spc. Colin Strook, 25, with the 3rd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment in Afghanistan’s Maiwand district, said the longest he’d gone without sleep this deployment was 24 hours.

“I’ve got no problems sleeping,” he said. “I just drink a lot of energy drinks to stay awake.”

While cans of Monster and Rip-It get tucked away on convoys, with troops guzzling three or four a day, research shows that stimulants — such as caffeine, dexamphetamine and modafinil — don’t mitigate all the effects of sleep loss, said Dr. Thomas Balkin, chief of the Department of Behavioral Biology at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, the military’s leading sleep research center.

Other troops turn to sleep medications, causing the number of prescriptions for Ambien and similar sleep-inducing drugs to spike. In 2004, servicemembers filled prescriptions for sleep medications nearly 70,000 times. In 2009, the number of prescriptions filled by Tricare pharmacists jumped to more than 200,000.

While these medications help troops get a good night’s rest, they are not meant for long-term use.

“None of these drugs,” Balkin said, “is as good as getting a good night’s sleep.”


So...it's rather long this morning, but there's a lot of veteran's news these days. My apologies for not including the "cost of war" numbers, but the website has been down all morning. (you know where it is by now anyway.)




 

31 comments (Latest Comment: 02/08/2011 23:12:48 by clintster)
   Perma Link

Share This!

Furl it!
Spurl
NewsVine
Reddit
Technorati