Veterans for Common Sense

June 9, 2008 – In the Army’s ongoing push to provide fresh troops for the war zone and give a break to repeat deployers, personnel officials are targeting not only soldiers who have never gone, but also those whose combat tours were brief or long ago.

Now experts are tracking every soldier’s deployment record, zeroing in on a formula that considers frequency, length and total months in a combat zone, as well as skills, experience and availability.

They’re keying in on what they call the “deployment equity” factor, seeking to fill combat-zone demand with soldiers who have minimal boots-on-the-ground time. At Human Resources Command in Alexandria, Va., career branch managers scour the rolls for deployable soldiers while they look for at-home assignments for those with multiple combat tours.

The new focus on the duration of those tours, rather than just the number of deployments, is an evolution of the deployment process after seven years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, HRC officers say.

“We have officers who may have multiple deployments for maybe 90 days at a time,” said Lt. Col. John Waller, branch chief for company-grade logistics officers.

He manages captains, he said, “who may have deployed three times but only for a maximum of a year, while other officers may have two deployments of 12 and 15 months each and are now on their third. So we dig deeper; it’s not just the number of times deployed but the total number of months deployed.”

Army records show that more than 30,000 soldiers have never deployed, and thousands more logged only months in the war zone or have not been there for years.

Personnel officials say fairness dictates that these soldiers be placed in operational units before those with multiple combat tours of a year or more are again issued deployment orders.

Nearly 525,000 active-duty soldiers have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, Army data show, including 204,000 who have served more than one combat tour. Many have served three, four or even five rotations.

Today, 140,000 soldiers are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. A new round of deployments begins in the fall for 38,000 soldiers, 21,000 of them from active-duty units.

Software helps
Officers and warrant officers make up 16 percent of the Army, and their career managers stay in touch with them by e-mail and phone, even in the larger combat arms branches such as infantry, which has more than 6,000 officers. Their deployment time is tracked on an individual basis through that correspondence and electronic records.

Managers for the Army’s majority of enlisted soldiers use a Web-based software program that shows a detailed view of each soldier’s specialty, availability and deployment history. That program was refined after its first iteration in 2007 to show the frequency of deployments. It has been refined again to show the number of months a soldier has spent at war.

“At least we have the tools to do the best possible job we can,” said Deborah Jacobs, chief of operations for the management division of the Enlisted Personnel Management Directorate, which designed the program and manages the staff that continues to refine it.

“when people say, ‘Oh, they don’t even know I’ve deployed five times,’ that’s just not true,” she said. “We do know, and we do care about that.” Deployment duration is measured in months, and any soldier receiving hostile-fire pay is counted as deployed, regardless of location, according to HRC.

The time-away clock starts ticking, Jacobs said, when the deploying unit submits the names and Social Security numbers of its soldiers to HRC at any point between home-station departure and when they arrive in theater.

The ticking stops when that unit submits the data upon redeployment. The same information is being used to determine dwell time, which, as of now, is based on a one-for-one match of up to 12 months. So a soldier who deploys for six months is supposed to get six months’ dwell time. On the other hand, a soldier deployed for 15 months is guaranteed only up to 12 months.

Soldiers get tapped for new deployment orders based on skill, experience, availability and deployment history.

For example, if a unit requests a certain number of soldiers in a specific military occupational specialty in the military intelligence branch, that branch manager will search for the names of all the soldiers in the MOS and, by process of elimination using those variables, end up with a short list of eligible soldiers.

In that group, if their skills, experience and availability are equal, the branch manager will turn to the soldiers’ deployment history to make a decision, “on the rare occasion that you would find all variables equal,” Jacobs noted.

Until recently, the “deployment history” category was not available as part of the equation.

Some deployment decisions are made based on a soldier’s need, such as an infantryman who may not have logged platoon sergeant time. If he is compared with a soldier who has already done his platoon sergeant time, he’s likely to be the one chosen.

“We have a lot of soldiers who do want to deploy and are volunteering to deploy, because in today’s environment, that right shoulder patch is very important for promotion, professional development and all those things,” Jacobs said.

There is no mathematical equation, Jacobs said, adding, “If there were a cookie-cutter approach we could take, we wouldn’t need people to do our jobs.”

Ironically, the Defense Department shelved a plan for “high-deployment pay,” a formula that would have compensated troops for repeat war tours. Now, not only is the Army tracking individual deployment time, it has pushed a “warrior pay” proposal that would reward soldiers for cumulative time on combat tours.

Who’s doing what
Data compiled by HRC between Oct. 1, 2001, and March 1 shows that 63.6 percent of active-duty soldiers had deployment history, 9.2 percent had pending deployment orders, 7.4 percent were in basic training and 1.7 percent were unavailable to deploy because of medical, legal or other circumstances.

Another 11.5 percent of the active-duty population was listed as recruiters or drill sergeants; in transit, training or some other hold status; or in operational units that may have just redeployed and have no current deployment orders.

The remaining 6.7 percent of soldiers — about 35,000 active-duty troops — are eligible for reassignment to operational units or for an individual replacement requirement. They work in non-operational units, largely under organizations such as Training and Doctrine Command or the Pentagon.

Deployment numbers will never reach a 100 percent rate, according to HRC officials, because of the constantly shifting nature of the Army’s population. That includes growth of the force, which is programmed to reach 547,000 by the end of fiscal 2010, and the loss of soldiers who leave the Army at a rate of about 80,000 each year, taking their deployment history with them.

With the combination of seven years of war with increasingly steady, lengthy rotations, and the predictions by Army leadership that the U.S. is in for a period of persistent conflict, branch managers are more focused than ever on that deployment equity, they say, because people are tired, families are stressed to the max and equipment is worn.

Infantry officer branch chief Lt. Col. Ron Clark, who manages the careers of more than 6,100 infantry officers, offered as an example the 808 infantry majors he has on his radar screen.

“Only eight have not deployed, and five of those have pending deployment orders,” he said. “A number of them have deployed multiple times … the high end is 49 months deployed. So it’s a question of equity, of making sure we don’t rotate officers into the fight too quickly again.”

Clark pointed out that although a good number of infantry captains are going through Infantry Officer Basic Course, Basic Officer Leadership Course or Maneuver Captains Career Course at any given time, the units that are deploying are always 100 percent manned. Conversely, some non-operational assignments are going unfilled because of the war-zone demand.

The same is true for Clark’s counterpart on the enlisted infantry side, Col. Marlon Blocker, who searches for deployment and dwell opportunities for more than 62,000 enlisted infantrymen, the Army’s largest military occupational specialty.

“We’re almost beyond the point of finding soldiers who have not deployed,” Blocker said.

He said that his effort is focused as much on those with multiple deployments as it is on those who want to keep going to the war zone.

He pointed out that high re-enlistment rates are helping alleviate the war-zone demand because many of those re-upping are requesting to return to the war zone.

“We have senior NCOs who are reaching retirement dates and requesting to go to deploying units. There are a lot of infantry soldiers who are trying to get back into the fight again,” he said.

Balancing the needs of the institutional Army and the requirement to fill deploying units means somebody has to make do with less. That is reflected, for example, in TRADOC centers and schools where cadres that might normally be manned with eight instructors would have to make do with six or less.

“We do have enough captains to fill the combat formations, but with modularity and transformation, the growth of the Army, the projected growth of the Army, and attrition to a lesser degree, we don’t have enough captains to fill the organizations that aren’t combat formations,” said Lt. Col. Jamie Inman, who manages the careers of about 4,300 field artillery officers.

“We’re meeting our requirement for the [war] at the expense to a degree of the institutional Army,” Inman said, citing statements made by Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey, who has testified before Congress on several occasions that the Army “is out of balance” because of the requirements of overseas commitments.

“There are some specialties that are a few short right now, and there’s a plan to address that in the coming years,” said Col. Thomas Webb, chief of the Officer Personnel Management Directorate. “But you can figure it out, it’s not that hard, our focus is on the fight forward and we’re going to meet the mission.”

Military intelligence branch chief Lt. Col. Bryan DeCoster said his soldiers are “right up there with logistics, field artillery and infantry” with its captains, 93 percent of whom have deployed.

“That’s primarily because the company-grade officers are most in demand downrange, and then MI is a very large requirement with the transition teams,” DeCoster said of the small, embedded transition teams training Iraqi and Afghan security forces in partnered arrangements, sometimes within a brigade or assigned directly from training at Fort Riley, Kan.

Enlisted military intelligence soldiers who specialize in human intelligence collection or the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles are in high demand, as well.

On the other hand, DeCoster said, about a third of the MI MOSs are in signal intelligence, and a lot of the soldiers in that field support missions that don’t send them to the war zones, such as working with the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md.

Some MI soldiers whose MOSs are related but not in high demand, such as signals collectors and analysts, are volunteering to go in other roles that are required “because they want to be professionally developed downrange.”

“But,” he said, “you can only do so much of that substituting of MOSs. They are the ones processing the signals intelligence that’s gathered downrange from a number of stations worldwide needed at NSA.”

Transportation Corps branch chief Lt. Col. Vic Harmon said he has seen some of the same volunteerism in his branch, where some soldiers in one of the Army’s highest priority MOSs, truck driver, 88M, ask to be kept in their deploying units. The 88M MOS is chronically short, and the Army offers bonuses to soldiers who reclass into that job. Soldiers from other MOSs, such as field artillery, are retrained or involuntarily reclassed to be truck drivers.

“When we go through the process to take some of these soldiers out of these units and instead of deploying put them elsewhere, they want to stay in these units. They want to stay,” Harmon said.

Another trend branch managers are seeing is an increase in the number of enlisted soldiers contacting them directly at HRC in phone calls or e-mails from Iraq and Afghanistan, or when they get home from deployment.

“They’re more inclined to call,” Blocker said. “They go to the Web site, find their branch and there’s a phone number.”

Col. Louis Henkel, chief of the Enlisted Personnel Management Directorate, said soldiers are starting to get used to the fact that when they redeploy, they likely will be on the move quickly either to a school or another post or unit.

“I think what you have is a new dynamic. There’s an opportunity when a unit gets back, soldiers inherently know something’s going to happen,” Henkel said. “Before the [war], a soldier was on an installation and there wasn’t that mechanism. Soldiers know that when they get home, something’s going to happen or they’re going to go somewhere, and they want to try and influence that.”

June 6, 2008 – When I first heard about Scott McClellan’s charges that the Bush administration had lied and deceived Americans during the months and years leading up to the war, I burst into tears of happiness. No, nothing he wrote was new. And even if he still seems like a sleazy public relations expert in obfuscation, an insider was finally telling the truth, in one book.

My story is different from those who felt seriously constrained about raising questions about the administration’s obvious lies. I worked as an editorial writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, where a liberal editorial board raised serious objections to the war. And yet, in the years following 9/11, I felt editorial restraints that never allowed us to tell the whole truth about the lies and deception that led to America’s most catastrophic foreign policy disaster.

Others in the mainstream media felt far greater restraints. Jessica Yellin, a CNN journalist, for example, says she felt pressured by corporate executives at her previous network to support the Iraq War. To Anderson Cooper, she described how she and others were “under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.” On the Today Show, Katie Couric, Brian Williams, and Charles Gibson also admitted feeling pressure from the Bush administration to support the war, MSNBC reported. Couric even recounted a threat from the White House Press Secretary to “block access to [the network] during the war” if she did not change the tone of her interviewing style.”

So what did I experience? An editor and an editorial board who felt that, in the absence of inside sources, we could not counter the administration’s lies.

Let me give you some examples. I was raised in a Republican family, but schooled by the great iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone, who taught me that you can find the truth without inside sources, if only you’re willing to see beyond patriotic fervor and examine voices in the public domain that are marginalized, So, I would read national security experts who countered Donald Rumfeld’s ridiculous predictions; I would read the British, Canadian, Italian and French press; I would read the writings of experts in resource wars and weapons of mass destruction.

No, I didn’t know I was right. But I was sure that the administration was lying. And, I knew that at the very least that our editorials should be asking why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al should be believed when I had found strong evidence that they were cherry picking intelligence, and setting up their own office in the Pentagon, and acting in complete secrecy.

The rush to war drove me crazy. In the days that led up to the war, I went to my editor and told him I needed a few days unpaid leave to accept the fact that we were, in fact, going to war. In my mind’s eye, I saw a baby tied to the railroad tracks and saw the train rapidly moving toward the helpless child. I saw years of quagmire, bloodshed, and tens of thousands of deaths. I needed a few days to accept that reality before I could return to writing. He understood and allowed me to regain my professional composure.

To its credit, the editorial board raised some of the toughest questions in the mainstream media. And yet….I was the only one who didn’t believe Colin Powell’s shameful presentation at the United Nations. Why? Not because I had special insider knowledge, but like I.F. Stone, I had found credible people who could dissect his speech and found it unconvincing and unpersuasive.

When I heard Bush’s inaugural address, I heard two major lies embedded within his speech. But somehow that still wasn’t enough to accuse him of plagiarism and deception.

The truth is, even a liberal newspaper, blessed with a liberal editorial board, did not engage in truth telling. We raised some good questions, wrote about supporting the troops, but failed to describe the deception that led to the catastrophe that was unfolding right before our eyes.

While I was writing editorials, I was also publishing two weekly political columns on the op-ed page. I also felt constrained as a columnist. If I wanted to discuss this country’s desire to gain control and access over oil, I had to bump up against the accusation that I was a vulgar Marxist, rather than conversant with the reality of resource wars.

Finally, I am an historian, and I knew Iraq’s history. I also knew that the war would end in a disastrous occupation, not a liberation, and that no country, including our own, will ever tolerate occupation by a foreign nation.

This week, I sat with a former colleague from the editorial board in a café, rather than in the room where we used to make our editorial decisions. He admitted that I had been right, but even more, that even in a liberal paper, the editor and most of the board, had felt restrained, afraid of seeming unpatriotic, afraid of saying the emperor wore no clothes, afraid of not giving the President the benefit of the doubt, afraid of truth telling without access to inside sources.

You may say, “Ho Hum, even the Senate has now, after five years, come out with a report that describes (oh, so tepidly) the years of deception.

But for me, the tears flowed because I remembered all those years when I felt passionate about telling the public the truth, but was unable to do so in a mainstream, liberal, newspaper.

Please watch the news for more headlines about our VCS and Veterans United for Truth lawsuit against VA.  If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, please consider attending a new court hearing scheduled for Tuesday, June 10 at 10:00 a.m. in Courtroom #1, at the U.S. Federal Building, 450 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco.

Here’s why there is another court hearing.  In May, a new VA e-mail surfaced where a PTSD clinic manager in Texas discouraged her staff from diagnosing veterans with PTSD due to staffing and budget constraints.  The VA’s Dr. Norma Perez advised VA psychiatrists and psychologists to improperly diagnose veterans with Adjustment Disorder, and this might prevent veterans from recieving VA healthcare and disability benefits. VCS is outraged at this callous treatment and misdiagnosing of our veterans.

Judge Samuel Conti, who is presiding over our lawsuit against VA, ordered VA into court this Tuesday to explain the e-mail. VCS believes VA misled the court by failing to release this e-mail during the trial. In his order, Judge Conti wrote, ” . . . the e-mail raises potentially serious questions . . . .”

Congress held hearings on Dr. Perez’ e-mail last week.  VCS supports strong Congressional oversight of VA. “Once again VA’s political appointees were taken to the woodshed by an alert Congress for repeatedly failing our veterans,” stated Paul Sullivan, VCS Executive Director.

The New York Times quoted VCS head attorney, Gordon Erspamer, as saying the VA e-mail is “part of a systemic pattern where there’s a divergence between the pristine world of the V.A.’s central office and what goes on around the country.”

Veterans for Common Sense works tirelessly in our lawsuit against VA. We are not asking the judge for financial compensation; rather, we are fighting to ensure our veterans receive the care they deserve and earned through their service to our country.

Please click here to make a monthly contribution supporting VCS and veterans throughout the year.

VCS filed our lawsuit against VA because of the many tragic news articles, such as Gary Connellis, who said: “I don’t know who to turn to, what else to do.”

VCS leads the way publicizing VA issues and changing VA policy to be more veteran-friendly.  Please set up a sustaining contribution and support veterans all year long.

Thank You,

Libby Creagh
Development Director
Veterans for Common Sense

VCS provides advocacy and publicity for issues related to veterans, national security, and civil liberties. VCS is registered with the IRS as a non-profit 501(c)(3) charity, and donations are tax deductible.

June 7, 2008 – I am upset and angry. My late mother, Susan, always told me to “tell it like it is,” so I will.

I read the Q&A with John Williams, director of the Erie County Department of Veterans’ Affairs (Erie Times-News, May 26). Let me be direct. I don’t believe the federal, state and local governments fight hard enough for our veterans.

I think they are afraid to create waves or ruffle feathers. I was told years ago by a staff member of the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome Clinic in Batavia, N.Y., that he and other staff members really felt the heat when supporting vets.

It took me more than 10 years to get my benefits, and it was an uphill battle the whole way. Many veterans believe the Veterans Administration wants them to just go away. I almost quit my pursuit of benefits because VA referees kept changing my diagnosis. While many doctors and staff help vets, many retire or quit.

Today, many young vets of the Iraq war are given a diagnosis of “personality disorder,” not post traumatic stress disorder. They lose their bonuses and VA benefits. Many are severely disabled. They need the government and service organizations to create such a stink with the VA that claims are handled in a timely manner.

Many vets can’t handle this on their own, and they shouldn’t have to. At one point in my own case, I was told if I complained, they would pull my file, look at it, then put it on the bottom.

We need fighters for the vets at all levels of government. The VA is always supposed to give veterans the benefit of the doubt. I’d like to believe that.

National Briefing, California: A New Hearing in V.A. Case

June 7, 2008 – A federal judge presiding over a lawsuit alleging mistreatment of veterans has ordered a hearing regarding new evidence in the case.

The judge, Samuel Conti of Federal District Court in San Francisco, ordered the hearing, scheduled for Tuesday, after the emergence of an internal e-mail message that appears to urge Veterans Affairs clinicians to avoid making a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder to save money.

The message was written by a V.A. psychologist in Texas, but it did not surface until after the trial concluded in April, prompting the plaintiffs to request that the case be reopened. “It’s part of a systemic pattern where there’s a divergence between the pristine world of the V.A.’s central office and what goes on around the country,” said Gordon Erspamer, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

On Wednesday, a lawyer with the Justice Department wrote to Judge Conti contending that the e-mail message in question did not represent V.A.-wide practice or policy. Also on Wednesday, Norma Perez, the psychologist who wrote the message, told members of Congress that it was poorly worded and was meant only to suggest diagnostic options for doctors. The lawsuit was filed last year by veterans’ groups.

June 5, 2008 – A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.

The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.

America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military “surge” began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.

The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. “It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty,” said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.

The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: “This is just a tactical subterfuge.” Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its “war on terror” in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.

Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called “strategic alliance” without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said yesterday that such a deal would create “a permanent occupation”. He added: “The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans.”

Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his coalition government cannot stay in power without US backing.

The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more influential in Iraq.

Although Iraqi ministers have said they will reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now. The one Iraqi with the authority to stop deal is the majority Shia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In 2003, he forced the US to agree to a referendum on the new Iraqi constitution and the election of a parliament. But he is said to believe that loss of US support would drastically weaken the Iraqi Shia, who won a majority in parliament in elections in 2005.

The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down. The influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to demonstrate every Friday against the impending agreement on the grounds that it compromises Iraqi independence.

The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.

The signature of a security agreement, and a parallel deal providing a legal basis for keeping US troops in Iraq, is unlikely to be accepted by most Iraqis. But the Kurds, who make up a fifth of the population, will probably favour a continuing American presence, as will Sunni Arab political leaders who want US forces to dilute the power of the Shia. The Sunni Arab community, which has broadly supported a guerrilla war against US occupation, is likely to be split.

May 27, 2008 – A U.S. Army Special Forces soldier based at Fort Carson was killed Sunday near Najaf, Iraq, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Sgt. Frank Joseph Gasper, 25, was killed when his vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device during a resupply operation, according to Army officials.

Gasper was a radio operator assigned to the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), of the Headquarters Support Company, 3rd Battalion.

He was assigned to the 10th in April 2003.

Gasper, originally of Merced, Calif., had been in the Army since October 2002. None of Gasper’s family could be reached Tuesday for comment.

He was the fifth 10th Special Forces soldier to be killed in Iraq and the 238th Fort Carson soldier killed in Iraq.