On Mental Health Care for Wounded Service Members

A congressman from North Carolina met with 15 Army kids. According to an article by that name on Military.com:

...the last child, Rep. Walter Jones recalled July 22 during a House Armed Services Committee subcommittee hearing on family support programs, left him stunned and speechless."The little boy looked up at me and said, 'My daddy's not dead yet,' " Jones said, then repeated the question more slowly for emphasis: " 'My daddy's not dead yet.' "

Back in DC, this Rep. Jones is now trying to figure out how to do more about mental care for service men and women and their families, and good for him.

This is the shtick behind so many of my posts: we can spend billions buying weapons systems, but what are we doing for the men and women actually using them on our behalf? We can debate whether or not certain programs should be canceled or not (such as F-22, Presidential Helicopter, FCS), but the budget is in many ways a zero-sum game. When it comes to taking care of people who give us their all vs. paying for a program, I would vote for people every time.

This is not about politics or ideology, it's not about jobs or economics. Everybody who fights for our country deserves our gratitude. A wounded soldier and his/her family deserve our best medicine, including the best mental health help, nothing less. The article sites a study grading mental health care performance for our military. It sighted excellent care for the few who can get it. Accessibility is the big problem. For starters, many private mental health companies will not accept Tri-Care (according to that study).

That's despicable. This is a moral issue. We should be better than this.

Good Job Gates. Stick With It.

From our Secretary of Defense, a snippet of a speech delivered to the Economic Club of Washington this past Thursday:

"What is needed is a portfolio of military capabilities with maximum versatility across the widest possible spectrum of conflict. As a result, we must change the way we think and the way we plan – and fundamentally reform – the way the Pentagon does business and buys weapons. It simply will not do to base our strategy solely on continuing to design and buy – as we have for the last 60 years – only the most technologically advanced versions of weapons to keep up with or stay ahead of another superpower adversary – especially one that imploded nearly a generation ago.

To get there we must break the old habit of adding layer upon layer of cost, complexity, and delay to systems that are so expensive and so elaborate that only a small number can be built, and that are then usable only in a narrow range of low-probability scenarios.

We must also get control of what is called “requirements creep” – where more features and capabilities are added to a given piece of equipment, often to the point of absurdity. The most flamboyant example of this phenomenon is the new presidential helicopter – what President Obama referred to as defense procurement “run amok.” Once the analysis and requirements were done, we ended up with choppers that cost nearly half a billion dollars each and enabled the president to, among other things, cook dinner while in flight under nuclear attack.

We also had to take a hard look at a number of weapons programs that were grotesquely over budget, were having major performance problems, were reliant on unproven technology, or were becoming increasingly detached from real world scenarios – as if September 11th and the wars that followed had never happened."

DoD Public Affairs posted the full text of the speech. It's worth a read. In another part of the speech he lashes out, in the measured tone of a bureaucrat, at critics who may try to paint him as a dove.

We in the aerospace and defense establishment have probably grown complacent and forgotten exactly how much we cost our nation. I believe that defense should be the highest priority, and that we probably should spend this much on defense, but I think our Secretary of Defense is right to expect more war fighting capability for these sums on behalf of our taxpayers and especially our service men and women.

I happen to agree with these remarks. Mark this one in the Bark! predictions box: Gates will stay on as SecDef until 2012. He has spent 40 years serving our country as a consumate bureaucrat and not as a politician. I think that for personal sense of patriotism and duty, Gates will stay to try to see these reforms through. Feast your eyes on this beauty of a flow chart. I think that changing this chart will be one of his highest goals. Of course, that's really hard because each box represents physical organizations with lots of people, so you can't just redraw the picture.... (Image from Defense Acquisition University website.)

Congratulations SpaceX! You Did It Again!

Today, SpaceX executed its second successful launch of the Falcon I. Now it's 2 for 5, but it's 2 in a row and I predict a string of successful launches from here on. I bet SpaceX's customer list just grew today.

The next big venture for the company is scheduled for a maiden flight this fall: the 9-engined Falcon9. Fingers crossed.

Great job, SpaceX. Here's the video from today (oh, and Happy Bastille Day, if you're into that).

Let the Mid-Term Elections Begin.... NOW!

So Cheney is in the news again. More trouble with secrecy, yadda yadda. I frankly don't find this too surprising. Here's my take on what's happening:

I suspect the Democrats wanted to roll this little gem out to the public a little later. Say... this time next year just as the mid-term elections are heating up. But it came out now. What gives?

I see a couple of possibilities:

#1 Democrats know more and want an investigation now to dig up more embarrassing stuff this time next year. So... Democrats leaked to NYT (?)

#2 Republicans know even more than the Democrats and want this trash aired now to clear the air for next year. So... Republicans leaked to NYT (?)

#3 Republicans know so much that they're working behind the curtains to get Democrats to trip up because of an investigation they really want. In this scenario, Republicans would LOVE an investigation that focuses for the next year or more on how much Republicans worked to secure our country and it would simultaneously dig up ways that Democrats were sabotaging these security measures.... Democrats foolishly leaked to NYT (?)

We'll see. It'll be interesting to see the way this story turns. But one thing's for sure: just whisper Cheney and there will be a Democrat eager to talk your ear off about it.

I do have one nagging question about this episode, though: Does Cheney actually have executive authority? I had presumed before that the whole point of VP's was that they didn't have actual executive authority until something happened to the president?