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Author: TriSec    Date: 01/14/2014 10:59:41

Good Morning.

Today is our 4,482nd day in Afghanistan.

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

US Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 2,302
Other Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 1,108

We find this morning's cost of war passing through:

$ 1, 505, 270, 225, 00


So last week, Secretary Robert Gate's book debuted with a bang. Much was made about his "harsh" criticism of President Obama, but your mileage may vary, as always.


WASHINGTON — In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Barack Obama's leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president "doesn't believe in his own strategy, and doesn't consider the war to be his. For him, it's all about getting out."

Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was "skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail," Gates writes in "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War."

Obama, after months of contentious discussion with Gates and other top advisers, deployed 30,000 more troops in a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a phased withdrawal beginning in mid-2011. "I never doubted Obama's support for the troops, only his support for their mission," Gates writes.

As a candidate, Obama had made plain his opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion while embracing the Afghanistan war as a necessary response to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, requiring even more military resources to succeed. In Gates' highly emotional account, Obama remains uncomfortable with the inherited wars and distrustful of the military that is providing him options. Their different worldviews produced a rift that, at least for Gates, became personally wounding and impossible to repair.

It is rare for a former Cabinet member, let alone a defense secretary occupying a central position in the chain of command, to publish such an antagonistic portrait of a sitting president.


One sentence in that story rather leaps out at me: "I never doubted Obama's support for the troops, only his support for their mission," Which of course, is sour grapes. Obama ran on a platform of "Let's get the hell out of there", so on January 20, 2009 the mission changed. Five years on, we're still trying to get out, but the President's commitment to getting us home remains. Not sure what Mr. Gates is getting at with this book, but I don't have many problems with what the President has done.

But maybe Mr. Gates is trying to supplement his meager retirement income.
Followers of a certain IAVA member on Facebook may have already seen this story, but nevertheless we'll report on it here. Unfortunately, it seems that the military is taking cues from civilian life, and now there's two classes of military retirees; the haves and the have nots. Of course, guess which way pensions are going in both of these classes of retired soldier?


WASHINGTON — Top military brass will keep their specially boosted pensions despite the December budget deal that trimmed pension rates for other military retirees, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.

In 2007, Congress passed a Pentagon-sponsored proposal that boosted retirement benefits for three- and four-star admirals and generals, allowing them to make more in retirement than they did on active duty. The Pentagon had requested the change in 2003 to help retain senior officers as the military was fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and wanted to entice officers to remain on active duty.

That means a four-star officer retiring with 40 years of experience would receive a pension of $237,144, according to the Pentagon. Base pay for active-duty top officers is $181,501, according to Navy Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen, a Pentagon spokesman. Housing and other allowances can boost their compensation an additional third.

Last month's budget deal reduces cost-of-living adjustments, COLAs, by 1 percentage point a year until retirees reach age 62. At 62, the full COLA will return and pensions will bounce back to their full value. The plan is estimated to save $6 billion.

Currently, after 20 years of service, regardless of age, a military retiree qualifies for a pension amounting to 50 percent of final pay with an additional 2.5 percentage points for each year of service beyond 20.

But the deal does not affect the 2007 enhancement for top pension, which has allowed pension rates for those officers to spike. Figures for 2011 show that a four-star officer retiring with 38 years' experience received a yearly pension of about $219,600, a jump of $84,000, or 63 percent beyond what was previously allowed. A three-star officer with 35 years' experience would get about $169,200 a year, up about $39,000, or 30 percent. Before the law was changed, the typical pension for a retired four-star officer was $134,400.


Finally this morning, we'll go back more than two decades now to the first Gulf War. (1991; can you believe it?) One of the maladies that continues to plague veterans of that conflict is the still mysterious and poorly understood "Gulf War Syndrome". Research and treatment has been going on for decades, and you'd think that any progress at all will be quickly and widely shared among VA providers. Of course you'd be wrong. And the leading researcher isn't happy about it.


WASHINGTON — As Department of Veterans Affairs physician Nancy Klimas told an agency panel Tuesday about the many successful ways her clinic has been treating Gulf War illness, veterans have responded with a combination of hope and anger.

The hope came because her clinic appears to be making headway in using research-based methods to treat veterans with the disease, which consists of symptoms ranging from headaches to memory loss to chronic fatigue, and plagues one in four of the 697,000 veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War against Iraq.

The anger came because, although Klimas had been using at least some of her methods for a decade, none of them have been disseminated throughout the VA system for use in other clinics. Her testimony was part of the ongoing fight between Gulf War veterans, who believe the government is ignoring physical causes for their ailments, and the VA, which has been reluctant to support the veterans’ claims.

Klimas heads the Institute for Neuro Immune Medicine at Nova Southeastern University in Miami, and she leads Gulf War Illness research at the VA Medical Center in Miami. She said she has asked her patients to be their own advocates because many physicians don’t believe the illness is anything but psychiatric.

Others, Klimas said, don’t have time to read the training manual VA put out to help them care for Gulf War veterans, don’t have more than 15 minutes to deal with each patient, or don’t know how to refer them to specialty clinics where they can get care — and some simply don’t care to learn.

“That was a great presentation, but I can’t resist adding that this information has been in the hands of Dr. Klimas for 12 years,” said Jim Binns, chairman of the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, which met with VA officials Tuesday.

For 23 years, Gulf War veterans have argued they were exposed to toxins, such as pesticides, insect repellents, anti-nerve agent pills and nerve agents that caused them to be sick. They’ve said they do not believe their ailments are due to stress because of the war’s short duration and because the majority of troops were not exposed to the fighting. But until 1997, the VA focused on psychological disorders and not research to determine physical causes for the ailments.

In 1997, Congress mandated Binns’ committee after a congressional report found that the efforts to find causes and treatments for Gulf War illness by government agencies were “irreparably flawed.”

Binns said Klimas’ use of research to create a plan to treat veterans is what should have happened at the top level.

Robert Jesse, the VA’s principal deputy undersecretary for health, said the agency was trying to develop a “medical home” program that would allow doctors to spend more time with specialty cases, such as those involving Gulf War illness.

“This is a wholesale change in how we’re approaching care in VA,” Jesse said.


And so it goes; another week at war.
 

57 comments (Latest Comment: 01/14/2014 23:26:09 by Raine)
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