What's New
| VA Secretary Pressed by Senator on High Percentage of Wrongly Denied Benefit Claims |
March 16, 2010, Washington, DC (CQ Politics) - A leading Republican senator on Tuesday asked Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to explain why so many veterans’ benefit claims are wrongly denied, resulting in a high rate of reversal on appeal. |
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| Profile of New Veterans' Courts in New York Times |
Defendants Fresh From War Find Service Counts in Court - VCS Supports Veterans' Courts March 15, 2010, Charleston, West Virginia (New York Times) — When Judge Robert C. Chambers handed down Timothy Oldani’s federal sentence for selling stolen military equipment on eBay, he gave the former Marine a break. |
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| Presdent Obama Donated $250,000 of Nobel Prize Money to Fisher House |
March 11, 2010, Washington, DC (New York Times) - President Obama made good on his promise to give his $1.4 million Nobel Prize money to charity, releasing the names on Thursday of the organizations that will benefit. |
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| Philanthropist Bobby Willis to Build New $3.3 Billion Hospital for VA in Farmington, NM for Rural and Native American Veterans |
Proposed state-of-the-art Kirtland veterans clinic could provide as many as 8,000 jobs March 14, 2010, Farmington, New Mexico (Farmington Daily Times) — A proposed veterans complex in Kirtland centered around a new hospital, backed by a wealthy entrepreneur and costing an estimated $3.3 billion promises to bring state-of-the-art medicine and other benefits to veterans, as well as 8,000 jobs to the local economy. |
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| Dr. Haley at UTSW Presents Compelling Brain Images Showing Gulf War Illness |
VCS Asks VA: Since UTSW Research Remains Vital to Understanding Gulf War Illness, Then Why Did a Handful of VA Staff in Washington Impede UTSW Contract and Then End Funding for UTSW? March 9, 2010, Salt Lake City, Utah (Science News) - Nearly two decades after vets began returning from the Middle East complaining of Gulf War Syndrome, the federal government has yet to formally accept that their vague jumble of symptoms constitutes a legitimate illness. Here, at the Society of Toxicology annual meeting, yesterday, researchers rolled out a host of brain images – various types of magnetic-resonance scans and brain-wave measurements – that they say graphically and unambiguously depict Gulf War Syndrome. |
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Reality: Military Repeatedly Fails to Meet Recruiting Goals
Written by VCS
Saturday, 02 January 2010 21:21
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( But DoD Cleverly Cooks the Books and Claims Success ) The CSM column by Jamie Holmes falsely claimed that, "For the first time since the establishment of all-volunteer forces in 1973, the US military has met all of its recruiting goals." Not only is this wrong, it ignores a mountain of evidence clearly available in the press showing the military remains in crisis. The lead sentence is so far from reality that I stayed late at my office at Veterans for Common Sense on New Year’s Eve to respond with facts. We progressives need to kill the myth of “successful” military recruiting dreamed up by someone who must read military press releases and then regurgitate them whole. The national recruiting failure is so bad, and the pressure on recruiters so overwhelming, that Houston, Texas recently saw a cluster of Army recruiter suicides, according to the Houston Chronicle. In reality, the military failed to reach new enlistment goals for the past decade. The military accomplished this by manipulating, and thereby significantly lowering, the number of new recruits needed to fill the ranks. The military accomplished this voodoo bookkeeping by relying upon more than 500,000 individual National Guard and Reserve service members to fill recruiting shortages. The true number is even higher because many Guard and Reserve activated and deployed twice or more. While Holmes claims “success” for military recruiting, the Pentagon’s top leaders actually cheated and lied with statistics by using "stop loss," the horrible policy that forcibly kept nearly 200,000 additional service members on active duty months after their enlistment contract was over, thus temporarily inflating the number of troops in the military, and reducing the number of new recruits needed. Furthermore, the military has spent billions of dollars on advertising and more recruiters to make the hard sell to potential recruits to go to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Billions more were spent on cash bonuses in a desperate attempt to increase enlistment and re-enlistment. In a time of the worst economic collapse in 80 years, the financial incentives (cash, healthcare, housing, college, and citizenship) are enormous for low-income Americans as well as non-citizen residents. The military also raised the age limit and lowered standards to allow more people to quality. Therefore, let us put a stake through the heart of the media / military myth claiming the military has met recruiting goals: the military has been short at least 700,000 new recruits the past decade, a minimum of 70,000 per year, by cooking the books just like Ken Lay (remember Enron?) and Bernie Madoff (and how he stole $50 billion?). The bottom line failure of the two current wars is that, after nine years, our government has no plan to handle the 480,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans (out of 2.2 million deployed) who have flooded into Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals and clinics. Half of new VA patients from the two wars are diagnosed with at least one mental health condition. The deployment of 30,000 new troops and tens of thousands of contractors / mercenaries to Afghanistan will only further exacerbate the problems. The military personnel shortage, along with poor planning for war, has forced the military to deploy more than 800,000 troops twice or more, with many fighting in combat for one year three or four times. Yes, the situation is dire for our veterans. Veterans for Common Sense expects up to one million casualties from the two current wars, half of whom will suffer from traumatic brain injury or post traumatic stress disorder, by the end of 2013. Over the next 40 years, the estimated cost to taxpayers is up to $1 trillion. As “60 Minutes” will report on Sunday, January 3, more than one million veterans are now waiting for disability benefits from VA, a clear example of how our Federal Government remains unable to meet the crushing demand for assistance. Shame on the Christian Science Monitor for publishing lies peddled by Pentagon propaganda specialists – spin artists who should be fired promptly by President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates so there is accountability. What we don’t need now is another Judith Miller. What we do need is honesty about the facts as well as a serious strategic casualty plan from President Obama, Defense Secretary Gates, and Veterans Affairs Secretary Shinseki that reduces the shockingly high number of our veterans from falling through the cracks when they return home from war. |









