Thursday May 23rd, 2013 • 10:03:22am
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered the furlough of 680,000 civilian employees for one day a week, from early July through September, to avoid taking deeper cuts in training and maintenance, which could have degraded readiness to the point of threatening "core missions," he said.
The Department of Defense furlough plan will cut work hours and pay of most civilian employees by 20 percent for up to 11 weeks to save $1.8 billion. And Hagel doesn't rule out needing another furlough plan in 2014.
This furlough will help DoD absorb $37 billion in arbitrary budget cuts from sequestration, a mechanism the White House and Congress agreed to in 2011 to try to scare Republicans and Democrats into compromising on a hefty debt-reduction deal. The strategy has misfired.
Members of Congress, it turns out, prefer capricious spending cuts to putting their names on a more considered compromise that might put their re-election at risk. Republicans have chosen sequestration over closing tax loopholes and Democrats prefer it to curbing entitlements, despite warnings from military leaders that automatic defense cuts are devastating readiness.
The silver lining in this leave-no-fingerprints approach to debt reduction is that the annual budget deficit is shrinking. The Congressional Budget Office reports this month that the federal spending this year will exceed tax revenues by only $642 billion, the smallest shortfall since 2008.
If sequestration stays in effect, defense spending will be cut $52 billion more in fiscal 2014 and by $500 billion over the next decade. And in 2014 and beyond, military personnel accounts won't be protected from sharing the burden of sequestration like they are in this first year.
Hagel told a group of DoD employees in Alexandria, Va., last week that he settled on ordering a 11-day furlough because "I could not responsibly go any deeper into cutting or jeopardizing our core missions on readiness and training."
Roughly 120,000 workers will be exempted, including 50,000 foreign nationals who work on U.S. bases overseas under host-nation agreements. The other 70,000 exempted employees either hold critical readiness jobs; are needed to ensure safety of life and property; are essential for delivery of military health care, including to wounded warriors; or are deployed or temporarily assigned to war zones. Among those in critical readiness jobs are almost 30,000 shipyard workers building or overhauling nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, platforms critical to force readiness.
DoD child care center employees will be exempted to protect families. Non-appropriated fund (NAF) employees who run base exchanges and morale, welfare and recreational activities also won't be furloughed because doing so for those employees wouldn't save appropriated defense dollars.
Teachers and faculty in DoD-run dependent schools overseas and in rural areas stateside will face furlough for only five days after classes begin in the fall. Fewer furlough days protects against a lapse in accreditation.
Hagel noted that 11 days is half the length of furlough projected in March, before Congress finally passed a 2013 defense appropriations bill and before budget officials scrambled to find ways to soften sequestration's effect on civilian workers. The number will not exceed 11 this year, senior defense officials explained in a background briefing at the Pentagon to discuss how the decision was reached and how it will be implemented. And the number could from fall from 11 by September if spending rates are lower than expected.
"The overall goal is to minimize adverse effects on missions … because we are devastating the readiness of this military right now," one senior official explained. A secondary goal is that furloughs be fair, consistent and shared across military departments.
Hagel rejected the Navy's plan not to furlough anyone. Instead, dollars saved through Navy Department furloughs can be redistributed to the Army, which has had to suspend unit rotations through its combat training centers, or the Air Force, which has suspended flying in 12 combat aircraft squadrons.
Defense officials rejected a charge by some Republicans that the furlough announcement is a political move to pressure Congress to negotiate a debt deal. Cuts to civilian payrolls were needed only after other operations and maintenance accounts had been squeezed, they said.
"We've already made the cuts we believe we can," said a senior DoD official. Facilities maintenance "we've essentially stopped … except for safety of life and property. We've cut back on base operating costs. We have hiring freezes (and have) made about as many training cuts as we can and still meet needs in Afghanistan and deployments."
Commands will sent out furlough letters May 28 to June 5. Employees will have seven days to appeal. Some might argue their jobs are more critical than commands appreciate, but more exemptions will be hard to get. Financial hardship will not be a consideration, officials said. They assume furloughs will hit many workers and families hard.
"This is one of the most distasteful tasks I've had in more than 30 years of government service," said one official who helped shape the plan.
The biggest negative expected will be to employee morale, officials predicted. No one will be happy losing 11 days' pay, and federal employees also haven't seen an annual pay increase for three years.
Political appointees are not subject to furlough, but Hagel has promised to forfeit his pay the same number of days as department employees.
DoD Comptroller Robert F. Hale told an auditorium of Pentagon employees in April that furloughs not only would impact morale but "seriously damage productivity in virtually every area of the department."
Among employees being furloughed are skilled maintainers of ships, tanks and aircraft, medical personnel, educators of military children and managers of contracts worth billions of dollars, officials said. Reducing their work hours 20 percent for 11 weeks will free up more training dollars for soon-to-deploy units, but the cost to longer-term readiness is still unknown.
Commissaries face turbulent times as staff vacancies swell under a federal hiring freeze, employee furloughs remain a worry and the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) digests budget guidance for fiscal 2015 that will force efficiencies and possibly deeper cuts.
The guidance directs at least a 5 percent ($70 million) cut to the $1.4 billion annual taxpayer subsidy needed to run 252 base grocery stores. It also directs DeCA to develop options to accommodate deeper cuts, as much as one-third of the subsidy, without impacting commissaries overseas.
The commissary benefit has been targeted often over recent decades, usually when budget officials are told to identify quick savings or a new study concludes military shopping discounts are a costly anachronism for a modern force in an age when most patrons reside off base.
In the gloomy fiscal time of budget sequestration, there are some real, near-term factors threatening commissary services and patron access. There also is the more distant rumble that subsidies for stores might be slashed, which could deeply impact stateside shopping and, critics charge, even fumble a commitment to leave commissary operations overseas unchanged.
Watching events closely is Patrick B. Nixon, a former DeCA director who now is president of the American Logistics Association. ALA represents manufacturers and vendors doing business with bases.
Nixon said the most immediate threat to commissaries, where shoppers realize savings of more than 30 percent, is a federal hiring freeze, which took effect for stateside commissaries Feb. 4.
A hiring freeze hits commissaries harder than most other federal workplaces because 40 percent of store workers are military spouses or teens. That means high turnover and higher job vacancy rates as families move, leaving jobs that can't be filled and relocating near commissaries that can't rehire them.
"There are some stores whose staffing level is down below 70 percent because they can't hire replacements," Nixon said. He worries the hiring freeze could force stores to reduce operating hours.
"We cannot speak to percentages of staffing levels right now," said DeCA spokesman Kevin L. Robinson from headquarters at Fort Lee, Va. "However, the hiring freeze has affected us," he said. "The most significant effect has been our inability to hire store-level positions …to ensure that product is on the shelf and that cashiers are in place to check out customers."
Commissaries also would be impacted by any Defensewide civilian employee furloughs. In March, after Congress finally passed a defense appropriations bill for this fiscal year, a tentative plan to furlough most Defense employees for 21 days was cut to 14 through September. Since then, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has said plans are being reconsidered.
There is hope Congress will grant enough relief from the across-the-board cut formula of sequestration that Defense employee furloughs can be avoided through a mid-year budget reprogramming request.
If that doesn't happen, commissaries will be closed an extra day per week during the furlough period. So if employees are to be furloughed 14 days, stateside commissaries would be closed an added day for 14 weeks.
"We are cautiously optimistic that they will find a solution to the furlough issue and that won't happen," said Nixon. "But that's our major concern right now furloughs and the hiring freeze."
For fiscal 2014, the Obama administration has proposed full funding for commissaries, which signals strong support for the benefit, Nixon said. But the defense budget request doesn't reflect $52 billion in cuts from sequestration that will take effect in 2014 if, as expected, Republicans and Democrats continue to refuse to negotiate a significant debt-reduction deal.
For fiscal 2015, budget clouds over commissaries darken more. Various internal studies are eyeing the commissary subsidy for budget savings. More significantly, DeCA must follow a new "resource management directive" in shaping its 2015 budget that assumes a 5 percent cut to its annual appropriation. Nixon said commissaries likely could absorb a $70 million hit with help from industry partners and by executing new efficiencies.
Part two of the directive, however, is worrisome, Nixon said. DeCA is to prepare a series of options for reducing the taxpayer subsidy, by up to a third, while fully protecting store operations overseas. That presents a challenge if the intent is to keep stores' current business model, he said.
The business model, set in law, is to sell goods at cost; collect a 5 percent surcharge from patrons to cover new store construction and capital improvements; and use appropriated dollars too, mostly for staff salaries and overseas transportation costs.
The model can still work if the appropriation is cut 5 percent, Nixon said. But cut more and a system widely recognized as efficiently run will have to cut into the bone by reducing operating hours and closing some stores, starting in about 15 areas with multiple commissaries, such Seattle-Tacoma, San Antonio, Washington D.C., Hawaii, Fayetteville, N.C., and Hampton Roads, Va.
"They didn't build those commissaries on a whim. The need was there," said Kathy Moakler, director of government relations for the National Military Family Association. "But if they don't have the staff to run them, people will get frustrated. Lord knows we wait in long lines at the commissary already."
If shopper experiences deteriorate with longer checkout lines and crowded parking lots, stateside commissary patrons could shop off base, ignoring commissary discounts. Falling sales stateside would ultimately affect overseas stores, which are more costly to operate, Nixon said. Advocates fear a kind of death spiral for a prized military benefit.
Factors in favor of commissaries' weathering another budget storm, Nixon said, include strong support from Congress and commitments from the president and first lady Michelle Obama to expand job opportunities and healthy lifestyles for veterans and military families, which base grocers do.
After five years and an estimated $1 billion spent trying to build a single integrated electronic health record (iEHR) system with the Department of Veterans Affairs, defense health officials have been taken off the project, sources confirm.
Wielding the hook was Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who signaled disappointment with his management team to a House panel, saying he halted a solicitation for bids from commercial electronic record designers because "I didn't think we knew what the hell we were doing."
A congressional source confirmed that DoD oversight for developing an interoperable electronic health records is now under Frank Kendall, under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.
A cloud of confusion descended on the VA-DoD effort to create a single e-record system after an awkward joint announcement in February by departing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. Panetta suggested development of a single system had grown unaffordable and some "quick wins" were needed to show progress on seamless transfer of electronic medical files of veterans moving from military to VA care.
Rather than build a customized system "from scratch," Panetta said, the VA would keep but improve its popular record system, Vista, and electronic military health data would gain interoperability with VA by deploying an existing commercial software solution "as quickly as possible." By summer, he said, DoD and VA would field a pilot program that would allow clinicians to share VA and DoD medical data at seven joint rehabilitation and poly-trauma centers treating veterans with the most serious wound. Those facilities would have interoperable records by the end of July this year, Panetta promised.
What the two leaders actually were announcing, charged the chairmen and ranking members of the veterans affairs committees, was their failure to agree on a single record system after years of work and public promises. They said compromise wasn't what Congress directed in 2008, nor was it what Barrack Obama had promised campaigning for president and in 2009 when announcing a joint DoD-VA effort to build a single virtual lifetime electronic record for veterans from enlistment to their death in old age.
Yet for weeks after the February announcement, VA and Defense leaders continued to insist the compromise was what had been promised. Key lawmakers, including Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., now Senate Budget Committee chairman, and Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman, didn't buy that claim nor, it turns out, did Hagel after he was briefed on the course change.
Architects of the compromise were Jonathan Woodson, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, and Beth McGrath, deputy chief management officer for the department. Their plan to buy proprietary health records software from industry, however, was labeled as expensive and shortsighted by other technical experts inside the Pentagon.
The director of operational test and evaluation for DoD, J. Michael Gilmore, told Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in a March 28 memo that the "current approach is manifestly inconsistent with the President's open standards agenda for electronic health records."
While Obama wanted "a broad spectrum of government, industry and academic participants" involved in pursuit of an open standards iEHR, which would be less costly and easier to achieve, Gilmore charged that DoD actions throughout Obama's first term had gone against the president's agenda.
"The Department's past and current desire is to completely replace its healthcare information technology package Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (AHLTA) with an existing commercial healthcare management package," Gilmore said.
This resistance to an open standard's agenda, he continued, "appears to be founded largely on an incorrect assumption" that this "will take too much time and the lack of immediate progress will inevitably cause (DoD) to be forced to adopt the Vista software" used by VA. But an open standards agenda "has nothing whatsoever to do with the department using Vista."
Gilmore urged a course shift. DoD should design and test an overall architecture of iEHR and then build or purchase software that would allow AHLTA "to interact with the outside world via open standards."
Defense officials wouldn't comment on reports that Woodson's office had lost oversight responsibility for design of the integrated electronic health record. But a congressional source said key lawmakers have been told it had.
In his appearance April 16 before the House appropriations subcommittee on defense, Hagel promised he would announce a revised decision on the iEHR within 30 days, meaning mid-May.
"I can't sit here and defend what we've done" over four years, Hagel told Rep. Nita M. Lowey, D-N.Y., who blasted the lack of progress after DoD and VA had spent a billion dollars so far on integrating its health records.
"I could take you down through the programs and say 'Well, it hasn't been totally wasted because these things have come out of the investment.' But I'm not going to do that. I am going to acknowledge that we are way behind. We will do better ... I'm restructuring who's in charge and the accountability of this. I deferred a request for proposal. I've stopped it from going out at the end of March ... And until I get some understanding of this and get some control of it, we're not going to spend any more money on it."
Hagel said he understood lawmakers' frustration, which is heightened by the growing backlog of compensation claims, slowed in part by health records that still must be transferred by hand. "We have not completed an integrated health record system, which was what we committed to," Hagel said. Both the president and Congress still want "a seamless, interoperable system."
Shinseki, meanwhile, is sounding more confident about VA's decision to keep but modernize Vista. He told the Senate Budget Committee last week that Vista "is government owned, government operated and we have put Vista into the open architecture so that anyone else can use the code that goes with Vista and won't have to pay for it."
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Between the budget sequester and what one of my military correspondents deplores as "a high degree of aversion to the use of 'boots on the ground' in the general public," the Army currently seems to be immersed in one of its periodic bouts of post-war handwringing and navel-gazing.
We've been through that at least twice before in my lifetime. The first time was after World War II, when the nuclear weapon seemed to have rendered all lesser forms of warfare obsolete.
Even Korea's "police action" failed to alter that view. On the contrary, the expensive draw with which that war ended seemed only to confirm the inability of traditional ground warfare to achieve strategic results worth its cost.
The New Look that followed relegated much of the Army to what amounted to a constabulary force, useful only to hold the line in Europe and the Far East long enough for the Air Force's strategic nuclear weapons to win the day. In mute submission to that view, the Army began fielding its own "tactical" nuclear weapons, whence decades of pain for the harried field artillerymen who became their reluctant servants.
Eventually, encouraged by Soviet and Chinese nuclearization, reason reasserted itself, and the Army under Flexible Response began to recover at least some of its institutional self-confidence just in time to be committed for the next decade to the Vietnam War and counter-insurgency.
We all know how that ended, and once again, a traumatized Army figuratively crawled back into its foxholes. And there it remained for nearly 10 years, while the conventional military balances in Europe and Asia progressively deteriorated.
Two nearly concurrent developments helped pull the Army out of its post-Vietnam malaise. The less important, though more often cited, was the Reagan defense buildup, which permitted the Army to begin replacing weaponry on the edge of obsolescence after more than a decade of war-driven non-investment.
The second and ultimately more important was what amounted to an internal rebellion against the Army's post-Vietnam bunker mentality. Led less by its generals than by its majors and colonels, the Army went back to the doctrinal drawing-board.
The aim of an Army, its younger leaders insisted, was to impose its will on an enemy. And that could be done only by seizing and retaining the initiative. The business of an Army, in short, was to fight. Not alone, to be sure together with its sister services but neither as the mere appendage of their capabilities.
The Army, the revisionists recognized, could do other things, from fighting forest fires to helping out in the drug war. But they recognized those tasks to be ancillary: an Army's central non-negotiable function was to seize and/or hold strategically important geography by destroying anyone choosing to resist.
Belatedly championed by the Army's leadership, the rebellion of the early 1980s birthed the Army that, together with its joint and coalition partners, defeated Saddam Hussein's hapless legions in two of the shortest offensive campaigns in the modern history of war.
Neither, of course, produced a conclusive result, though why that failure should have been attributed to flaws in the Army's warfighting competence is far from clear. Just such a conviction, however, seems to underlie a good deal of today's handwringing, which the nation's fiscal woes have only aggravated.
Thus we have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, himself an Army officer, insisting that such activities as humanitarian relief and peacekeeping should be considered "equal claimants" with major combat operations, while the Army's chief of staff complains that cuts amounting to less than 10% of the Army's current budget will prevent units other than those headed back to Afghanistan from training.
Which might explain why the lieutenant son of a friend, returned not long ago from Afghanistan, reports that he and many of his fellows plan to leave the service at their earliest opportunity, disgusted with a leadership that has them conducting property inventories in lieu of rebuilding too-long-ignored basic warfighting skills.
Those of us who remained in the Army during the latter 1970s, when it was consumed more with combating drug addiction and racial antipathy than with preparing for war, can identify with their angst. But it was from just that demoralized low point which led one disillusioned officer to publish a book entitled The Death of the U.S. Army: A Premortem that the Army's institutional rebirth began.
The key to that rebirth wasn't marketing the Army to politicians, or even to the nation at large. It was restoring its own doctrinal self-confidence. In turn, that required the Army to go back to conceptual basics and remind itself why it was in business.
Today's Army is nowhere near the sorry condition of the one that emerged from the Vietnam War. But unless it quits hyperventilating about budgetary penury and the nefarious intentions of its sister services and starts recovering its own sense of purpose, it soon could be.
And if the Army's generals won't lead that effort, maybe it's time for another revolution from below.
Military folks upset by Obama administration proposals to cap pay raises, to phase-in sharply higher co-pays on prescriptions filled off base and to raise TRICARE costs on working-age retirees also tend to rail against such changes with arguments politicians can shrug off as stale or in error.
Two examples from the flood of feedback to recent columns are:
n"We were promised free health care for life" and
n"Before Congress votes to raise fees on those who secure our freedoms they should first pay more for their own health care."
The flaw of the first is that "free lifetime" care promises were made to older generations and not to working-age retirees who are the main targets of proposed fee hikes. In, addition,f ederal appellate courts ruled a decade ago that benefits promised by recruiters or even commands at time of re-enlistment aren't legally binding for the government if not backed by federal statute.
To the second popular argument, U.S. senators and representatives have the same health insurance as federal civilian employees so they already pay higher premiums as they should than do military folks, and their premiums increase annually with overall health costs.
But far more effective arguments against compensation curbs are being made by representatives of The Military Coalition, an umbrella group of associations and veteran groups, who last Wednesday testified before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel.
Their talking points still seem to resonate with lawmakers even as government functions get squeezed by a debt crisis and frightened politicians avoid hard choices by using the automatic pilot of budget sequestration.
Though only several senators heard their points this day, coalition reps will continue to make them privately to key lawmakers and congressional staff. Still, it will be a Herculean task to avoid pay caps and higher TRICARE fees, certainly if lawmakers refuse to reach a debt deal to end sequestration. The Obama defense budget request for 2014 doesn't even reflect $52 billion in deeper cuts that would occur if sequestration were not repealed.
Kathleen Moakler with the National Military Family Association warned the subcommittee that because of sequestration, and a recent six-month delay in passing the fiscal 2013 defense appropriations bill, "military families now doubt our nation's leaders' commitment to supporting their service."
Steve Strobridge, a retired Air Force colonel who retires again this month, from Military Officers Association of America, after 19 years of hard-nosed advocacy for troops, challenged the contention of multiple defense secretaries that personnel costs, particularly for TRICARE, are out of control.
"Claims of exploding military health costs cite growth since 2001 as if that were a reasonable starting point. But it's not," he told the subcommittee. "Congress enacted TRICARE for Life in 2001 to correct the ejection of older retirees from military health care in the six years before that. There was a spike as they returned to coverage in 2002 and 2003. But the cost growth has actually been declining ever since."
He argued that personnel costs "are the same share of the defense budget a little less than a third that they've been for the last 30 plus years. In fact the Department of Defense has used the health account as a cash cow to fund other needs, diverting $700 million in surplus funds last year and $2.5 billion over the last three years."
Military health benefits are excellent and carry lower fees into retirement because members paid "in-kind" premiums civilians don't face over many years of dangerous and arduous service, Strobridge said.
He suggested Defense officials refuse to end waste in the health system, such as operating separate medical commands for the Army, Air Force and Navy, because it's politically difficult, and instead find it easier to propose that beneficiaries pay more for their care.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., challenged the coalition's opposition to proposals to means test the level of TRICARE fees based on rank at retirement. Strobridge refused to budge, arguing that means testing is appropriate for welfare payments but not benefits earned through service.
For the coalition, Joe Barnes with the Fleet Reserve Association argued that current service members deserve a full 1.8 percent pay raise in January to match private-sector wage growth versus a 1 percent federal pay cap proposed by the administration. He warned against returning the military to an era of pay gaps and retention challenges last seen in the late 1990s.
"Pay comparability is directly related to long-term readiness," he said.
Marshall Hanson with the Reserve Officers Association had perhaps the hardest task, arguing for new initiatives to address "benefit parity issues" for Reserve and Guard forces compared to active duty colleagues.
Drilling reservists, for example, earn a Reserve GI Bill education benefit valued at 11.5 percent of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, Hanson said. In addition, Reserve and Guard members deployed for war can lower the age at which they retire. But a glitch in law makes those members lose months off the calculation if their deployment period spans the start of a new fiscal year.
At the same hearing, Defense Department witnesses defended the pay caps and TRICARE fee increases as necessary in tight budget times to keep smaller defense budgets "in balance" and protect readiness.
Key lawmakers sent mixed signals. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., subcommittee chair, said she remains "very skeptical about increasing costs for military members and veterans."
But Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C., ranking Republican, suggested he could support fee increases if they made TRICARE more sustainable.
"Because if it's not sustainable, it's a false promise," Graham said. He said he wants to avoid a situation where retiree health care costs and a shrinking defense budget lessen the capabilities of active duty forces.
CORRECTION: In my column two weeks ago, describing the proposed TRICARE fee increases, I made a significant error of omission. The TRICARE for Life (TFL) increases, if adopted, would impact only those retirees who age into TFL benefits after enactment of the law. That grandfathering protection, by the way, would not apply to higher prescription fees described last week.
As I write this, one of the two named suspects in Monday's bomb attack on the Boston Marathon is dead, the other on the run. While information on the two remains sketchy, the evidence to date suggests that they were acting on their own, from motives yet to be established.
Hence it's just as well that, in the days immediately following the attack, the repeated refrain among both government officials and pundits was to avoid overreacting. That represents a welcome reprieve from the massive overreaction that followed the attacks of 9-11-01, an overreaction from which the nation's domestic institutions and foreign policy continue to suffer to this day.
Writing in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, long-time war-on-terror cheerleader Max Boot urged that we "do our best to make sure that the terrorists don't achieve their objective to terrorize us. As the British said in World War II: Keep calm and carry on." That's excellent advice. It's just too bad that it took Boot and others like him so long to offer it.
It's possible, of course, that such relatively restrained reactions to Boston's tragedy were no more than a reflection of over-familiarity that, after 10 years of calling every murderous thug with a political agenda a terrorist, we've overused the description.
Once upon a time, we'd just have called them criminals and dealt with them like any other murderous thugs. We'd have needed no expensive undeclared wars, no secret CIA drone bases, no Guantanamo, no military commissions, and certainly no abridgement of domestic civil liberties of the sort to which we've sadly become accustomed in the past 10 years.
But it's also possible that we've begun at last to recover from the paranoid binge to which we succumbed after 9-11-01, a binge only aggravated by drama-biased mass media, neo-con politicians and academics, and military and civilian bureaucrats with a vested interest in promoting the effectively permanent state of war to which we thoughtlessly committed ourselves.
As the Washington Post's David Ignatius wrote earlier this week, "A decade has taught America that the most destabilizing consequence of 9/11 wasn't the terrorist act itself, but the way the country responded. America was knocked off balance: Costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sapped public morale without achieving clear gains."
That wasn't the only way in which we knocked ourselves off balance. The day after the Boston bombing, the highly regarded bipartisan Constitution Project's Task Force on Detainee Treatment released a scathing 577-page report confirming the widespread use of torture by the Bush administration this, contrary to repeated public denials by senior administration officials.
While recognizing that brutality in wartime is common, the report noted that there never previously had been "the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody."
As former U.N. ambassador Thomas Pickering, a member of the task force, wrote in Friday's Post, "By authorizing and permitting torture in response to a global terrorist threat, U.S. leaders committed a grave error that has undermined our values, principles and moral stature; eroded our global influence; and placed our soldiers, diplomats and intelligence officers in even greater jeopardy."
Of course, apologists for that damage, and for much else that we've done to ourselves since 9-11, will correctly point out that, as the old "Enemy of the State" tagline claims, "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you." There are indeed real terrorists out there, and they can't be allowed to operate freely.
But, as Boot acknowledges, there always have been those prepared to wreak violence on civil societies that offended them in one way or another, or which, for that matter, simply deprived them of the economic rewards to which they felt entitled. Whether called pirates, or anarchists, or simply murderous lunatics, they were distinguished above all by their deliberate refusal to observe any conventional or moral limits on their violent behavior.
In the words of the U.S. Constitution's Article 1, they were and are guilty of "Offenses against the Law of Nations" in other words, they were and are outlaws. And the proper way to treat them is the way any other outlaws should be treated: as ordinary criminals, not as combatants, legal or otherwise, with the dignity of soldiers under regulation and discipline.
But that requires that we exercise the sort of political self-restraint and public patience that have marked this tragic week. We need not grant those who would harm us a free pass. But neither need we become like them, nor sacrifice our own moral principles and political freedoms to the very fear that they seek to arouse.
Terrorists are thugs, whatever the motives that impel them. We should deal with them accordingly.
Rahm Emanuel, while serving as President Obama's first chief of staff, once advised not to let a "crisis go to waste" because that's when politicians will do things they otherwise wouldn't.
Defense officials seem to have taken that advice to heart amid the current debt crisis with their plan to boost co-payments on military family members and retirees who use TRICARE retail and mail order pharmacies.
For starters, the current $17 co-pay collected at retail outlets for 30-day prescriptions of brand name drugs found on the military formulary would double to $26 on Oct. 1, start of the new fiscal year. The retail co-pay then would be increased by $2 every October through 2017 and possibly for five years longer because budget documents refers to a 10-year phase-in plan.
Also on Oct. 1, if Congress allows, brand name drugs not on the military-approved formulary would become unavailable using TRICARE at neighborhood drug outlets, except on a very limited basis.
Since last year, beneficiaries have faced a co-pay of $44 to get a non-formulary drug at retail. Under the administration's new plan, non-formulary drugs would have to be obtained by mail order. And that co-pay, for a three-month supply of pills, would be raised from $43 to $51 this fall and would see annual increases thereafter to reach $66 by fall 2017.
Five years ofphased increases
Meanwhile, the co-pay for formulary brand drugs via mail order would double from $13 to $26 this October and increase by $2 to $4 annually to reach $34 by fall 2017. Again, budget documents suggest five more years of phased-in increases beyond 2017, though specific co-pays aren't shown.
Beneficiaries could continue to have prescriptions filled for free at base pharmacies, and generic drugs would be filled at no charge by mail until 2017, when co-pays would begin at $9 per 90-day supply. The current $5 co-pay for generic drugs at retail outlets would be increased by $1 a year starting in October 2014.
Last year's defense authorization bill had allowed some increases in drug co-pays at retail and mail order. Congress also authorized the department to begin a pilot program that will require TRICARE for Life beneficiaries retirees and family members 65 or older to obtain all of their maintenance drugs by mail order for at least one year starting this fall.
The new plan would shelve the pilot and require all retirees and family members, regardless of age, to use mail order or base pharmacies for drugs to control chronic conditions like high blood pressure and cholesterol.
Congress can block those proposals, support them all or reach a compromise. They are part of a larger TRICARE reform package that, as described here last week, also calls for higher out-of-pocket costs to beneficiaries using TRICARE Prime, Extra or Standard or TRICARE for Life.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, defended the TRICARE increases during hearings over the past week on the fiscal 2014 defense budget request held by the House and Senate armed services and appropriations committees.
Hagel noted that survivors of service members who die on active duty and medically retired members would be spared any TRICARE increases. Also, if Congress adopts the changes, said Hagel, a former enlisted combat veteran of the Vietnam War, TRICARE "will still remain a very substantial benefit. These adjustments to pay and benefits were among the most carefully considered and most difficult choices in the budget."
Hagel noted that raising TRICARE fees has the "strong support" of the joint chiefs and senior enlisted leaders because they know that "to sustain these benefits over the long term, without dramatically reducing the size or readiness of the force, these rising costs need to be brought under control."
Earlier efforts to hike beneficiary health costs or take other controversial cost-saving actions "met fierce political resistance and were not implemented," Hagel said. "We are now in a completely different fiscal environment, dealing with new realities that will force us to more fully confront these tough and painful choices, and to make the reforms we need to put this department on the path to sustain ... military strength for the 21st Century."
Resistance
Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel, has been part of the fierce resistance. Last week, with Hagel and Dempsey, he sounded like he would be again.
Wilson challenged their arguments that the $49 billion-a-year military health care account is unsustainable, pointing to a $500 million surplus reported in 2011 and $709 million last year. And Defense health costs grew by less than 1 percent in fiscal 2013, Wilson said.
"My concern is that we know this is a great program. TRICARE people are very satisfied. Military families appreciate this benefit. Commitments have been made to our veterans and to military families," Wilson said. "Why would we be increasing fees when, in fact, the program is working well?"
Hagel responded that despite recent surpluses, the health care benefit over the long term is unaffordable unless beneficiaries pay more.
Robert Hale, the Defense Department comptroller, warned Wilson that if Congress again rejects higher TRICARE fees and co-pays, the projected savings of $1 billion in fiscal 2014 would have to come "out of readiness or modernization" accounts. Hagel, Dempsey and the service chiefs, Hale said, "feel strongly (that) the right thing to do is a balanced approach to meeting our defense needs with some modest increases in (TRICARE) fees."
Dempsey added later that he speaks often to service members and families who ask why pay raises have to slow or tuition assistance might be cut or TRICARE fees need to be raised in this tight budget environment.
"The answer is unless we look across the board at all the levers we have to pull, whether its infrastructure, health care, pay and compensation, tuition assistance, we'll have an extraordinarily well-compensated force that will be sitting at Fort Hood, Texas, or at Camp Lejeune, (N.C.) unable to train" for lack of funds. "And therefore we will be putting them at risk."
Trying once more to get military compensation costs "under control," the Obama administration has asked Congress to cap annual active duty and reserve component pay raises, and to phase in over four years a complex formula for raising TRICARE fees on retirees of all ages and their families.
The five-year budget plan unveiled Wednesday proposes that annual pay raises be held at one percent from 2014 through 2016 and be raised to 1.5 percent in 2017 and to 2.5 percent in 2018, said Robert Hale, the Department of Defense's under secretary and comptroller.
The first year's pay cap alone, which would trim just eight-tenths of a percentage point off a scheduled 1.8 percent increase to match of private sector wage growth, would save $540 million in 2014 and $3.5 billion through 2018, officials said.
As in years past, the administration seeks to cut health costs by having retirees and families pay more under all three options of TRICARE.
Here are details of these proposals:
TRICARE PRIME – The current family enrollment fee of $539 for working-age retirees (under age 65) would increase next year to equal 2.95 percent of the individual's gross retired pay. But for 2014 the fee would be subject to an annual minimum, or floor, of $548 and a ceiling of $750 ($900 for flag officers). The fee would be raised to 3.3 percent of gross retired pay in 2015 with a floor of $558 and ceiling of $900 ($1200 for flag); 3.65 percent in 2016 with floor of $569 and ceiling of $1050 ($1500 for flag); and so on until reaching 4 percent of gross retired pay in 2018 with a floor of $594 and ceiling of $1226 ($1840 for flag).
Fees for single coverage would be half these amounts.
TRICARE STANDARD/EXTRA – For the first time, users of these options would face an annual enrollment fee, starting at $70 for single coverage or $140 for family, and rising each year until reaching $125 (individual) and $250 (family) in 2018. Also, the current annual deductible of $150 (individual) and $300 (family) would gradually increase, starting in 2014 and until it reached $290 (individual) and $580 (family) in 2018.
ADJUSTMENTS – After 2018, all TRICARE enrollment fees, floors and ceilings, and deductibles for retirees would climb yearly by the same percentage increase of cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for military retired pay to keep pace with inflation.
TRICARE FOR LIFE – Beneficiaries 65 and older can use TRICARE for Life as a golden supplement to Medicare. Officials said a comparable individual policy in 2009 would cost $2100 in the private sector. So, they reason, military elderly should at least pay a small enrollment fee.
The fee would equal one half of one percentage point of gross retired pay in 2014; one percent in 2015; 1.5 percent in 2016, and two percent in 2017 and in 2018. But the fees would have ceilings: no more $150 a year in 2014; no more than $300 in 2015, $450 in 2016, $600 in 2017 and no more than $618 in 2018. Flag officers would face higher ceilings though not substantial. After 2017, these fees would be adjusted by the percentage of retiree COLAs.
PHARMACY FEES – The administration wants to follow last year's increases in pharmacy co-pays with additional increases phased in to encourage greater use of mail order and generic drugs.
CATASTOPHIC CAP – The current cap on total out-of-pocket costs TRICARE costs of $3000 a year would be raised for retirees in two ways: by excluding any TRICARE enrollment fees from counting toward the cap; and by raising the cap annually by the percentage of retiree COLA.
Officials hope tying the size of fees to level of retired pay will soften resistance in Congress. Also, this year's plan would exempt from any fee increases the survivors of members who die on active duty and persons medically retired from service. And the department no longer is asking that TRICARE fees be adjusted annually based on medical inflation.
That concession to use retiree COLAs instead might be less than it appears. The Obama budget proposes, as part of a larger debt-reduction deal, that all federal COLAs, including for social security, veteran benefits and retirement plans, switch to a "chain" Consumer Price Index to measure inflation. This CPI would save the billions of dollars annually by shaving every COLA by a fraction of a percentage point.
Obama's support for it is conditional; Republicans must agree to close some corporate tax loopholes and to raise taxes on the wealthy. Still, Obama support of chain CPI has drawn fire from some Democrats and liberals in Congress. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who chairs the veterans affairs committee, added language to the Senate's non-binding budget resolution to oppose it. If the chain CPI is adopted, said Sanders, "veterans who started receiving VA disability benefits at age 30 would have their benefits reduced by $1,425 [a year by] age 45."
In unveiling the 2014 defense budget request, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the smaller pay raises and TRICARE changes would save $1.4 billion next year and $12.8 billion over just five years. The TRICARE changes, he said, would "bring the beneficiary's cost-share closer to the levels envisioned when the program was first implemented."
In 1996, officials said, retirees covered 27 percent of total TRICARE costs with enrollment fees, deductibles or co-payments. Today, their out-of-pocket costs cover only 11 percent.
Asked to recall how hard it was to vote for higher TRICARE fees when he was a senator, Hagel said times are different now. When he left Congress in 2009 the global financial crisis was just beginning. Today, the Department of Defense is struggling with $41 billion in automatic cuts this year from budget sequestration. It faces $500 billion in more cuts over the next decade if the administration and Congress can't partner on a solution.
The $527 billion defense budget for 2014 assumes that a large debt-reduction deal is reached and sequestration ends. The defense share of the deal would be $150 billion in cuts over the decade versus $500 billion under sequestration. If slowing compensation growth isn't as part of that $150 billion cut, Defense officials said, deeper force cuts are inevitable.
With the backlog of compensation claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs having ballooned in recent years, one would expect major veterans service organizations to be among VA's harshest critics.
If so, they would join a rising chorus. Recently, network news programs have turned cameras and commentary on the mountain of 598,000 overdue claim decisions, suggesting bureaucratic neglect of returning ill and injured vets from Iraq and Afghanistan. Time magazine columnist Joe Klein even asked VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign.
One veterans association, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), says the administration isn't doing nearly enough to end the backlog with its average wait, from filing to decision, now at 273 days and some veterans in the largest cities reportedly waiting more than 600 days.
But most veterans service organizations aren't joining that chorus, for perhaps two major reasons. One, they believe they understand better than the loudest critics why the backlog has grown so. Some contributing factors these veterans' groups actually fought for.
Two, criticism of Shinseki and his team rings hollow to many veteran groups, given the administration's support over the past four years for robust funding of VA, unprecedented cooperation with veterans advocates and the depth of its commitment to reform a 20th century paper-driven claims process.
That's why groups including Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion came to Shinseki's defense after Klein's call to resign. That's why Joseph Violante, legislative director of Disabled American Veterans, told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee that VA is moving "down the right path" with many of its reform plans even while "processing over a million claims annually, which in my mind is something phenomenal."
Violante described VA leadership as the most open he has seen in almost 30 years working on veterans issues in Washington, D.C. He had particular praise for Allison A. Hickey, under secretary for benefits.
At the same hearing, Bart Stichman, executive director of the National Veterans Legal Services Program, praised Shinseki. The NVLSP successfully has sued VA, initially more than 20 years ago, to compensate Vietnam veterans for diseases presumed caused by wartime exposure to herbicides, including Agent Orange. Stichman said Shinseki showed courage when, facing a rising claims backlog in 2009, he added three new diseases to VA's list of diseases compensable for Vietnam veterans due to Agent Orange.
That required VA to re-adjudicate 150,000 claims previously denied and to process more than 100,000 fresh claims from Vietnam veterans, including for most anyone with heart disease who ever served in Vietnam. The Veterans Benefits Administration put more than 2300 experienced claims staff 37 percent of its workforce on the effort for 2 years, paying out more than $4.5 billion in retroactive benefits.
"While the decision was absolutely the right thing to do," Hickey said, "it did have an impact on our ability to keep up with new claims coming in and on aging claims already in the system."
One of Klein's criticisms is that VA should be giving priority to claims from returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans versus the steady stream of "supplemental" claims from older generations seeking to upgrade ratings.
One factor encouraging supplemental claims from military retirees is Congress' decision to lift the ban on concurrent receipt of both retired pay and VA disability compensation for retirees with ratings of 50 percent or higher. That threshold encourages some to file again and again for reconsideration, given the financial stakes. Until a retiree is rated 50 percent disabled, his or her retired pay is offset dollar for dollar by VA disability compensation.
VA claims data give some credence to Klein's argument because 52 percent of the current backlog is veterans who had an earlier claim decided in the past five years. But critics also should note only 20 percent of backlogged claims are from Iraq and Afghanistan vets. Vietnam veterans represent 37 percent and 1991 Gulf War veterans 23 percent, and 20 percent are claims from World War II, Korean War and peacetime-era veterans.
Hickey pointed to several developments that should allow VA to reach its two goals of eliminating the backlog by 2015 and raising the quality of claim decisions to an average accuracy rate of 98 percent, up from 86 percent in 2012. One is electronic claim processing through the Veterans Benefits Management System (VBMS), which will be operating at all 56 regional offices by December. Hickey said that will result in faster and more accurate claim decisions, in the same way automation was used to end long waits for payments under the new Post-9/11 GI Bill.
In addition, military services now have teams collecting VA service and medical records, including from TRICARE civilian physicians, for former service members filing claims. And those teams are certifying to VA that files are complete and accurate. "That is a game changer," Hickey said.
VA continues a massive project of scanning into computers all paper claims so adjudicators can use Google-like searches, rather than physically flipping pages, to verify information. And VA also has established quality review teams at every regional office to monitor claims processing in real time to catch and correct errors before decisions become final.
All of that is encouraging the support of most veterans groups. But the political pressure on VA remains intense, and the generational rift among advocates likely won't ease until the backlog is in full retreat.
Joseph Thompson, who formerly held Hickey's job as VA benefits chief, told senators that for VA to meet its ambitious goals for 2015 every one its many initiatives must succeed, which is an unlikely outcome. The quantity of claims, the unproven technology solutions and the vast number of other initiatives working, Thompson said, "is the heaviest lift I can imagine."
What VA needs most, Thompson said, "are more people … thousands more." That is one initiative that Hickey said VA isn't yet ready to embrace.
Sometimes the news of the day more-or-less compels a columnist to write about a topic that he or she would just as soon ignore. North Korea' recent belligent behavior is that sort of topic.
As anyone who has been paying attention to the news knows, during the past several weeks, what passes for a government in North Korea has done everything short of firing the first shot in a war that it insists is about to turn the Korean peninsula and - oh, by the way, Japan, Guam, Hawaii, and the west coast of the United States - into a "sea of flame."
No one really knows what's going on under the bad haircut of Kim Jong Un, the Hermit Kingdom's 29-year-old monarch, or even whether what's going on in his head is what really matters. We have only the North's deafening rhetoric from which to guess.
That rhetoric has become steadily more inflammatory during the past several weeks, with predictable hand-wringing by western governments and far too much attention from the world's press. Which probably is exactly what it was intended to accomplish. The question is why we're all so willing to indulge it.
A little over a decade ago, a bunch of thugs flew hijacked airplanes into buildings in New York City and Washington. In response, we turned ourselves inside out, doing ourselves far more damage both domestically and abroad than anything al Qaeda managed to inflict.
In retrospect, a more judicious response would have been a casual public shrug, accompanied by the quiet but relentless commitment of every clandestine capability we owned to go after Bin Laden and his henchmen. Instead, we responded to their piratical behavior with a decade of expensive and largely profitless undeclared wars from which U.S. foreign and domestic policy both continue to suffer.
North Korea of course isn't al Qaeda. It really is a nation-state, sort of, with a very large conventional army sitting just across Korea's periodically misnamed demilitarized zone, and undoubtedly capable of inflicting serious damage with 6000-odd artillery weapons emplaced roughly 50 miles from South Korea's capital, together with an uncertainly large chemical and nuclear stockpile.
But only if North Korea's rulers - whoever they really are - truly are suicidal. If they are, we risk an intense and very unpleasant war, unpleasant above all to the civilians on both sides of Korea's DMZ.
The odds are much greater that they aren't suicidal, and that, instead, what we're seeing is the military equivalent of a temper tantrum. To which, as every parent knows, the best response is to ignore it.
Ignoring it doesn't mean failing to take prudent military precautions, which we can be certain already are in progress. As Defense Secretary Hagel recently acknowledged, with 28,000 troops of our own on the peninsula, we've little choice but to take North Korea's threats seriously.
The more interesting question is why those 28,000 troops still are there sixty years after the Korean War ended, presenting Kim and company with the ideal target for their episodic belligerence.
Almost exactly ten years ago, I argued that U.S. combat forces in Korea were becoming a military anachronism, in effect little more than a tripwire for which better strategic uses could be found.
Indeed, apart from their use as hostages, it was hard to see what they contributed to a conventional force balance that long since had altered qualitatively in favor of South Korea, together with the nuclear umbrella that we remain obliged by treaty to provide.
More troublesome still, their continued presence on the peninsula has made it that much more difficult to convince China, the one nation best able to put the arm on North Korea, that doing so is in its own strategic interest.
Now, of course, we find ourselves prisoners of our own failure to rationalize a troop commitment that should have been modified years ago. After all, no one would suggest that we negotiate under the gun of North Korean threats. Or would they?
They would. Writing in the Los Angeles Times earlier this week, former ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg urges direct presidential diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, insisting that "though the North Koreans often sound like belligerent lunatics, there are certainly many reasons to engage, particularly on a peace treaty, an idea Kim Jong Un might well embrace."
Well, of course he might, thus gaining by threats precisely what six-power diplomacy thus far has repeatedly failed to achieve. What sort of signal that would send to other international scofflaws such as Iran isn't hard to fathom.
Prudently prepare for war - check. Reassure our Korean and Japanese allies that we'll turn North Korea into a parking lot if necessary - check. Allow ourselves to be frightened into negotiation - never.
In the meantime, the less public attention paid by both our government and the international press to the Nuts of the North, the better for all concerned.
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