History > 2007 > USA > Pentagon (I)

A SECOND CHANCE Former Specialist Evan Mettie

was initially declared “killed in action” only to be saved.

His mother, Denise, agreed to a medical retirement for him

that left him dependent on the veterans’ health care system.

He now faces transfer to a nursing home.

Photograph: Peter DaSilva

for The New York Times

For War’s Gravely Injured, Challenge to Find Care

NYT        12.3.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/us/12trauma.html

Bush Vows

to Fix Problems at Walter Reed

March 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:22 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush apologized to troops face to face on Friday for shoddy conditions they have endured at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He shook the artificial hand of a lieutenant and cradled a newborn whose daddy is nursing his remaining, severely injured leg back to health.

''The problems at Walter Reed were caused by bureaucratic and administrative failures,'' Bush said during a nearly three-hour visit to the medical center -- his first since reports surfaced of shabby conditions for veterans in outpatient housing. ''The system failed you and it failed our troops, and we're going to fix it.''

News that war veterans were not getting adequate care stunned the public, outraged Capitol Hill and forced three high-level Pentagon officials to step down. Bush met with soldiers once housed in Building 18, who endured moldy walls, rodents and other problems that went unchecked until reported by the media.

''I was disturbed by their accounts of what went wrong,'' Bush said. ''It is not right to have someone volunteer to wear our uniform and not get the best possible care. I apologize for what they went through, and we're going to fix the problem.''

He did not visit Building 18, which is now closed.

Bush critics questioned the timing of the president's visit -- six weeks after the problems were exposed and in the middle of the White House's battle with Congress over funding for troops in Iraq.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, among retired military officers who took part in a conference call before Bush's visit, said the president needs to make sure the problems are corrected.

''We have been shortchanging these returning soldiers ever since the conflict began,'' Gard said. ''Look at the inadequate funding in the Veterans Administration. That's caused by the fact that there has been a deliberate underestimate of the number of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who will need care. We've got to make this a seamless web between military facilities and the Veterans Administration so the soldiers are not hung out to dry.''

Bush has set up three commissions to look into the problems facing military personnel who come off of active duty and are moving into veteran status.

The Defense Department's independent review group is to report back by the middle of next month with recommendations on how to improve conditions at Walter Reed. Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson is leading an interagency task force to find gaps in federal services received by wounded troops. A bipartisan commission, chaired by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., and Donna Shalala, President Clinton's secretary of health and human services, will complete its report this summer.

This week, the House voted to create a coterie of case managers, advocates and counselors for injured troops. The bill also establishes a hot line for medical patients to report problems in their treatment.

Bobby Muller, president of Veterans for America, said Bush didn't see areas of the hospital most in need of change. He cited Ward 54, where soldiers are suffering from acute mental health conditions, and outpatient holding facilities where soldiers see long waits to get processed out of the Army.

''Walter Reed is not a photo-op,'' Muller said. ''Walter Reed is still broken. The DOD health care system is still broken. ... Our troops need their commander in chief to start working harder for them.''

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino called it ''an unfortunate characterization'' to say Bush was using Walter Reed as a picture-taking opportunity. She said it took some time to clear enough room on the president's schedule so he could spend time with patients and staff at Walter Reed, which he praised for providing ''extraordinary health care.''

The president awarded 10 Purple Hearts during his visit to Walter Reed, his 12th as president.

Bush went to a building that houses troops who once stayed in Building 18. Afterward, he visited a physical therapy room where a soldier with an artificial limb from one knee down was using an elliptical machine, and the president ran his hand over the buzz-cut head of Sgt. Mark Ecker Jr. of East Longmeadow, Mass.

''I'm doing great,'' said Ecker, a double-amputee who was wounded by an improvised explosive device in Iraq.

Bush noticed a large tattoo of a scantily clad woman decorating his left arm.

''Make sure you get a picture of the tattoo,'' Bush said, eyeing photographers. ''The man's proud of it.''

Bush walked up to Army Sgt. David Gardner, who lost a leg and sustained serious injuries to his other leg when a small bulldozer, being used to fill a hole caused by an explosion, ran over him in Iraq.

''I was run over by a Bobcat while there was sniper fire going on,'' Gardner said as he did leg presses on a machine to exercise his wounded limb and get used to the other one now fitted with a prothesis.

''It kinda hurts,'' said Gardner, an engineer stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. ''It hurts to put pressure on it.''

Gardner's wife, Beverly, who was pregnant when her husband was injured and gave birth to their daughter, Hailey, just days after he came out of a three-week coma, had no complaints about her husband's care at Walter Reed.

''They've been great,'' she said.

But Steve Robinson with Veterans for America tells a different story.

''I was at Walter Reed yesterday. Within 10 minutes I was encircled by about 15 soldiers having problems with their medical discharge, telling me they needed to get in touch with their congressman or their senator,'' Robinson said.

''The system is broke,'' he said. ''We need him (Bush) to be personally affected by it.''

------

On the Net:

Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

Bush Vows to Fix Problems at Walter Reed, NYT, 31.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

Military to use bomb-sniffing robots

30.3.2007
USA Today
By James Hannah, Associated Press

DAYTON, Ohio — As it increases its use of robots in war zones, the military will begin using a explosive-sniffing version that will allow soldiers to better detect roadside bombs, which account for more than 70% of U.S. casualties in Iraq.

Fido is the first robot with an integrated explosives sensor. Burlington, Mass.-based iRobot Corp. is filling the military's first order of 100 in this southwest Ohio city and will ship the robots over the next few months.

There are nearly 5,000 robots in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from about 150 in 2004. Soldiers use them to search caves and buildings for insurgents, detect mines and ferret out roadside and car bombs.

As the war in Iraq enters its fifth year, the federal government is spending more money on military robots and the two major U.S. robot makers have increased production.

Foster-Miller Inc., of Waltham, Mass., recently delivered 1,000 new robots to the military. IRobot cranked out 385 robots last year, up from 252 in 2005.

The government will spend about $1.7 billion on ground-based military robots between fiscal 2006 and 2012, said Bill Thomasmeyer, head of the National Center for Defense Robotics, a congressionally funded consortium of 160 companies, universities and government labs. That's up from $100 million in fiscal 2004.

Fido, produced at a GEM City Manufacturing and Engineering plant, represents an improvement in bomb-detecting military robots, said Col. Terry Griffin, project manager of the Army/Marine Corps Robotic Systems Joint Project Office at Redstone Arsenal, Ala.

The bomb-sniffing sensor is part of the robot, with its readings displayed on the controller along with camera images. Otherwise, a soldier would have to approach the suspect object with a sensor or try to attach it to a robot. The new robot has a 7-foot manipulator arm so it can use the sensor to scan the inside and undercarriage of vehicles for bombs.

Officials would not release details of how the sensors work because of security concerns.

"The sniffer robot is a very good idea because we need some way of understanding ambiguous situations like abandoned cars or suspicious trash piles without putting soldiers' lives on the line," said Loren Thompson, defense analyst with the Washington-based Lexington Institute.

Philip Coyle, senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said the robots could be helpful if they are used in cases where soldiers already suspect a bomb. But he said explosive-sniffing sensors are susceptible to false positives triggered by explosive residues elsewhere in the area, smoke and other contaminants.

"The soldiers can begin to lose faith in them, and they become more trouble than they're worth," he said.

Thompson said all military robots have limitations. Their every move must be dictated by an operator, they can be stopped by barriers or steep grades, they are not highly agile and they can break down or be damaged, he said.

Robots range in size from tiny — 1.5-pound ones carrying cameras are tossed into buildings to search for insurgents — to brute — 110-pound versions move rubble and lift debris.

Fido is an upgrade of PackBot, a 52-pound robot with rubber treads, lights, video cameras that zoom and swivel, obstacle-hurdling flippers and jointed manipulator arms with hand-like grippers designed to disable or destroy bombs. Each costs $165,000.

Army Staff Sgt. Shawn Baker, 26, of Olean, N.Y., has helped detect and disable roadside bombs during two tours in Iraq. Before the robots were available, he and fellow soldiers would stand back as far as possible with a rope and drag hooks over the suspect devices in hopes of disarming or detonating them.

Two soldiers were killed that way, Baker said. No one in his unit has been hurt or killed while disarming bombs since the robots arrived.

"The science and technology of this has been way out in front of the production side," Thomasmeyer said. "We're going to start to see a payoff for all the science and technology advancements."

IRobot posted $189 million in sales last year, up 33% from 2005. Its military business grew 60% to about $76 million. Bob Quinn, general manager of Foster-Miller, said his company has contracts of $320 million for military robots and that its business has doubled every year for the past four years.

    Military to use bomb-sniffing robots, UT, 30.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-30-military-robots_N.htm

9 Officers Faulted for Aftermath of Tillman Death

March 27, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, March 26 — Army officers violated regulations and misled members of Cpl. Pat Tillman’s family by failing to disclose promptly in 2004 that he had been accidentally killed by other American soldiers, a Pentagon investigation concluded Monday.

The investigators recommended that the nine officers, four of them generals, be subjected to disciplinary action.

Evidence that Corporal Tillman had been shot to death by fellow Rangers who believed that they were engaging enemy forces emerged on April 23, 2004, the day after his death in eastern Afghanistan. But, the investigation found, Army commanders did not notify his family of this suspicion as required, and did not tell them what had actually happened until 35 days after he was killed.

The report, issued jointly by the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, and the Army Criminal Investigation Command, found no criminal wrongdoing in the shooting of Corporal Tillman, a professional football player whose decision to enlist in the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks drew national attention. Nor is there evidence of a broad cover-up, Mr. Gimble said.

But the report was particularly critical of Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr., who headed the Army Special Operations Command when Corporal Tillman was killed.

“We found compelling evidence,” the report said, that General Kensinger “learned of the suspected fratricide well before” a May 3 memorial service for Corporal Tillman that both he and the family attended, but that he failed to alert the Tillmans. The report also said that the general, who retired last year, had misled investigators by telling them he first learned of the suspected true cause of death the night before the service.

The report cites two occasions before the service on which, other officers say, they passed along information to General Kensinger about the likelihood that Corporal Tillman had been killed by “friendly fire.” On one of those occasions, an unidentified lieutenant colonel said, he gave the general a message on April 30 that said an investigation would find such a cause “highly possible.”

“After reading the message LTG Kensinger stated that he wished they had not told him (or words to that effect),” the lieutenant colonel told investigators.

Army regulations require that the family be informed of additional information about the cause of a soldier’s death as soon as it becomes available. But, the report said, General Kensinger decided to withhold notification from family members until a final conclusion was reached.

“We find no reasonable explanation for these failures to comply with Army regulations,” the report said.

Efforts to reach General Kensinger on Monday were unsuccessful. Though he is retired, the Army could reduce his benefits if it found that his actions warranted disciplinary action.

The report does not recommend how the Army should discipline the officers involved. Army officials said Monday that they were reviewing the report and had assigned to Gen. William Scott Wallace, head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command, the job of deciding what discipline to impose.

While the report calls for nine officers to be held accountable, because of privacy laws it identifies by name only the four generals.

Among them is Brig. Gen. James C. Nixon, who as a colonel commanded Corporal Tillman’s regiment in Afghanistan. The report says General Nixon failed to follow regulations that require notification of the Army Safety Center to conduct a formal investigation of the cause of death.

The report also criticizes Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones, who as chief of staff to General Kensinger was ordered by him to investigate the death but who, the report says, failed to do so thoroughly.

The Pentagon investigation also found that information provided by Corporal Tillman’s unit in recommending him for a Silver Star was inaccurate in suggesting that he had been killed by enemy fire. It recommended that the decision to award him the medal be reviewed.

The acting Army secretary, Pete Geren, said that the Silver Star would not be taken from Corporal Tillman but that the citation would be rewritten to correct inaccuracies.

The report says Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, is “accountable for the inaccurate and misleading assertions” in the papers recommending the Silver Star.

    9 Officers Faulted for Aftermath of Tillman Death, NYT, 27.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/washington/27tillman.html

Despite strains, U.S. could fight a third war: Gates

Fri Mar 23, 2007 10:58AM EDT
Reuters
By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Robert Gates cautioned on Thursday the Army would face problems without emergency funds but insisted U.S. forces could fight a third war despite being stretched in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He painted a mixed picture of the impact Iraq has had on U.S. military readiness at a time when Congress is considering tying a Bush administration request for emergency war funding to a deadline for pulling troops out of the conflict.

Gates had raised concerns about a demand by some Democrats to set a deadline. He declined on Thursday to say what Congress should do or to discuss a threat by President George W. Bush to veto a bill linking funds to a withdrawal timetable.

"It's my responsibility to let everybody involved in the debate know the impact of the timing of the decisions," he said. "I think that that's about as far as I should go."

More than four years into the U.S.-led war in Iraq, the U.S. military shows increasing signs of strain. Top defense officials say the United States would prevail in a third major confrontation, but it would take longer.

Asked how the U.S. military was positioned in the face of commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan to deal with a major confrontation in a third state, Gates said adversaries should not think the United States too weak to fight.

"Our ability to defend the United States despite the heavy commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan remains very strong and every adversary should be aware of that," he said. He did not identify any specific adversaries.

QUESTIONS REMAIN

But questions remain about readiness, and the secretary enumerated several problems the Army would face if Congress does not pass $100 billion in emergency funding, such as curtailed training and equipment repairs.

Gates said by way of example that if Congress did not approve the funds by April 15, the Army might have to curtail or suspend some training for reserve forces, slow training of units scheduled to go to Iraq and Afghanistan and stop repairing equipment used in training.

If the funds are not approved by May 15, Gates said, the Army might have to extend some soldiers' tours because other units are not ready, delay the formation of new brigade combat teams, reduce equipment repair work at Army depots and delay or curtail deployment of combat teams to training.

Also, in another signal of stress, the military said on Thursday that 1,200 Marines and sailors would stay in Okinawa, Japan, for an additional five months so other Marines scheduled to move into Iraq can stay home and train for the mission. That allows the Marine Corps to maintain its target for "dwell time" -- the time a Marine is home between deployments.

    Despite strains, U.S. could fight a third war: Gates, R, 23.3.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2223259020070323

Army Revises Upward Number of Desertions in ’06

March 23, 2007
The New York Times
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

A total of 3,196 active-duty soldiers deserted the Army last year, or 853 more than previously reported, according to revised figures from the Army.

The new calculations by the Army, which had about 500,000 active-duty troops at the end of 2006, significantly alter the annual desertion totals since the 2000 fiscal year.

In 2005, for example, the Army now says 2,543 soldiers deserted, not the 2,011 it had reported. For some earlier years, the desertion numbers were revised downward.

National Public Radio first reported on Tuesday that the Army had been inaccurately reporting desertion figures.

A soldier is considered a deserter if he leaves his post without permission, quits his unit or fails to report for duty with the intent of staying away permanently. Soldiers who are absent without leave — or AWOL, a designation that assumes a soldier still intends to return to duty — are automatically classified as deserters and are dropped from a unit’s rolls if they remain away for more than 30 days.

Some Army officers link the recent uptick in annual desertion rates to the toll of wartime deployments and point to the increasing percentage of troops who are on their second or third tours in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But an Army spokeswoman, Maj. Anne Edgecomb, gave different reasons. Most soldiers desert because of personal, family or financial problems, Major Edgecomb said, adding, “We don’t have any facts to indicate that soldiers who desert now are doing so for reasons different from why soldiers deserted in the past.”

Lt. Col. Brian C. Hilferty, an Army spokesman, said the desertion data errors were caused by confusion among employees who tally them. “They were counting things wrong, and doing it inconsistently,” Colonel Hilferty said in an interview.

He added, “We are looking at the rise in desertions, but the numbers remain below prewar levels, and retention remains high. So the force is healthy.”

The failure to count deserters accurately is inexcusable, said Derek B. Stewart, director for Defense Department personnel issues for the Government Accountability Office.

“It is just unbelievable to the G.A.O. to hear that the Army does not know what that number is,” Mr. Stewart said in an interview Thursday.

Noting that the problem with the desertion numbers arises when the service cannot find enough recruits to fill certain crucial specialties like medical experts and bomb defusers Mr. Stewart said, “In the context of their current recruiting problems for certain occupations, these desertion numbers are huge.”

The new figures also show a faster acceleration in the rate of desertions over the previous two fiscal years than announced. In 2006, for instance, desertions rose by 27 percent, not 17 percent, as the Army had previously reported, a spokesman said.

The revised figures show 2,543 desertions in the fiscal year 2005, an 8 percent increase from the 2,357 the year before. Previously, the service said 2005 desertions dropped by 17 percent, to 2,011 from 2,432.

But from the fiscal year 2000 through 2003, there were hundreds fewer desertions than the Army had previously reported. The Army’s revised data, while reflecting significant errors in year-to-year desertions, showed a total of 22,468 desertions since the fiscal year 2000, nearly the same as the old count of 22,586.

Over all, desertions, a chronic problem in the Army but hardly pervasive, now account for less than 1 percent of active-duty soldiers. The current annual rates pale in comparison with the 33,094 soldiers — 3.41 percent of the total force — who deserted the Army in 1971, during the Vietnam War.

The Army’s data does not reflect deserters from the 63,000 currently activated National Guard and Reserve soldiers, and Colonel Hilferty said that data was not available yesterday. But he said few soldiers from those units deserted.

In an e-mail statement yesterday, Colonel Hilferty also said that the record keeping was damaged in the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon, which destroyed personnel records.

“Unfortunately, for the past several years,” he said, “our methodology for tracking deserters at the macro level has been flawed.”

    Army Revises Upward Number of Desertions in ’06, NYT, 23.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/us/23awol.html

New to Job, Gates Argued for Closing Guantánamo

March 23, 2007
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, March 22 — In his first weeks as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates repeatedly argued that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantánamo would be viewed as illegitimate, according to senior administration officials. He told President Bush and others that it should be shut down as quickly as possible.

Mr. Gates’s appeal was an effort to turn Mr. Bush’s publicly stated desire to close Guantánamo into a specific plan for action, the officials said. In particular, Mr. Gates urged that trials of terrorism suspects be moved to the United States, both to make them more credible and because Guantánamo’s continued existence hampered the broader war effort, administration officials said.

Mr. Gates’s arguments were rejected after Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and some other government lawyers expressed strong objections to moving detainees to the United States, a stance that was backed by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, administration officials said.

As Mr. Gates was making his case, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined him in urging that the detention facility be shut down, administration officials said. But the high-level discussions about closing Guantánamo came to a halt after Mr. Bush rejected the approach, although officials at the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the State Department continue to analyze options for the detention of terrorism suspects.

The base at Guantánamo holds about 385 prisoners, among them 14 senior leaders of Al Qaeda, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who were transferred to it last year from secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Under the Pentagon’s current plans, some prisoners, including Mr. Mohammed, will face war crimes charges under military trials that could begin later this year.

“The policy remains unchanged,” said Gordon D. Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Even so, one senior administration official who favors the closing of the facility said the battle might be renewed.

“Let’s see what happens to Gonzales,” that official said, referring to speculation that Mr. Gonzales will be forced to step down, or at least is significantly weakened, because of the political uproar over the dismissal of United States attorneys. “I suspect this one isn’t over yet.”

Details of the internal discussions on Guantánamo were described by senior officials from three departments or agencies of the executive branch, including officials who support moving rapidly to close Guantánamo and those who do not. One official made it clear that he was willing to discuss the internal deliberations in part because of Mr. Gonzales’s current political weakness. The senior officials discussed the issue on ground rules of anonymity because it entailed confidential conversations.

The officials said Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice expressed their concerns about Guantánamo in conversations with Mr. Bush and others, including Mr. Gonzales, beginning in January and onward. One widely discussed alternative would move the prisoners to military brigs in the United States, where they would remain in the custody of the Pentagon and would be subject to trial under military proceedings. There is widespread agreement, however, that moving any detainees or legal proceedings to American territory could bring significant complications.

Some administration lawyers are deeply reluctant to move terrorism suspects to American soil because it could increase their constitutional and statutory rights — and invite an explosion of civil litigation. Guantánamo was chosen because it was an American military facility but not on American soil.

Placing the detainees in military brigs on United States territory might fend off some of those challenges. The solution may eventually require a new act of Congress establishing legal standing for the detainees and new rules for their trial and incarceration if brought to the United States.

Mr. Gates’s criticism of Guantánamo marks a sharply different approach than the one taken by his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld. It also demonstrated a new dynamic in the administration, in which Mr. Gates was teaming up with Ms. Rice, who often was at loggerheads with Mr. Rumsfeld. The State Department has long been concerned about the adverse foreign-policy impact of housing prisoners at Guantánamo.

In the end, Mr. Gates did succeed in killing plans to build a $100 million courthouse and detention complex at Guantánamo, after he argued that the large and expensive project would leave the impression of a long-lasting American detainee operation there and that the money could be more effectively spent elsewhere by the Pentagon. Mr. Gates approved a far more modest facility at one-tenth of the cost.

The setback in his effort to close Guantánamo was described by senior Pentagon officials as Mr. Gates’s only significant failure during an effort in his first three months in office to shift course from policies pursued by Mr. Rumsfeld. The outcome suggests that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Gonzales remain committed to a detention plan that has become one of the most controversial elements of the administration’s counterterrorism program.

Mr. Cheney’s spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, said via e-mail that “we don’t discuss internal deliberations.”

Mr. Bush has repeatedly said he ultimately wants to shutter the detention operations at Guantánamo. But he has also said it is not possible to do so any time soon.

State Department and Pentagon officials have said that even close allies are uncomfortable with American policies toward Guantánamo, making it more difficult in some cases to coordinate efforts in counterterrorism, intelligence and law enforcement.

More than 390 detainees have been transferred abroad from the Guantánamo facility since it was opened amid global controversy in 2002. Last year, 111 detainees were transferred out, and 12 more have been this year. About 20 of those repatriated to home countries have been picked up again in sweeps of terrorism suspects or have been killed or captured in battle, Pentagon officials say.

Many countries do not want to take back the detainees held at Guantánamo. Some home nations will not guarantee that returning detainees would be assured humane treatment and fair trials, while others will not guarantee that detainees viewed by American officials as still dangerous would not be set free.

Mr. Gates’s challenge has sent a ripple through the White House, because it forced officials to confront the question of whether Mr. Bush was actually moving to fulfill his stated desire to close the detention facility. Officials who advocate shutting down Guantánamo, including some at the Pentagon and the State Department, said an underlying motivation of those who want to keep the center open is that closing it would be seen as a public admission of an incorrect policy — something the Bush administration is loath to do.

Neither Mr. Gates nor Ms. Rice have made public their comments to Mr. Bush. “Nobody is going to be insubordinate with the president,” said one senior administration official involved in the discussions. “You know the saying: ‘One war, one team.’ ”

But in a recent Pentagon news conference, Mr. Gates did speak about his concerns over Guantánamo in general terms.

“I think that Guantánamo has become symbolic, whether we like it or not, for many around the world,” Mr. Gates said at the time. “The problem is that we have a certain number of the detainees there who often by their own confessions are people who if released would come back to attack the United States. There are others that we would like to turn back to their home countries, but their home countries don’t want them.”

He said officials “are trying to address the problem of how do we reduce the numbers at Guantánamo and then what do you do with the relatively limited number that would be irresponsible to release.”

“And I would tell you that we’re wrestling with those questions right now,” he continued.

In an interview on Thursday, Gordon England, the deputy secretary of defense who is Mr. Gates’s point man on detention issues, suggested that the long-term answer to Guantánamo might be creating some new international legal structure or set of multilateral agreements to manage captured members of global terrorist organizations.

“I don’t know the alternative unless the international community, frankly, develops an alternative,” Mr. England said. “It is not a U.S. problem. It is an international problem to be dealt with.”

Mr. England said American government officials had “an extraordinarily high degree of confidence from the information available” that many Guantánamo detainees were “going to damage the country, so you just can’t let them go.”

“So,” he added, “this is difficult. I know it’s onerous. I know there are a lot of questions about it. We deal with it the best we can. But at the end of the day, we are not going to put the country or our citizens in jeopardy.”

    New to Job, Gates Argued for Closing Guantánamo, NYT, 23.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/washington/23gitmo.html?hp

U.S. General Strengthens Military Ties in Beijing

March 23, 2007
The New York Times
By JOSEPH KAHN

BEIJING, Mar. 23 — China’s recent test of an anti-satellite weapon sent a confusing message to the world about its military intentions, but the United States and China are slowly building stronger military-to-military ties anyway, the top-ranking United States military officer said today.

Gen. Peter Pace of the Marines, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he urged his Chinese counterparts to provide more information, both about their spending and about the aims of their military buildup. He called his meetings encouraging, but said he did not get concrete answers to his questions.

“I used the example of the antisatellite test as how, sometimes, the international community can be confused, because it was a surprise that China did that, and it wasn’t clear what their intent was,” General Pace told reporters in Beijing.

China said nothing about the test, in which it fired a medium-range ballistic missile into space to destroying one of its own aging weather satellites, for more than a week after it was conducted in January. The test raised alarms in Washington that the Chinese military might be seeking the capacity to cripple the Pentagon’s heavily satellite-dependent communications, missile guidance and navigation systems in the event of a future conflict.

The United States and the former Soviet Union have also destroyed satellites in space in the past. They ceased such tests in the 1980s, partly because the debris left behind in orbit posed threats to other satellites and space vehicles.

China has maintained that it has only peaceful intentions in space, and has declined to explain its missile test in any detail, calling it only “a scientific experiment in space.”

General Pace, who arrived on Thursday for his first visit to China, discussed overall military relations between the two powers with Guo Boxiong, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission; Cao Gangchuan, the defense minister; and Li Zhaoxing, the foreign minister, among other officials.

China put forward proposals to strengthen communication and understanding between the two militaries, General Pace said. They included sending some Chinese cadets to study at West Point, and conducting joint humanitarian and rescue-at-sea exercises.

General Pace said he agreed to study the proposals. He said the two sides were still discussing the establishment of a military hotline that could speed communications in an emergency.

“The Chinese military understands as well as I do that the opportunity to pick up the phone and smooth out misunderstandings quickly is a very important part of relations,” General Pace said.

The exchange highlights a modest warming trend in relations between the two militaries, which grew chilly in the early days of the Bush administration. Administration officials, including the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, initially said they did not see much value in extending a hand to the secretive Chinese military, which they said provided little in the way of confidence-promoting disclosures.

Tensions increased when an American spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter over the South China Sea in 2001, killing the Chinese pilot and forcing the American plane to make an emergency landing at a Chinese air base. The crew was held for more than a week before being released.

Top officers from both countries have picked up the pace of visits in the past two years, but the Pentagon has pressed China to explain its rapid military buildup, without obvious success.

China raised its military spending by nearly 18 percent this year, to $45 billion, extending an already long streak of double-digit annual spending increases. The Pentagon claims the country’s real military spending is at least twice the official figure in the national budget.

Chinese officials have expressed unease about America’s weapon sales to Taiwan, an independently governed island that China claims as its sovereign territory. The Pentagon has announced plans to sell more than 400 missiles to Taiwan to counter a large array of Chinese missiles aimed at the island.

General Pace said the issue of Taiwan came up in all his meetings. But he played down concerns that tensions across the Taiwan Strait could lead to war.

“I believe that there are good-faith efforts amongst all the leadership to prevent that,” he said. “That’s what we can focus on — not how to fight each other, but how to prevent military action.”

    U.S. General Strengthens Military Ties in Beijing, NYT, 23.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/world/asia/23cnd-china.html?hp



 

Army Brigade Finds Itself Stretched Thin        NYT        20.3.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/us/20army.html

Army Brigade Finds Itself Stretched Thin

March 20, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

FORT POLK, La., March 14 — For decades, the Army has kept a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division on round-the-clock alert, poised to respond to a crisis anywhere in 18 to 72 hours.

Today, the so-called ready brigade is no longer so ready. Its soldiers are not fully trained, much of its equipment is elsewhere, and for the past two weeks the unit has been far from the cargo aircraft it would need in an emergency.

Instead of waiting on standby, the First Brigade of the 82nd Airborne is deep in the swampy backwoods of this vast Army training installation, preparing to go to Iraq. Army officials concede that the unit is not capable of getting at least an initial force of several hundred to a war zone within 18 hours, a standard once considered inviolate.

The declining readiness of the brigade is just one measure of the toll that four years in Iraq — and more than five years in Afghanistan — have taken on the United States military. Since President Bush ordered reinforcements to Iraq and Afghanistan in January, roughly half of the Army’s 43 active-duty combat brigades are now deployed overseas, Army officials said. A brigade has about 3,500 soldiers.

Pentagon officials worry that among the just over 20 Army brigades left in the United States or at Army bases in Europe and Asia, none has enough equipment and manpower to be sent quickly into combat, except for an armored unit stationed permanently in South Korea, several senior Army officers said.

“We are fully committed right now,” said Col. Charles Hardy of the Forces Command, which oversees Army training and equipping of troops to be sent overseas. “If we had a fully trained-up brigade, hell, it’d be the next one to deploy.”

The 82nd recently canceled its annual Memorial Day parade because most of its 17,000 soldiers are overseas. When the First Brigade, which got the rotating assignment as the ready brigade in December, leaves for Iraq over the summer, the 101st Airborne Division, at Fort Campbell, Ky., will take over responsibility for the ready brigade. But its soldiers are preparing to go to Iraq this year as well.

[Gen. Richard Cody, the Army vice chief of staff, told Congress in testimony on March 15 that with the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army does not have the time or the resources to prepare for most of the other missions it could potentially face.]

Military officials say that the United States, which has more than two million personnel in active and reserve armed forces, has a combat-tested force that could still emerge victorious if another major conflict arose. But the response would be slower, with more casualties, and would have to rely heavily on the Navy and Air Force, they said.

Despite tensions with Iran and North Korea, another crisis requiring troops does not appear imminent.

If ground forces were needed urgently, Army commanders said they could draw units quickly from Iraq and send them wherever they might be needed, rather than relying solely on the ready brigade to provide a fast reaction force.

The Pentagon can also draw on 28 combat brigades in the reserves, several of which the military is making plans to mobilize later this year or early next to relieve some of the strain. But those units face even deeper problems than the active duty brigades because of equipment and training shortfalls.

Altogether, Army officials said 23 brigades, including one National Guard brigade, are now deployed overseas. Once the reinforcements called for by the White House are in place, 17 Army combat brigades will be in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, Army officials said, along with four more deployed in various locations, including as peacekeepers in the Sinai desert.

In effect, the Army has become a “just in time” organization: every combat brigade that finishes training is sent back to Iraq or Afghanistan almost immediately. Equipment vital for protecting troops, like armored vehicles, roadside bomb jammers and night vision goggles, is rushed to Iraq as quickly as it is made, officials say.

The 2007 Pentagon budget includes $17.1 billion to reset Army equipment, with a separate fund of $13.9 billion in emergency funds to replace or repair gear damaged in combat. Even so, units at home preparing to deploy are facing equipment shortages and have all but given up preparing for anything other than their next tour in Iraq or Afghanistan.

[“We do have shortages in the nondeployed forces,” General Cody conceded in his unusually candid testimony to Congress. There were not enough vehicles, radios and night vision gear, and there are “spot shortages” in weapons, he said, noting that those units constituted the nation’s strategic reserve.]

Later this year, the Army will probably be forced to send its first brigades back to Iraq with less than a year at home resting and training, senior Pentagon officials said. Another alternative, they said, would be to lengthen the tours in Iraq to 18 months from a year.

Army officials said no soldiers were sent overseas without adequate training and equipment. And they point to continued strong recruiting and retention numbers as proof that morale remains high.

But after insisting for years that one year at home is a minimum amount of time necessary to prepare a unit to conduct counterinsurgency operations, commanders now say that, by speeding up equipment overhauls and compressing training, they can do the job in 10 months or less.

Over time, the shortened training schedules will inevitably begin to affect the performance of troops in the field, some officers said.

Senior Pentagon officials worry about those deepening strains. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a secret report to Congress last month that upgraded from “moderate” to “significant” the risk of failing in its mission that the military faces this year in carrying out tasks in Iraq, Afghanistan and any other hot spots that might emerge.

[“We have the best counterinsurgency army in the world, but they’re not trained for full-spectrum operations,” General Cody said in his testimony.]

The Marines, which are also heavily engaged in Iraq, are facing similar strains.

Fort Polk is one of the last stops many combat units make before deploying to Iraq. During the cold war, the installation trained soldiers to fight the Soviets in Europe. The 82nd, based in Fort Bragg, N. C., used to parachute into Louisiana to keep its airborne skills sharp, but that tradition has been abandoned.

Now, even though the terrain bears little resemblance to Iraq’s desertlike conditions, the emphasis is solely on preparing infantry units to handle the chaotic sectarian conflict and random violence they are likely to encounter there.

Within the 82nd’s current First Brigade, about 4 soldiers in 10 have done previous tours in Iraq, making preparations to go back easier, said Col. Charles Flynn, the brigade commander. Last week, the brigade was spread out throughout the wooded training area at Fort Polk, in an exercise that featured simulations of the kind of Iraqi villages and roadside bomb attacks that many soldiers had actually experienced in previous deployments.

But almost all are in new jobs. Lt. Col. Michael Iacobucci, now a battalion commander, had served as a battalion executive officer in the 82nd when it was in Iraq in 2003. After coming home, Colonel Iacobucci, who is from Albany, had moved with his family to Australia as part of a three-year military exchange program.

He rejoined the 82nd in August, eager to go back to Iraq, he said while driving in a Humvee through the mock Iraqi villages. Before units were actually preparing to go into combat, their performance at Fort Polk would be graded only when the two-week exercise was over, said Lt. Col. Arthur Kandarian, a trainer. Now, the lessons are frequently spelled out as they happen, to get soldiers ready faster.

“It was treated as more of a test, and it was a closed-book test,” he explained. “Now it’s a coaching situation because we’re in a war.”

Training is being compressed at almost every stage, Army officers said. Soldiers who before 2003 spent months in specialized courses and on firing ranges now take compressed classes taught by so-called mobile training teams and hone their weapons proficiency on simulators, Army officers said.

“The biggest problem I’m seeing is unfamiliarity with equipment,” said Capt. Christian Durham, an instructor at Fort Polk, who sees all the units that rotate through before heading to Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Army is struggling just to keep up with current troop demands. The five additional combat brigades ordered by President Bush in January will raise the total American force level in Iraq to 160,000 troops, including combat and support troops, by June. That has forced the Army to take steps to supply troops faster to maintain the higher force levels.

Two Army brigades, one at Fort Riley, Kan., and another at Ft. Hood, Tex., that were not scheduled to return to the combat rotation until 2008 were ordered in December to speed up preparations so they will be ready to deploy by October, said Lt. Col. Christian Kubik, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division.

The Pentagon also informed the 172nd Stryker Brigade, which returned in December from a 16-month tour in Iraq, that it had to be ready for possible deployment between October and December, according to Maj. Michael Blankartz, a brigade spokesman.

Normally, a brigade is given half a year to overhaul its equipment, but the Alaska brigade, now part of the 25th Infantry Division, has only four months, he said. The timetable for preparing its troops is even more accelerated.

Roughly two-thirds of the brigade’s 3,300 soldiers are rotating to other units around the Army, as is customary after a deployment, Major Blankartz said. Their replacements are not scheduled to arrive until July and August, he said, leaving only one or two months before the Army wants the brigade prepared.

    Army Brigade Finds Itself Stretched Thin, NYT, 20.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/us/20army.html?hp

Army’s Surgeon General Retires in Wake of Walter Reed Furor

March 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:25 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Army forced its surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, to retire, officials said Monday, the third high-level official to lose his job over poor outpatient treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Kiley, who headed Walter Reed from 2002 to 2004, has been a lightning rod for criticism over conditions at the Army's premier medical facility, including during congressional hearings last week. Soldiers and their families have complained about substandard living conditions and bureaucratic delays at the hospital overwhelmed with wounded from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kiley submitted his retirement request on Sunday, the Army said in a statement.

''We must move quickly to fill this position -- this leader will have a key role in moving the way forward in meeting the needs of our wounded warriors,'' Acting Secretary of the Army Pete Geren said in an Army statement.

Geren asked Kiley to retire, said a senior defense official speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was not involved in the decision to ask Kiley to retire, the official said.

Kiley's removal underscored how the fallout over Walter Reed's shoddy conditions has yet to subside. Instead, the controversy has mushroomed into questions about how wounded soldiers and veterans are treated throughout the medical systems run by the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs and has become a major preoccupation of a Bush administration already struggling to defend the unpopular war in Iraq.

''I submitted my retirement because I think it is in the best interest of the Army,'' Kiley said in Monday's Army statement. He said he wanted to allow officials to ''focus completely on the way ahead.''

The conditions at Walter Reed were detailed last month by The Washington Post. Since then, Gates has forced Army Secretary Francis Harvey to resign and Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, who was in charge of Walter Reed since August 2006, was ousted from his post.

A number of investigations have been ordered.

President Bush appointed a bipartisan commission to investigate problems at the nation's military and veteran hospitals, and separate reviews are under way by the Pentagon, the Army and an interagency task force led by Nicholson.

In a briefing Thursday for reporters at the medical center, top Army officials said they have moved to fix some of the problems at Walter Reed.

Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody said that officials have added caseworkers, financial specialists and others to work with soldiers' families on problems they have related to the injuries such as getting loans or help with income taxes.

    Army’s Surgeon General Retires in Wake of Walter Reed Furor, NYT, 12.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Walter-Reed.html?hp

For War’s Gravely Injured, Challenge to Find Care

March 12, 2007
The New York Times
By DEBORAH SONTAG and LIZETTE ALVAREZ

When Staff Sgt. Jarod Behee was asked to select a paint color for the customized wheelchair that was going to be his future, his young wife seethed. The government, Marissa Behee believed, was giving up on her husband just five months after he took a sniper’s bullet to the head during his second tour of duty in Iraq.

Ms. Behee, a sunny Californian who was just completing a degree in interior design, possessed a keen faith in her husband’s potential to be rehabilitated from a severe brain injury. She refused to accept what she perceived to be the more limited expectations of the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto, Calif.

“The hospital continually told me that Jarod was not making adequate progress and that the next step was a nursing home,” Ms. Behee said. “I just felt that it was unfair for them to throw in the towel on him. I said, ‘We’re out of here.’ ”

Because Ms. Behee had successfully resisted the Army’s efforts to retire her husband into the V.A. health care system, his military insurance policy, it turned out, covered private care. So she moved him to a community rehabilitation center, Casa Colina, near her parents’ home in Southern California in late 2005.

Three months later, Sergeant Behee was walking unassisted and abandoned his government-provided wheelchair. Now 28, he works as a volunteer in the center’s outpatient gym, wiping down equipment and handing out towels. It is not the police job that he aspired to; his cognitive impairments are serious. But it is not a nursing home, either.

Like the spouses of many other soldiers with severe brain injury, Ms. Behee, also 28, transformed herself into a kind of warrior wife to get her husband the care she thought he deserved. By now, there is a veritable battery of brain-injured-soldiers’ relatives who have quit their jobs and, for some extended time, moved away from their homes to advocate for and care for these very wounded soldiers during long hospitalizations.

In the eyes of five such relatives interviewed, the military health care system, which is so advanced in its treatment of lost limbs, has been scrambling to deal with an unanticipated volume of traumatic brain-injury cases that it was ill equipped to handle. Largely because of the improvised explosive devices used by insurgents in Iraq, traumatic brain injury has become a signature wound of this war, with 1,882 cases treated to date, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center.

In general, these caregivers said that their grievously wounded soldiers had either been written off prematurely or not given aggressive rehabilitation or options for care. From the beginning, they said, the government should have joined forces with civilian rehabilitation centers instead of trying to ramp up its limited brain-injury treatment program alone during a time of war. That way, soldiers would have had access to top-quality care at civilian institutions that were already operating at full throttle and might be closer to home.

In fact, many soldiers do have that access. But unlike Ms. Behee, many caregivers only belatedly come to understand how to negotiate the daunting military health care system.

Generally, after severely brain-injured soldiers are medically evacuated to the United States, they are treated first at Walter Reed Army Hospital or Bethesda Naval Hospital. Relatively quickly, the military, depending on the branch, initiates a medical retirement process that turns the soldiers’ health care over to the V.A. If soldiers succeed in deferring retirement, they remain covered by a military insurance policy that, if pressed, pays for private care.

Still, the military hospitals tend to discharge seriously brain-injured soldiers to V.A. hospitals, regardless of their active or retired status. It is how the system works, and challenging it requires constant haggling, which often leaves the families of the severely wounded soldiers feeling abused, resentful and anxious for those soldiers without an advocate.

“We have been let down by a system that is so bungling and bureaucratic that it doesn’t know what it can and cannot do and just says ‘No’ as a matter of course,” said Debra Schulz of Friendswood, Tex., whose son, Lance Cpl. Steven Schulz of the Marines, 22, suffered a severe brain injury during his second tour in Iraq.

Offers of Help

Early on, at least two top-ranked nonprofit civilian centers, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey, made overtures to the government. Since the Vietnam War, their leaders said, while the V.A. has focused primarily on the chronic care of aging veterans, the civilian acute rehabilitation system has been dealing daily with brain-injured patients, fine-tuning their care.

Dr. Bruce M. Gans, chief medical officer of the Kessler Institute, contacted senior military and V.A. physicians. “I said, ‘Please let us help. Please let us be used as a resource,’ ” Dr. Gans said. “Especially in the early days, they had no capacity to take care of these kids. There was either no response or a negative response. We just didn’t understand.”

Last week, Dr. Joanne C. Smith, chief executive officer of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, met in Washington with senior Pentagon officials and found far keener receptivity to the idea of extending civilian sector treatment to more soldiers, she said. After revelations by The Washington Post of problems with outpatient care at Walter Reed and Bob Woodruff’s reporting on ABC about traumatic brain injury, the tenor of the conversations was “action-oriented,” Dr. Smith said.

“There was a high degree of acceptance that there is a gap in the military system’s current ability to take care of particularly the profoundly injured,” she said.

V.A. officials, however, do not believe there is a problem or any need for rescue by the private sector.

The V.A. has centralized the care for severe traumatic brain injury at four hospitals that specialized in brain injury before the war. Those four, converted into “polytrauma centers” by Congress in 2005, have been gradually beefed up and the level of care has improved since Sergeant Behee arrived at Palo Alto in the summer of 2005, advocates for veterans say. But they still have a total of only 48 beds.

Some 425 soldiers have been treated for moderate and severe traumatic brain injury at the polytrauma centers in the past four years, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center.

“At the moment we are handling the numbers,” said Dr. Barbara Sigford, the V.A.’s national director for physical medicine and rehabilitation. “The trauma centers are running close to capacity, but there are always beds available.”

Harriet Zeiner, the lead clinical neuropsychologist at the V.A.’s polytrauma center in Palo Alto, said care at the polytrauma centers was “tremendous.” She and Dr. Sigford said the great majority of soldiers and their families had been satisfied. A few disgruntled families, they said, grew frustrated with the slow recovery process and directed their anger at the V.A.; many went “through the system early on while we were still building the blocks,” Dr. Sigford said.

Susan H. Connors, president of the Brain Injury Association of America, said she was more concerned about follow-up care once soldiers returned to their communities, a concern of all advocates for these soldiers. The polytrauma centers, Ms. Connors said, are “pretty good.”

Dr. Sigford of the V.A. said, “We really are able to take care of a high-acuity group.”

But Dr. Smith of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago disagreed in the strongest terms.

“The V.A. has not been doing this for the last 35 years, and there is no way, with the complexity of this injury, that the V.A. system is prepared to get to parity with the civilian acute rehabilitation system overnight,” she said. “They’re dabbling in brain injury, and you can’t dabble in brain injury.”

A Growing Group

The severely brain-injured are among the most catastrophically wounded soldiers, and recovery can be painfully slow or, in some cases, entirely elusive. “There is no prosthetic for the brain,” said Jeremy Chwat, vice president for program services at the Wounded Warrior Project, an advocacy organization.

The Wounded Warrior Project organized a meeting on traumatic brain injury in Washington attended by about three dozen caregivers last fall. One raised “a huge, sad ethical question,” Mr. Chwat said, related to the advances in military trauma care that have saved so many lives: “Are we doing these young men and women a service by bringing them home alive?”

Mr. Chwat said the severely brain-injured soldiers were a relatively small, but growing, subset of the wounded whose needs were particularly acute. “Their families need to know that they have options,” he said. “Our message to the V.A. is that the V.A. is still providing them care if they’re paying for a private facility. But that’s a cultural shift for the V.A., and, while their ears are now open, bureaucracies don’t change on a dime.”

That is a lesson Edgar Edmundson, 52, of New Bern, N.C., has been learning and relearning since his son, Sgt. Eric Edmundson, sustained serious blast injuries in northern Iraq in the fall of 2005.

Mr. Edmundson was aggressive, abandoning his job and home to care for his son, calling on his representatives in Washington for help, “saying no a lot.” But even he did not come to understand his son’s health care options quickly enough to ensure that his son was not “shortchanged” in the critical first year after his injury.

Two days before Sergeant Edmundson was wounded near the Syrian border, he visited with his father on the telephone. Mr. Edmundson urged his son, then 25 with a young wife and a baby daughter, to “stay safe.”

In an interview last week, Mr. Edmundson’s voice cracked as he recalled his son’s response: “He said, ‘Don’t worry, because if anything happens, the Army will take care of me.’ ”

While awaiting transport to Germany after initial surgery, Sergeant Edmundson suffered a heart attack. As doctors worked to revive him, he lost oxygen to his brain for half an hour, with devastating consequences.

A couple of weeks later, at Walter Reed in Washington, on the very day that Sergeant Edmundson was stabilized medically and transferred into the brain injury unit, military officials initiated the process of retiring him.

“That threw up the red flag for me,” Mr. Edmundson said. “If the Army was supposed to take care of him, why were they trying to discharge him from service the minute he gets out of intensive care?”

Mr. Edmundson fought the retirement on principle, winning a temporary reprieve. Still, he did not understand that his son’s military insurance policy covered private care. When Walter Reed transferred Sergeant Edmundson to the polytrauma center in Richmond, Mr. Edmundson believed that he was, more or less, following orders.

Mr. Edmundson was disappointed by what he considered an unfocused, inconsistent rehabilitation regimen at what he saw as an understaffed, overburdened V.A. hospital filled with geriatric patients. His son’s morale plummeted and he refused to participate in therapy. “Eric gave up his will,” he said. In March 2006, the V.A. hospital sought to transfer Sergeant Edmundson to a nursing home.

Mr. Edmundson chose instead to care for his son himself, quitting his job at a ConAgra plant. For almost eight months, Sergeant Edmundson, who was awake but unable to walk, talk or control his body, received nothing but a few hours of maintenance therapy weekly at a local hospital.

One day, by chance, Mr. Edmundson encountered a military case manager who asked him why his son was not at a civilian rehabilitation hospital. That is when Mr. Edmundson learned that his son had options. He did some research and set his sights on the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

Sergeant Edmundson is now the only Iraq combat veteran being treated there.

The first step in his treatment in Chicago, Dr. Smith said, was to use drugs, technology and devices “to reverse the ill effects of not getting adequate care earlier, somewhere between Walter Reed and here.”

For example, she said, Sergeant Edmundson’s hips, knees and ankles are frozen “in the position of someone sitting in a hallway in a chair.” They are working to straighten out his joints so that he can eventually stand, she said. They have taught him to express his basic needs using a communication board, and they hope to loosen his vocal cords so he can start speaking. He is also learning to chew and swallow.

“He has a profound cognitive disability,” Dr. Smith said. “But he can communicate, albeit not verbally, and can express emotions, including humor and even sarcasm.”

A couple of weeks ago, she said, when his family came to visit him, Dr. Smith asked Sergeant Edmundson if he was happy to see his daughter. He used his board to say yes. She asked him the same about his mother. He said yes. And then she asked him about his older sister, Anna Frese. He said no. She repeated the question twice more, wondering if he was pushing the wrong button, until, Dr. Smith said, “he looked up at me with a huge, wicked smile.”

Searching for Options

In early 2006, Denise Mettie of Selah, Wash., signed away her son Evan’s health care options without realizing it. She agreed to a medical retirement for her 23-year-old son only weeks after he was initially declared “killed in action” only to be saved. That left him dependent on the veterans’ health care system, where, after a tumultuous journey through several hospitals, he now faces transfer from the “coma stimulation” program at Palo Alto to a nursing home.

“At the very beginning, there was a V.A. doctor who said, ‘You know, he’s not going to come any further, let’s put him in a nursing facility and let you get on with life,’ ” Ms. Mettie said. “I was not ready to give up on him then and I’m not now. If there is a private rehab that will take him, I’m going to get him there and finagle the finances by hook or by crook.”

Mr. Chwat of the Wounded Warrior Project said severely brain-injured soldiers should be offered a one-year moratorium on medical retirement so they can remain on active duty status with the insurance-covered privileges to seek private care if they want it. Dr. Smith and other civilian rehabilitation doctors suggest that the V.A., too, give the option of private care to soldiers who have been discharged or retired.

On the other hand, Dr. Alan H. Weintraub, medical director of the brain injury program at the private Craig Hospital in Denver, said wounded soldiers were probably better off in the military health care system, which he said offered open-ended care tailored to combat soldiers. Dr. Weintraub, a retired major in the Army Medical Corps, said private acute care was too expensive for the “funding stream” to cover.

Dr. Smith disagreed: “Are we accepting that these people are not going to amount to something anyway, so they’re not entitled to the best acute care that the United States has to give — at the front end of their potential life?”

Looking Ahead

“Jarod Behee was headed for a nursing home,” said Felice L. Loverso, the chief executive of Casa Colina in Pomona, Calif.

When Sergeant Behee arrived from the V.A. in Palo Alto, he was in severe condition, essentially nonresponsive, said Dr. Loverso, a speech pathologist. Casa Colina, which now has two other soldier patients and also provides their families housing, first worked to “wake him up,” weaning him from medications he no longer needed. He quickly started getting therapy bedside, making relatively steady progress and then quite rapid progress after a cranioplasty that repaired his skull.

“Potentially the same good things could have happened to Jarod at the Palo Alto V.A.,” said Dr. Loverso, a former V.A. employee himself. “I like to think it was due to our aggressive therapy.”

Because of his impairment, Ms. Behee said, her husband, who still has his old Superman tattoo on his calf, does not agonize over his situation. “He wakes up every morning with a smile on his face,” she said.

Lance Cpl. Steven Schulz, on the other hand, is just cognitively rehabilitated enough to experience anguish, his mother, Debra Schulz, said. Occasionally, Lance Corporal Schulz gets angry at his situation or feels guilty toward his mother, who describes herself as an “Old South yellow dog Democrat” who was not pleased when her son enlisted.

“He has told me that he needed to apologize to me for ever joining the Marines,” Ms. Schulz said. “I say, ‘Son, we can’t look back.’ ”

    For War’s Gravely Injured, Challenge to Find Care, NYT, 12.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/us/12trauma.html?hp

Soldiers Testify to Lawmakers Over Poor Care at Walter Reed

March 6, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

WASHINGTON, March 5 — Members of Congress heard wrenching testimony on Monday from wounded soldiers treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and contrite promises from top Army officials to correct the conditions there.

The general who most recently commanded Walter Reed, a premier military hospital in Washington, and the Army’s surgeon general accepted responsibility for the situation faced by some wounded troops, including poor housing, neglect and a hopelessly complicated bureaucratic maze.

The Army officials said they were working to address the problems at Walter Reed and were examining the situation at other medical centers.

“We have let some soldiers down,” said Pete Geren, the acting secretary of the Army, addressing the panel before the hearing began.

The hearing was held by a subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, whose members convened in an auditorium at Walter Reed, in deference to the soldiers who were to testify. The unusual venue also provided a vivid backdrop for the hearing, the first of several that Congressional committees intended to hold.

The subcommittee members heard first from two soldiers badly wounded in Iraq and from the spouse of another soldier injured in Iraq about their experiences at Walter Reed. Together, the three’s stories set the emotional tenor for the testimony from military officials that followed.

Wearing a black eye patch, Staff Sgt. John Daniel Shannon described how he was struck in the head by a round from an AK-47 in November 2004 during a firefight near Ramadi, causing a traumatic brain injury and the loss of an eye.

Within a week of the injury, he was released to outpatient treatment, Sergeant Shannon recounted.

Despite being extremely disoriented, he said, he was given a map and told to find his own way to his new residence on the hospital’s sprawling grounds. He wandered into a building and received directions.

He then waited several weeks wondering whether anyone would contact him about additional treatment, eventually calling people himself until he reached his case worker.

He told of languishing in the hospital’s bureaucratic system that evaluates soldiers for continuing in active duty or becoming medically retired, and what benefits they should receive. His paperwork, he said, was lost repeatedly, forcing him to start over several times.

Specialist Jeremy Duncan, one ear shredded by a makeshift bomb, told of the moldy living conditions in Building 18.

“It wasn’t fit for anybody to live in a room like that,” Specialist Duncan said.

Annette L. McLeod, whose husband, Wendell, returned from Iraq with a head injury, spoke emotionally of her distress during his treatment.

“My life was ripped apart the day my husband was injured, and having to live through the mess we’ve had to live through at Walter Reed has been worse than anything I’ve had to sacrifice in my life,” Mrs. McLeod said through tears.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said he was “extraordinarily angry and embarrassed” by the living conditions at the hospital, reported prominently last month by The Washington Post. His brother, Maj. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, a senior medical officer, has now been named to command Walter Reed. The Army officials said extensive repairs were being made to deal with the deplorable conditions at one of the facilities on the hospital campus, Building 18, in which soldiers getting outpatient treatment at the hospital were found to be living in crumbling rooms soiled by mice, cockroaches and mold. Most of the soldiers living there, they said, have now been moved.

Accusations about shoddy treatment received by wounded soldiers at the prominent hospital, which is the centerpiece of the military’s medical system, have touched a public nerve and deeply embarrassed the military in the past few weeks. The Bush administration has been thrown on the defensive, and members of Congress have been quick to express outrage.

“This is absolutely the wrong way to treat our troops, and serious reforms need to happen immediately,” said Representative John F. Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subcommittee on national security and foreign affairs.

Mr. Tierney declared the problems at Walter Reed to be part of broader dysfunction at military health care facilities across the country and wondered whether it was “another horrific consequence of the terrible planning that went into our invasion of Iraq.” He warned of a coming crunch with Mr. Bush’s new plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq.

“As we send more and more troops into Iraq and Afghanistan,” Mr. Tierney said, “these problems are only going to get worse, not better.”

Last week, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey was ousted over his handling of the revelations at Walter Reed, and officials changed the hospital’s commanding officer twice in as many days.

Speaking at a meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Vice President Dick Cheney restated on Monday the White House’s promise fix the problems at Walter Reed.

“There will be no excuses, only action,” Mr. Cheney said.

“As we work to improve conditions at Walter Reed, we want to find out whether similar problems have occurred at other military” and veterans’ hospitals, he said. “These brave men and women deserve the heartfelt thanks of our country, and they deserve the very best medical care that our government can possibly provide.”

Members of the committee from both parties were sharply critical during the hearing, some arguing that government audits and news articles have hinted at similar problems for years. Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the committee, said the military’s entire system for handling wounded veterans was in need of a “top-down overhaul.”

“You’re not going to be able to Scotch tape over it,” Mr. Davis said.

Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the surgeon general of the Army, who also headed Walter Reed several years ago, apologized to soldiers and said the bureaucratic process they faced demanded “urgent simplification.”

“We really need to reinvent this process,” General Kiley said.

General Kiley was initially appointed to replace Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman as commander of the hospital last week, but the appointment came under fire because he had previously appeared to play down problems at the hospital when he was in command in 2004.

He was pressed on Monday to explain how he had not known about the conditions at Building 18, even though he lived across the street from it. He explained that inspections of barracks were not part of his normal job duties. But the subcommittee members continued to hammer him, asking why he had not taken action earlier to deal with the challenges faced by wounded soldiers and wondered whether recent efforts to contract out services to civilians had left the hospital depleted.

“I want you to know that I think this is a massive failure of competency and management and command,” said Representative Paul W. Hodes, Democrat of New Hampshire.

Beyond specific steps to streamline the bureaucratic process that is faced by wounded troops and to improve living conditions, military officials said it might be time to re-evaluate whether Walter Reed should be closed in several years, as had been previously planned as part of a national base reorganization process.

Several patients at Walter Reed attended the hearing Monday and echoed some of the problems described. But Staff Sgt. Brian Beem, who lost his right leg to a makeshift bomb in Baghdad in October, said he had had no idea conditions were so bad for some of his counterparts, even though he had heard grumbling.

“At my level,” Sergeant Beem said, “I’m ignorant of it.”

    Soldiers Testify to Lawmakers Over Poor Care at Walter Reed, NYT, 6.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/washington/06medical.html

Army Secretary Is Ousted in Furor Over Hospital Care

March 3, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, March 2 — Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey was forced to resign Friday over the handling of revelations that wounded soldiers were receiving shabby and slow treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Even as the grim-faced defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, announced Mr. Harvey’s dismissal, the Army put a new general in charge of the hospital, the second change of command in two days, and a clear signal that Mr. Gates wanted a clean break from the status quo.

Earlier, the White House had announced that President Bush would appoint a bipartisan panel to examine the medical treatment provided to wounded service members, both by the Defense Department and by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I am disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation,” Mr. Gates told reporters. “Some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging into and addressing the problems.”

A senior Pentagon official said Mr. Gates had demanded Mr. Harvey’s resignation because he was displeased that Mr. Harvey on Thursday, in dismissing the commander of Walter Reed, temporarily named Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley to take command. General Kiley, the Army’s top medical officer, had earlier appeared to play down the problems at Walter Reed, where he was in command until 2004.

Mr. Gates’s aggressiveness in addressing the problem has surprised many Pentagon officials who are still getting used to his style more than two months into his service.

Ordered by Mr. Gates to get an acceptable new commander in place by the end of the day, the Army announced late Friday that Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, a veteran Army doctor and the brother of the current Army chief of staff, would take over command at Walter Reed.

In his weekly radio address, taped on Friday for broadcast on Saturday morning, Mr. Bush said, “This is unacceptable to me, it is unacceptable to our country, and it’s not going to continue.” The White House released a transcript without the usual embargo on its publication.

White House officials said the review ordered by Mr. Bush would examine soldiers’ medical treatment starting when they were wounded, as they were moved to Defense Department hospitals and as they received care in V.A. facilities after leaving the armed services.

The White House commission seemed to overlap in at least some respects with a separate panel announced by Mr. Gates last week that he said had authority to examine living conditions, problems getting prompt care and any other issues at Walter Reed and other military-run hospitals the panel chose to examine.

Officials said the White House commission was likely to undertake a broader review and take longer with its investigation than the Pentagon panel, which has a 45-day deadline. Mr. Bush plans to name his commission’s members next week.

House and Senate committees, too, are planning hearings on the matter next week. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said Friday that it was issuing a subpoena to Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, who had been in command of the hospital since last August before his firing on Thursday. The panel has scheduled a hearing at Walter Reed on Monday.

The committee also made public an internal hospital memorandum written last September that warned that an Army decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed was causing an exodus of experienced career personnel and putting patient care “at risk of mission failure.”

The scandal at Walter Reed is particularly embarrassing to the administration because many top officials have visited injured troops there. Although Mr. Bush has visited Walter Reed several times, his spokesman, Tony Snow, said last month that the president had learned about the situation from the newspaper and that he had given orders to “find out what the problem is and fix it.”

Army officials have defended the treatment provided to most patients at Walter Reed, especially the most serious cases, those admitted to inpatient wards on its campus a few miles from the center of Washington.

But the administration has been unable to explain why adequate improvements at Walter Reed’s nearby satellite facilities used to house outpatients were not made before the shoddy conditions were disclosed last month in a series of articles in The Washington Post. And the furor is unlikely to abate soon.

Mr. Harvey, the senior civilian official overseeing the Army, joined the Pentagon in 2004 after a long career as an engineer working mainly for defense contractors. He was an executive with the Westinghouse Corporation from 1969 to 1997.

In a speech last year, he said improved efficiency could reduce both the federal work force and the number of contractors.

But the House committee leaders said that at Walter Reed, hiring a contractor had resulted in a steep decline in the number of support personnel like maintenance workers to fewer than 60 last month, from 300 in early 2006.

An Army spokesman, Paul Boyce, said that “didn’t help” efforts over the last year to improve conditions for patients in Building 18, the dilapidated 50-room former hotel across the street from Walter Reed where outpatients are housed. Before rushed renovations last month, the building had moldy walls, stained carpets and infestations of rats.

Walter Reed officials have also acknowledged that the large number of wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan, currently around 650 patients and outpatients, has taxed doctors, nurses and other care providers and forced them to rely more heavily on overflow facilities.

General Kiley, commander of Walter Reed from 2002 to 2004, left when he was appointed Army surgeon general. On a tour of the outpatient facilities for reporters last month, he took issue with the way the conditions were portrayed in some accounts.

“While we have some issues here, this is not a horrific, catastrophic failure at Walter Reed,” he said. “I mean these are not good, but you saw rooms that look perfectly acceptable, you saw the day rooms with the pool tables and plasma screen TVs, and we’re working every day to make those rooms better.”

But those comments and others did not please Mr. Gates, aides said. Even though he issued a statement Thursday endorsing the decision to remove General Weightman, he was not aware that the Army had chosen General Kiley to be the acting commander, an appointment that lasted just one day.

“It could have been almost anybody but Kiley,” said a senior Pentagon official, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss Mr. Gates’s thinking. Referring to General Kiley’s service as the hospital commander, he added: “Some of this may well have developed and even started on his watch. And his comments also demonstrated a certain insensitivity.”

General Schoomaker, 58, the new commander, had been commander of the Army’s Medical Research and Material Command at Fort Detrick, Md. His brother, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, who is stepping down next month, was not involved in the decision to select him, the senior Pentagon official said.

In a visit to the outpatient facility last month before it was fixed up, Mr. Harvey called the conditions inexcusable. But he went on to place the blame for the situation on noncommissioned officers.

“We had some N.C.O.’s who weren’t doing their job, period,” Mr. Harvey said.

    Army Secretary Is Ousted in Furor Over Hospital Care, NYT, 3.3.2007,http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/03/washington/03veterans.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

New U.S. nuclear warhead design chosen

Updated 3/2/2007 12:43 PM ET
AP
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration selected a design Friday for a new generation of atomic warheads, taking a major step toward building the first new nuclear weapon since the end of the Cold War two decades ago.
The military and the Energy Department selected a design developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California over a competing design by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, according to government sources who spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of a formal announcement.

The decision to move ahead with the warhead, which eventually would replace the existing arsenal of weapons, has been criticized as sending the wrong signal to the world at a time when the United States is assailing attempts at nuclear weapons development in North Korea and Iran and striving to contain it.

But military and Energy Department officials have argued that the new U.S. warhead will not add to the nuclear arsenal. They maintain the new design will make the weapons stockpile more secure and reliable without the need for actual underground testing.

The warhead has been the focus of an intense competition between Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, the government's two premier nuclear weapons labs.

The two facilities submitted separate designs nearly a year ago. Lawrence Livermore's design is based on a warhead actually tested in an underground detonation in the 1980s. Los Alamos had a design based on a fresh approach that has not undergone testing.

One of the assurances given by defense officials to Congress is that the new warhead will not have to undergo actual testing. Once developed, it would be used in the Trident missiles on submarines and eventually would replace warheads on the Air Force's missile arsenal, officials said.

    New U.S. nuclear warhead design chosen, NYT, 2.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-03-02-nuclear-design_x.htm

U.S. Select Plan for New Nuclear Warhead

March 2, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:33 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration selected a design Friday for a new generation of atomic warheads, taking a major step toward building the first new nuclear weapon since the end of the Cold War two decades ago.

The military and the Energy Department selected a design developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California over a competing design by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, according to government sources who spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of a formal announcement.

    U.S. Select Plan for New Nuclear Warhead, NYT, 2.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-New-Warheads.html

Veteran Care to Be Reviewed After Firing of General

March 2, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, March 2 — President Bush has ordered a top-to-bottom investigation into the medical care available to returning veterans, the White House said today, a day after the firing of the two-star general in charge of Walter Reed Army Medical Center over shabby conditions there.

In his regular Saturday radio address this week, the president will say he intends to name a bipartisan commission to conduct “a comprehensive review of care that America is providing our wounded servicemen and women,” a White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said today.

“The review will examine their treatment from the time they leave the battlefield through their return to civilian life as veterans, so we can assure we are meeting their physical and mental health needs,” Ms. Perino said.

The president will announce the members of the bipartisan commission in the next several days, Ms. Perino said. She said Mr. Bush would reflect in his Saturday address on his “solemn experiences” visiting men and women recovering from wounds suffered in battle.

The general in charge of the Walter Reed hospital was relieved of his command on Thursday following disclosures that wounded soldiers who were being treated as outpatients there were living in dilapidated quarters and enduring long waits for treatment.

The officer, Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, a physician and a graduate of West Point, was removed from command because Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey “had lost trust and confidence” in his ability to make improvements in outpatient care at Walter Reed, the Army said in a brief statement.

The revelations about conditions at the hospital, one of the Army’s best-known and busiest centers for soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, have embarrassed the Army and prompted two investigations, several Congressional inquiries and a rush to clean up the accommodations for outpatients, where residents lived with moldy walls, stained carpets and other problems.

A series of disclosures published prominently in The Washington Post about the living conditions, the red tape ensnarling treatment and other serious problems have challenged the notion promoted for years by the Army, especially since the war in Iraq, that wounded soldiers receive unparalleled care at Walter Reed.

Army officials have defended the treatment provided to most patients at Walter Reed, especially the most serious cases, those admitted to inpatient wards on the hospital’s campus a few miles from the center of Washington.

But they have acknowledged that the large number of wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan, currently around 650 patients, has taxed doctors, nurses and other care providers and forced them to rely more heavily on overflow facilities to house outpatients who must remain near the hospital for treatment.

Officials refused to provide the specific reasons for General Weightman’s firing.

The Army has admitted in recent weeks that the system it uses to decide whether wounded soldiers who have been moved to outpatient status will be able to return to active duty often takes too long and has promised to change the system. At Walter Reed the process has taken an average of over 200 days, a source of frustration to soldiers and families who are awaiting decisions about what benefits they will receive if they retire.

Treatment of wounded soldiers has also been spotlighted recently in a documentary recounting the treatment received by the ABC News anchorman Bob Woodruff, who was wounded in Iraq last year. Mr. Woodruff contrasted his care with that of soldiers, finding that Veterans Administration regional medical centers provide retired soldiers with good care but that local V.A. hospitals are less skilled at dealing with complex problems like traumatic brain injuries.

Mr. Harvey told reporters Thursday that the Army was also examining conditions at other medical facilities, both in the United States and abroad. “We’ll fix as we find things wrong,” he said.

Paralleling the Army effort, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appointed a panel last week to examine conditions at Walter Reed and other Defense Department hospitals it chooses, including the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

Mr. Gates endorsed the decision to relieve General Weightman in a statement Thursday.

“The care and welfare of our wounded men and women in uniform demand the highest standard of excellence and commitment that we can muster as a government,” he said. “When this standard is not met, I will insist on swift and direct corrective action and, where appropriate, accountability up the chain of command.”

Mr. Gates had signaled earlier, after a visit to Walter Reed, that senior officials would probably be relieved of command.

A Pentagon official said that, in addition to General Weightman, a captain, two noncommissioned officers, and an enlisted soldier involved in outpatient treatment were being reassigned. He said he could not provide further information because of Defense Department confidentiality rules.

General Weightman assumed command of the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command and Walter Reed Army Medical Center on August 25, 2006. He oversees medical facilities in seven other states in addition to Walter Reed and is one of the most senior officers to be relieved in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He could not be reached for comment.

The Army said that command of Walter Reed would be taken over temporarily by Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army’s top medical officer.

A 1973 graduate of the United States Military Academy, General Weightman received a medical degree in 1982 from the University of Vermont and has held a series of medical commands in the past two decades, including “land component command surgeon” during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In comments to reporters on Feb. 16, just before the first of a series of articles was published by The Post, General Weightman conceded that there were problems with outpatient care at Walter Reed, but said that improvements were being made.

“The family members get a little frustrated because, I mean, we are really disrupting their lives,” The Associated Press quoted him as saying.

In the last year, General Weightman said, Walter Reed had increased to 17 from 4 the number of caseworkers charged with helping outpatients with the paperwork and other requirements of the patient disability evaluation system, which determines whether soldiers can remain in the military or retire with full benefits.

He said that the process often took months or years at Walter Reed because the hospital handled some of the most complex medical cases, involving head trauma and other conditions that made gauging recovery difficult.

Outpatients at Walter Reed have received initial treatment but require further care or rehabilitation before retiring from the armed forces or returning to active duty.

Addressing reports that recovering soldiers were asked to attend daily inspection, even when under medication, Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said that there would be periodic inspections in the outpatient facilities. Mr. Boyce added that soldiers who are able were asked to attend a daily morning meeting where treatment options and other information were discussed but that the sessions were not inspections.

Mr. Boyce said the worst conditions in the outpatient residences had been corrected but added the Army was planning to make more repairs, like replacing a faulty heating and air-conditioning system that was the cause of the mold on the walls.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting for this article.

    Veteran Care to Be Reviewed After Firing of General, NYT, 2.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/washington/02general.html

General Is Fired

Over Conditions at Walter Reed

March 2, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, March 1 — The two-star general in charge of Walter Reed Army Medical Center was relieved of command on Thursday, following disclosures that wounded soldiers being treated as outpatients there were living in dilapidated quarters and enduring long waits for treatment.

The officer, Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, a physician and a graduate of West Point, was fired because Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey “had lost trust and confidence” in his ability to make improvements in outpatient care at Walter Reed, the Army said in a brief statement.

The revelations about conditions at the hospital, one of the Army’s best-known and busiest centers for soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, have embarrassed the Army and prompted two investigations, several Congressional inquiries and a rush to clean up the accommodations for outpatients, where residents lived with moldy walls, stained carpets and other problems.

A series of disclosures published prominently in The Washington Post about the living conditions, the red tape ensnarling treatment and other serious problems have challenged the notion promoted for years by the Army, especially since the war in Iraq, that wounded soldiers receive unparalleled care at Walter Reed.

Army officials have defended the treatment provided to most patients at Walter Reed, especially the most serious cases, those admitted to inpatient wards on the hospital’s campus a few miles from the center of Washington.

But they have acknowledged that the large number of wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan, currently around 650 patients, has taxed doctors, nurses and other care providers and forced them to rely more heavily on overflow facilities to house outpatients who must remain near the hospital for treatment.

Officials refused to provide the specific reasons for General Weightman’s firing.

The Army has admitted in recent weeks that the system it uses to decide whether wounded soldiers who have been moved to outpatient status will be able to return to active duty often takes too long and has promised to change the system. At Walter Reed the process has taken an average of over 200 days, a source of frustration to soldiers and families who are awaiting decisions about what benefits they will receive if they retire.

Treatment of wounded soldiers has also been spotlighted recently in a documentary recounting the treatment received by the ABC News anchorman Bob Woodruff, who was wounded in Iraq last year. Mr. Woodruff contrasted his care with that of soldiers, finding that Veterans Administration regional medical centers provide retired soldiers with good care but that local V.A. hospitals are less skilled at dealing with complex problems like traumatic brain injuries.

Mr. Harvey told reporters Thursday that the Army was also examining conditions at other medical facilities, both in the United States and abroad. “We’ll fix as we find things wrong,” he said.

Paralleling the Army effort, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appointed a panel last week to examine conditions at Walter Reed and other Defense Department hospitals it chooses, including the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

Mr. Gates endorsed the decision to relieve General Weightman in a statement Thursday.

“The care and welfare of our wounded men and women in uniform demand the highest standard of excellence and commitment that we can muster as a government,” he said. “When this standard is not met, I will insist on swift and direct corrective action and, where appropriate, accountability up the chain of command.”

Mr. Gates had signaled earlier, after a visit to Walter Reed, that senior officials would probably be relieved of command.

A Pentagon official said that, in addition to General Weightman, a captain, two noncommissioned officers, and an enlisted soldier involved in outpatient treatment were being reassigned. He said he could not provide further information because of Defense Department confidentiality rules.

General Weightman assumed command of the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command and Walter Reed Army Medical Center on August 25, 2006. He oversees medical facilities in seven other states in addition to Walter Reed and is one of the most senior officers to be relieved in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He could not be reached for comment.

The Army said that command of Walter Reed would be taken over temporarily by Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army’s top medical officer.

A 1973 graduate of the United States Military Academy, General Kiley received a medical degree in 1982 from the University of Vermont and has held a series of medical commands in the past two decades, including “land component command surgeon” during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In comments to reporters on Feb. 16, just before the first of a series of articles was published by The Post, General Weightman conceded that there were problems with outpatient care at Walter Reed, but said that improvements were being made.

“The family members get a little frustrated because, I mean, we are really disrupting their lives,” The Associated Press quoted him as saying.

In the last year, General Weightman said, Walter Reed had increased to 17 from 4 the number of caseworkers charged with helping outpatients with the paperwork and other requirements of the patient disability evaluation system, which determines whether soldiers can remain in the military or retire with full benefits.

He said that the process often took months or years at Walter Reed because the hospital handled some of the most complex medical cases, involving head trauma and other conditions that made gauging recovery difficult.

Outpatients at Walter Reed have received initial treatment but require further care or rehabilitation before retiring from the armed forces or returning to active duty.

Addressing reports that recovering soldiers were asked to attend daily inspection, even when under medication, Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said that there would be periodic inspections in the outpatient facilities. Mr. Boyce added that soldiers who are able were asked to attend a daily morning meeting where treatment options and other information were discussed but that the sessions were not inspections.

Mr. Boyce said the worst conditions in the outpatient residences had been corrected but added the Army was planning to make more repairs, like replacing a faulty heating and air-conditioning system that was the cause of the mold on the walls.

    General Is Fired Over Conditions at Walter Reed, NYT, 2.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/washington/02general.html?hp

Editorial

The Build-a-War Workshop

February 10, 2007
The New York Times

It took far too long, but a report by the Pentagon inspector general has finally confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s do-it-yourself intelligence office cooked up a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda to help justify an unjustifiable war.

The report said the team headed by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, developed “alternative” assessments of intelligence on Iraq that contradicted the intelligence community and drew conclusions “that were not supported by the available intelligence.” Mr. Feith certainly knew the Central Intelligence Agency would cry foul, so he hid his findings from the C.I.A. Then Vice President Dick Cheney used them as proof of cloak-and-dagger meetings that never happened, long-term conspiracies between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that didn’t exist, and — most unforgivable — “possible Iraqi coordination” on the 9/11 attacks, which no serious intelligence analyst believed.

The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate’s “inappropriate” operations. The renegade intelligence buff said he was relieved.

We’re sure he was. But there is no comfort in knowing that his dirty work was approved by his bosses. All that does is add to evidence that the Bush administration knowingly and repeatedly misled Americans about the intelligence on Iraq.

To understand this twisted tale, it is important to recall how Mr. Feith got into the creative writing business. Top administration officials, especially Mr. Cheney, had long been furious at the C.I.A. for refusing to confirm the delusion about a grand Iraqi terrorist conspiracy, something the Republican right had nursed for years. Their frustration only grew after 9/11 and the C.I.A. still refused to buy these theories.

Mr. Wolfowitz would feverishly sketch out charts showing how this Iraqi knew that Iraqi, who was connected through six more degrees of separation to terrorist attacks, all the way back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

But the C.I.A. kept saying there was no reliable intelligence about an Iraq-Qaeda link. So Mr. Feith was sent to review the reports and come back with the answers Mr. Cheney wanted. The inspector general’s report said Mr. Feith’ s team gave a September 2002 briefing at the White House on the alleged Iraq-Qaeda connection that had not been vetted by the intelligence community (the director of central intelligence was pointedly not told it was happening) and “was not fully supported by the available intelligence.”

The false information included a meeting in Prague in April 2001 between an Iraqi official and Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 pilots. It never happened. But Mr. Feith’s report said it did, and Mr. Cheney will still not admit that the story is false.

In a statement released yesterday, Senator Carl Levin, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been dogged in pursuit of the truth about the Iraqi intelligence, noted that the cooked-up Feith briefing had been leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine so Mr. Cheney could quote it as the “best source” of information about the supposed Iraq-Qaeda link.

The Pentagon report is one step in a long-delayed effort to figure out how the intelligence on Iraq was so badly twisted — and by whom. That work should have been finished before the 2004 elections, and it would have been if Pat Roberts, the obedient Republican who ran the Senate Intelligence Committee, had not helped the White House drag it out and load it in ways that would obscure the truth.

It is now up to Mr. Levin and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the current head of the intelligence panel, to give Americans the answers. Mr. Levin’s desire to have the entire inspector general’s report on the Feith scheme declassified is a good place to start. But it will be up to Mr. Rockefeller to finally determine how old, inconclusive, unsubstantiated and false intelligence was transformed into fresh, reliable and definitive reports — and then used by Mr. Bush and other top officials to drag the country into a disastrous and unnecessary war.

    The Build-a-War Workshop, 10.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/opinion/10sat1.html

Report Says Pentagon Manipulated Intel

February 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:12 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, the Defense Department's inspector general said Friday.

Acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the office headed by former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith took ''inappropriate'' actions in advancing conclusions on al-Qaida connections not backed up by the nation's intelligence agencies.

Gimble said that while the actions of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy ''were not illegal or unauthorized,'' they ''did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers'' at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq.

''I can't think of a more devastating commentary,'' said Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

He cited Gimble's findings that Feith's office was, despite doubts expressed by the intelligence community, pushing conclusions that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague five months before the attack, and that there were ''multiple areas of cooperation'' between Iraq and al-Qaida, including shared pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

''That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war,'' Levin said in an interview Thursday. He said the Pentagon's work, ''which was wrong, which was distorted, which was inappropriate ... is something which is highly disturbing.''

Republicans on the panel disagreed. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said the ''probing questions'' raised by Feith's policy group improved the intelligence process.

''I'm trying to figure out why we are here,'' said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., saying the office was doing its job of analyzing intelligence that had been gathered by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Gimble responded that at issue was that the information supplied by Feith's office in briefings to the National Security Council and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney was ''provided without caveats'' that there were varying opinions on its reliability.

Gimble's report said Feith's office had made assertions ''that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community.''

At the White House, spokesman Dana Perino said President Bush has revamped the U.S. spy community to try avoiding a repeat of flawed intelligence affecting policy decisions by creating a director of national intelligence and making other changes.

''I think what he has said is that he took responsibility, and that the intel was wrong, and that we had to take measures to revamp the intel community to make sure that it never happened again,'' Perino told reporters.

Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman denied that the office was producing its own intelligence products, saying they were challenging what was coming in from intelligence-gathering professionals, ''looking at it with a critical eye.''

Some Democrats also have contended that Feith misled Congress about the basis of the administration's assertions on the threat posed by Iraq, but the Pentagon investigation did not support that.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Levin said the IG report is ''very damning'' and shows a Pentagon policy shop trying to shape intelligence to prove a link between al-Qaida and Saddam.

Levin in September 2005 had asked the inspector general to determine whether Feith's office's activities were appropriate, and if not, what remedies should be pursued.

The 2004 report from the Sept. 11 commission found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror organization before the U.S. invasion.

Asked to comment on the IG's findings, Feith said in a telephone interview that he had not seen the report but was pleased to hear that it concluded his office's activities were neither illegal nor unauthorized. He took strong issue, however, with the finding that some activities had been ''inappropriate.''

''The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq-war work was somehow 'unlawful' or 'unauthorized' and that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive or misleading,'' said Feith, who left his Pentagon post in August 2005.

Feith called ''bizarre'' the inspector general's conclusion that some intelligence activities by the Office of Special Plans, which was created while Feith served as the undersecretary of defense for policy -- the top policy position under then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- were inappropriate but not unauthorized.

''Clearly, the inspector general's office was willing to challenge the policy office and even stretch some points to be able to criticize it,'' Feith said, adding that he felt it was subjective ''quibbling.'' Feith maintains that the policy office and other, smaller groups created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks proved prudent and useful in challenging some of the CIA's analysis.

    Report Says Pentagon Manipulated Intel, NYT, 9.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Iraq-Pentagon-Intelligence.html

Pentagon Criticized for Prewar Data Analysis

February 9, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — A Pentagon investigation into the handling of prewar intelligence has criticized civilian Pentagon officials for conducting their own intelligence analysis to find links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, but said the officials did not violate any laws or mislead Congress, according to Congressional officials who have read the report.

The long-awaited report by the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, was sent to Congress on Thursday. It is the first major review to rebuke senior officials working for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for the way intelligence was used before the invasion of Iraq early in 2003.

Working under Douglas J. Feith, who at the time was under secretary of defense for policy, the group “developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers,” the report concluded. Excerpts were quoted by Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who has long been critical of Mr. Feith and other Pentagon officials.

The report, and the dueling over its conclusions, shows that bitter divisions over the handling of prewar intelligence remain even after many of the substantive questions have been laid to rest and the principal actors have left the government.

In a rebuttal to an earlier draft of Mr. Gimble’s report, Eric S. Edelman, the under secretary of defense, said the group’s activities were authorized by Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz. They did not produce formal intelligence assessments, and they were properly shared, the rebuttal said.

In a statement issued Thursday, Mr. Feith, who left the Pentagon in 2005, made similar points. Mr. Rumsfeld did not respond to telephone messages seeking comment.

According to Congressional officials, Mr. Feith’s statement and the policy office’s rebuttal, the report concluded that none of the Pentagon’s activities were illegal and that they did not violate Defense Department directives.

But the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, said in a statement that because the inspector general considered the work of Mr. Feith’s group to be “intelligence activities,” the committee would investigate whether the Pentagon violated the National Security Act of 1947 by failing to notify Congress about the group’s work.

Senator Levin, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the report a “very strong condemnation” of the Pentagon’s activities.

“I think they sought this kind of intelligence. They made it clear they wanted any kind of possible connections, no matter how skimpy, and they got it,” he said.

Mr. Feith and other officials in his Pentagon office have been accused by critics of the administration of distorting intelligence data to justify the invasion of Iraq. When Democrats were in the minority in Congress, Mr. Levin conducted an inquiry and issued a report excoriating Mr. Feith and others at the Pentagon for their conduct.

The conclusions the Pentagon team reached in the year or so before the invasion of Iraq have been generally known for some time and were largely discredited by the Sept. 11 commission, which found “no evidence” that contacts between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda “ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship.”

According to Mr. Levin, the inspector general’s report did not make any specific recommendations, and he said that interagency coordination “will significantly reduce the opportunity for the inappropriate conduct of intelligence activities outside of intelligence channels.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, is completing work on its own investigation into the use of intelligence by policy makers in the months before the Iraq war. Under Republican leadership, it had delayed an examination of Mr. Feith’s activities pending the outcome of the inspector general’s report.

The Pentagon’s rebuttal vehemently rejected the report’s contention that there was “inappropriate” use of intelligence by Pentagon civilians and said the effort to identify links between Saddam Hussein’s government and Al Qaeda was done at the direction of Mr. Wolfowitz, who was deputy defense secretary at the time.

Describing the work as a “fresh, critical look” at intelligence agency conclusions about Al Qaeda and Iraq, the Pentagon rebuttal said, “It is somewhat difficult to understand how activities that admittedly were lawful and authorized (in this case by either the secretary of defense or the deputy secretary of defense) could nevertheless be characterized as ‘inappropriate.’ ”

The Feith operation dates to shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the Pentagon established a small team of civilians to sift through existing intelligence with the aim of finding possible links between terror networks and governments. Bush administration officials contended that intelligence agencies were ignoring reports of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

By the summer of 2002, the group, whose membership evolved over time, was aimed at identifying links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq.

The inspector general’s report criticizes a July 25, 2002, memo, written by an intelligence analyst detailed to Mr. Feith’s office, titled, “Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case.”

The memo said that, while “some analysts have argued” that Osama bin Laden would not cooperate with secular Arab entities like Iraq, “reporting indicates otherwise.”

The inspector general concluded that the memo constituted an “alternative intelligence assessment” from that given by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies and that it led to a briefing on links between Al Qaeda and Iraq that was given to senior Bush administration officials in August 2002, according to excerpts of the draft inspector general report quoted by Mr. Edelman.

It is not clear whether the inspector general revised his report after receiving the rebuttal.

The draft inspector general report said Mr. Feith’s office should have followed intelligence agency guidelines for registering differing views, “in those rare instances where consensus could not be reached.”

In his statement Thursday, Mr. Feith said he was pleased that the inspector general had cleared him of violating laws or Defense Department policies, but he called it “wrong” and “bizarre” for the report to criticize civilian officials for scrutinizing intelligence agency conclusions and passing along their findings to senior officials.

Mr. Feith also said that the inspector general’s findings reflected “confusion about the way policy and intelligence officials relate to one another in the real world.”

    Pentagon Criticized for Prewar Data Analysis, NYT, 9.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/washington/09feith.html?hp&ex=1171083600&en=4eabd30f5f83ce6a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Army Is Going Wrinkle-Free; Velcro Becomes Norm

February 7, 2007
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
The New York Times

FORT LEWIS, Wash., Feb. 5 — Besides the hidden slots for knee and elbow pads, the extra room in the shoulders and the mod mandarin collar, the new Army uniform has a revolutionary feature critical to a nimbler military.

“You can just throw it in the dryer,” said Sgt. Donald Fisher, an instructor at this base for 30,000 soldiers about an hour south of Seattle. “You save money on dry cleaning.”

At military bases across the country and overseas, the era of the wash-and-war soldier has arrived. From Baghdad to Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Drum in New York, the Army has been retiring its old starched and pressed Battle Dress Uniform in favor of a wrinkle-free cotton and nylon version.

The new Army Combat Uniform — known, of course, by an Army acronym, A.C.U. — has been phased in over the last two years as the Battle Dress Uniform, or B.D.U., becomes obsolete by May 2008.

The change has largely been welcomed by soldiers who have seen civilian fashion evolve in form and function in the quarter century since the old uniform was introduced. It also has come with repercussions, inside and outside the military, that are inevitable when half a million people suddenly get a new everyday wardrobe.

While soldiers say they like the comfort, the look and the low maintenance, they complain almost universally about the Velcro, which has largely replaced needle and thread as the means for attaching patches to show name, rank, unit and other information.

And while some dry cleaners and seamstresses near military bases, long the invisible valets of the well-pressed soldier, have lost so much business that they have had to close stores, soldiers say they do not miss the creases.

“To me, it shows a newer, more modern Army,” said Sergeant Fisher, a soldier for two decades who trains troops in the final stages before deployment. “It’s kind of an intimidating sight.”

In recent years, each branch of the military has introduced a new uniform or has begun to develop one. The Army is the largest branch of the military, and so its shift in uniforms affects more people. It also goes beyond pants and tops. The spit-shined black leather boots that are standard with the old uniform are being replaced with tan “desert boots” made of suede and synthetic materials.

Here at Fort Lewis, at least two of the base’s Stryker brigades played a key role in developing the new uniform, advising engineers at the Army’s Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass. The Third Brigade, Second Infantry wore a prototype during its initial deployment to Iraq in 2003.

Sergeant Fisher stood in a parking lot outside the Foxhole, a military surplus store, and provided an impromptu tour of his new uniform.

The most obvious change is its digital-pixel camouflage, a blur of muted tones that many soldiers say seems best suited to desert combat. The old uniform, by contrast, came in bold black, brown, tan and green blotches. In Iraq, many soldiers have worn the older Desert Combat Uniform, a variation on the standard one, but with desert hues. But the new uniform, which will replace both the old one and its desert counterpart, has colors and a camouflage pattern that its designers say is effective in desert, “woodland” and urban combat. Having just one combat uniform saves the Army money.

New expansion pleats allow more freedom in the shoulders. The new collar, which can be worn up or down, does not chafe the neck. Buttons are gone. The material is meant to be tougher, though some soldiers dispute that claim.

An Army News Service article from June 2004 noted that the new uniform, then being tested, would probably cost about $88, some $30 more than the old one. However, the article said, “soldiers will eventually reap gains in money and time by not having to take uniforms to the cleaners or shine boots.”

Though there was no official requirement to have the old uniforms professionally cleaned and pressed, Army culture outside of combat situations has often been to do so. Now it is not only unnecessary, but also impractical.

“The plastic zipper and the Velcro, if we press it, that’s going to melt it,” said Moon Kim, who has been in the dry cleaning business near Fort Lewis since 1984.

Not too long ago, there were five dry cleaning businesses on Union Avenue, a small, struggling stretch in the city of Lakewood that is across Interstate 5 from Fort Lewis. Four of the stores were owned by Mr. Kim.

Now Mr. Kim has closed two stores, and the racks of those he has kept open are largely empty. He said he also had thousands of dollars worth of sew-on military patches but little market for them.

But Mr. Kim is adapting. He has a contract to do dry cleaning on the base itself, and he hopes that newly redesigned dress uniforms, which will require sew-on patches and are expected to arrive soon, will increase business. He also plans to open a barber shop.

Others are coping, too.

LaDon Pope used to work on the base repairing the heavy black leather boots, always adding a shine. But the new uniform’s “desert boot” requires no polishing.

Mr. Pope, who now has a small shop on Union Avenue, said that he still re-soled the boots for about half what it would cost to replace them and that his special finishing touch now included applying water-proofing.

“In Washington State,” he explained, “it can rain at any minute.”

Luz Robinson, a seamstress who once made her living sewing patches directly onto uniforms, is now taking advantage of what soldiers say is the principal weakness of the new uniform, the Velcro. It can lose its grip after a few washings, and patches can drop off.

Soldiers frequently lose their name strips. New name strips must still be sewn, letter by letter, onto a new Velcro patch. That is where Ms. Robinson makes her money.

She sells name strips for $6 each, turning them around in minutes for soldiers who rush in from the base, particularly in the days before deployment. Some soldiers note that this expense cuts into whatever they might save at the cleaners.

Cynthia Depoe, a senior staff sergeant with the Washington Air National Guard, stopped into one of Mr. Kim’s stores, Plaza Cleaners, on Monday night. Her unit had just been briefed on the new Airman Battle Uniform, the Air Force’s take on the digital, wrinkle-free future, just a step behind the Army’s that will be in place by 2011.

Sergeant Depoe said she was looking forward to not spending $6.50 on having her current uniform starched and pressed twice a week. She was also pleased to hear that the new uniform would have new features, including an elastic waistband, but will also stick with time-tested stitching for patches.

“We found out they had all of these problems with the Velcro,” she said of the Army. “So we’re not going to have Velcro.”

    Army Is Going Wrinkle-Free; Velcro Becomes Norm, NYT, 7.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/washington/07uniform.html?hp&ex=1170910800&en=5405a45d7e6de5c3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Pentagon to Set Up New Command in Africa

February 6, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Africa has moved up significantly in the Bush administration's global game-planning. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday the Pentagon will set up a new command to oversee its operations there.

Appearing on Capitol Hill, Gates announced that President Bush approved a Defense Department recommendation that a military structure be set up to oversee missions on the continent, which U.S. officials now believe has greater strategic importance to the United States than it had before.

''The president has decided to stand up a new unified combatant command, Africa Command, to oversee security, cooperation, building partnership capability, defense support to nonmilitary missions, and, if directed, military operations on the African continent,'' Gates told a congressional hearing on the defense spending that Bush proposed Monday for budget year 2008, which starts in October.

''This command will enable us to have a more effective and integrated approach than the current arrangement of dividing Africa between Central Command and European Command, an outdated arrangement left over from the Cold War,'' Gates said.

The U.S. military has a system under which each region of the world is overseen by a specific command -- essentially a regional headquarters -- such as the Pacific Command, Central Command and so on. Africa is now split among commands, which have been increasing activities on the continent greatly in recent years.

The Central Command, which controls the Horn of Africa, set up a task force there in attempt to catch any al-Qaida terrorists escaping from Afghanistan after the war started in late 2001. It since has expanded to humanitarian and other missions.

The European Command has sent Special Forces to do training exercises in North African countries and done humanitarian projects, medical training and other missions such as harbor maintenance in oil-producing nations in the Gulf of Guinea.

The various types of operations are aimed at building partnerships and strengthening the ability of African governments and militaries to do their jobs. The hope is that the activities will make nations there less vulnerable to the recruiting efforts of terrorists and help catch those already using it as a safe haven.

Officials say that Africa also is strategically more important because of increased efforts by China to involve itself and gain influence on the continent.

Gates gave no details on the new command but a military official familiar with planning for it said personnel, location of the headquarters and other details have not been finished. A transition team soon will begin working from facilities in Stuttgart, Germany, the European Command headquarters. But ultimately officials want the headquarters somewhere in Africa.

The new command will include islands around Africa and all nations on the continent except for Egypt, which will stay in Central Command, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the plans on the record.

Bush authorized the command to be set up no later than the end of the 2008 budget year -- or September, 2008 -- the official said, adding that he did not know the dollar amount budgeted for the plan.

On the Net:

www.defenselink.mil

    Pentagon to Set Up New Command in Africa, NYT, 6.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Africa-Command.html

Editorial

The Other Defense Budget

February 6, 2007
The New York Times

American troops under fire in Iraq and Afghanistan deserve every penny requested for them in President Bush’s new $622 billion Pentagon budget. And the overstretched Army and Marine Corps clearly need support, along with the extra troops that will eventually come their way. But that still leaves more than half of the overall request for Congress to carefully scrutinize and significantly prune.

Apart from war costs and personnel increases, this budget slips in more than $40 billion in other spending increases, compared with last year. Since Mr. Bush took office, the Pentagon budget has more than doubled. It is now higher, in real terms, than it has been in the past half-century.

Congress should direct particular attention to the roughly $140 billion in weapons procurement, research and development costs that are not part of the Iraq and Afghanistan section of the budget. Far too many of these programs are products of cold war strategic thinking and have outlived their rationale in a world with no superpower arms race.

That includes the $4.6 billion slated for the Air Force’s F-22 stealth fighter, the $2.6 billion for the Marine Corps’ tilt-wing V-22 Osprey, the $3 billion for the Navy’s DDG-1000 stealth destroyer and $2.5 billion for the Virginia-class attack submarine. It also includes much of the $15.9 billion going to space weapons and missile defense.

Several of these programs can be canceled outright. The F-22 is one of three new-generation stealth fighters, and the most expendable because it was originally designed for air-to-air combat against Soviet-style MIG fighters. Likewise, the Virginia-class submarine was designed to track enemy nuclear submarines. The DDG-1000 is a blue-water fighting fortress, when what the Navy really needs these days is smaller, faster ships that can operate in shallow coastal waters.

It makes sense to provide the Navy and Air Force with adequate means to maintain their current comfortable margins of superiority over any probable foe. That can still be done for billions of dollars less than President Bush has just requested.

If the new Democratic-controlled Congress is serious about reducing budget deficits and finding the money to pay for acute domestic needs, it will have to pare back the most extravagant elements of this fantasy weapons wish list. Special responsibility falls on the Armed Services Committee chairmen in both houses, Senator Carl Levin and Representative Ike Skelton. Addiction to military pork is the one area in which bipartisanship has flourished in Washington in the past six years.

This nation can afford to pay for all of its legitimate military needs. What it cannot afford are costly jobs programs disguised as defense and the wasteful weapons projects promoted by an army of well-connected Washington lobbyists.

    The Other Defense Budget, NYT, 6.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/opinion/06tue1.html

Record $622 Billion Budget Requested for the Pentagon

    Record $622 Billion Budget Requested for the Pentagon, NYT, 3.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/washington/03spend.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1170498556-DbibniGMcjKz8yToWACjzA
 

Ray gun brings some zap to the battlefield

Thursday January 25, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Matt Weaver and agencies

The American military has unveiled its latest hi-tech weapon - a virtual flame-thrower on top of a Humvee that microwaves enemies at 500 paces.

American defence experts are also developing artificial black ice to put the skids under adversaries.

The ray gun, which is supposed to be harmless, is designed to make people feel they are about to catch fire and drop their weapons.

The futuristic new weapon, called the Active Denial System, was tested yesterday on 10 journalists who volunteered to be fired at.

Airmen zapped beams from a dish on a Humvee at the volunteers. They were treated to a blast of 54C (130F) heat, that was said not to be painful but intense enough to make them feel they were about to ignite.

The test was carried out at a distance of 500 yards - nearly 17 times the range of existing non-lethal weapons such as rubber bullets.

Military officials say it would help save lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is not expected to go into production until 2010.

"This is one of the key technologies for the future," said Marine Colonel Kirk Hymes, director of the non-lethal weapons programme which helped develop the new weapon.

"Non-lethal weapons are important for the escalation of force, especially in the environments our forces are operating in."

The system uses tiny waves, which only penetrates 0.4mm of the skin, just enough to cause discomfort. By comparison, common kitchen microwaves penetrate several centimetres of skin. The system was developed by the military, but the two devices currently being evaluated were built by defence contractor Raytheon.

Airman Blaine Pernell, said he could have used the system during his four tours in Iraq, where he manned watchtowers around a base near Kirkuk.

"All we could do is watch them," he said. But if they had the ray gun, troops "could have dispersed them".

A new document from the US Defence Advance Research Projects Agency (Darpra) also reveals a programme to come up with spray-on "polymer ice" to cause pursuing enemies and their vehicles to skid and slide.

It says the substance will "degrade the ability of our adversaries to chase us".

It is hoped that the same programme will come up with a "reversal agent" that will stop US military vehicles from slipping on the ice.

    Ray gun brings some zap to the battlefield, G, 25.1.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1998405,00.html

Pentagon Sees Move in Somalia as Blueprint

January 13, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — Military operations in Somalia by American commandos, and the use of the Ethiopian Army as a surrogate force to root out operatives for Al Qaeda in the country, are a blueprint that Pentagon strategists say they hope to use more frequently in counterterrorism missions around the globe.

Military officials said the strike by an American gunship on terrorism suspects in southern Somalia on Sunday showed that even with the departure of Donald H. Rumsfeld from the Pentagon, Special Operations troops intended to take advantage of the directive given to them by Mr. Rumsfeld in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.

American officials said the recent military operations have been carried by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which directs the military’s most secretive and elite units, like the Army’s Delta Force.

The Pentagon established a desolate outpost in the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti in 2002 in part to serve as a hub for Special Operations missions to capture or kill senior Qaeda leaders in the region.

Few such “high value” targets have materialized, and the Pentagon has gradually relocated members of the covert Special Operations units to more urgent missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But officials in Washington said this week that the joint command had quietly been returning troops and weaponry to the region in recent weeks in anticipation of a mission against members of a Qaeda cell believed to be hiding in Somalia.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of Congress on Friday that the strike in Somalia was executed under the Pentagon’s authority to hunt and kill terrorism suspects around the globe, a power the White House gave it shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It was this authority that Mr. Rumsfeld used to order commanders to develop plans for using American Special Operations troops for missions within countries that had not been declared war zones.

But since the retreat of the Taliban in 2001, when American Special Forces worked with Afghan militias, Mr. Rumsfeld’s ambitious agenda for Special Operations troops has been slow to materialize.

The problem has partly been a shortage of valuable intelligence on the whereabouts of top terrorism suspects. Mr. Rumsfeld also dispatched teams of Special Operations forces to work in American embassies to collect intelligence and to develop war plans for future operations.

Pentagon officials said it is still not known whether any senior Qaeda suspects or their allies were killed in the airstrike on Sunday, carried out by an AC-130 gunship. A small team of American Special Operations troops has been to the scene of the airstrike, in a remote stretch near the Kenya border, to collect forensic evidence in the effort to identify the victims.

Some critics of the Pentagon’s aggressive use of Special Operations troops, including some Democratic members of Congress, have argued that using American forces outside of declared combat zones gives the Pentagon too much authority in sovereign nations and blurs the lines between soldiers and spies.

The State Department and Pentagon took control of Somalia policy in the summer, after a failed effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to use Somali warlords as proxies to hunt down the Qaeda suspects.

The trail of the terrorism suspects in Somalia, blamed for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, had long gone cold. But American military and intelligence officials said that the Ethiopian offensive against the Islamist forces who ruled Mogadishu and much of Somalia until last month flushed the Qaeda suspects from their hide-outs and gave American intelligence operatives fresh information about their whereabouts.

The Bush administration has all but officially endorsed the Ethiopian offensive, and Washington officials have said that Ethiopia’s move into Somalia was a response to “aggression” by the Islamists in Mogadishu.

In the weeks before the military campaign began, State Department and Pentagon officials said that they had some concerns about the impending Ethiopian government’s offensive in Somalia.

But as the Ethiopian’s march toward war looked more likely, Americans began providing Ethiopian troops with up-to-date intelligence on the military positions of the Islamist fighters in Somalia, Pentagon and counterterrorism officials said.

According to a Pentagon consultant with knowledge about Special Operations, small teams of American advisers crossed the border into Somalia with the advancing Ethiopian army.

“You’re not talking lots of guys,” the Pentagon consultant said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “You’re talking onesies and twosies.”

    Pentagon Sees Move in Somalia as Blueprint, NYT, 13.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/world/africa/13proxy.html

White House Pushes Hard on Iraq Plan

January 11, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 -- President Bush’s top aides pushed hard today for Mr. Bush’s Iraq strategy and unveiled plans to add 92,000 soldiers and marines to the overall strength of the United States military and help Iraqis far beyond Baghdad’s borders.

The addition of 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 to the Marine Corps, to be accomplished over five years, was announced by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates the morning after Mr. Bush told the American people that about 20,000 more troops are being sent to Iraq.

And the move to “further decentralize and diversify” the American civilian presence in Iraq was announced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the administration moved to persuade a skeptical Congress to embrace an intensified military, economic and military offensive to pacify Iraq and strengthen its frail, fledgling democracy.

“Success in Iraq relies on more than military efforts,” Ms. Rice said at a news conference. “It requires robust political and economic progress.”

It also depends on diplomacy, Ms. Rice said, reiterating that the United States would bring renewed pressure on Iran and Syria, both regarded by Washington as interlopers in Iraq.

Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who appeared with the two Cabinet members, said a look at the casualty lists in Iraq should convince anyone that the Iraqis are doing their share to eradicate terrorists and sectarian killers.

Immediately after their joint news conference, the secretaries and General Pace headed to Capitol Hill, where Mr. Gates and General Pace were to testify before the House Armed Services Committee and Ms. Rice was appearing before the Senate and House foreign relations panels.

The Cabinet members and the general were in line for sharp, perhaps hostile questions from the Democratic-controlled committees, if the reaction to Mr. Bush’s Iraq speech of Wednesday night was any indicator. For instance, Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, called Mr. Bush’s plan to send just over 20,000 more troops “three and a half years later and several hundred thousand troops short” and said it was high time for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to show that he is as committed as the United States to a new, peaceful Iraq.

Ms. Rice said she has appointed Tim Carney, a former ambassador to Haiti, to the new position of coordinator for “Iraq transitional assistance” to work with Iraqis on economic and development projects.

“Iraq is central to the future of the Middle East,” Ms. Rice said at the news conference.

Ms. Rice said it is essential to get Americans “out of the embassy, out of the Green Zone,” the heavily fortified sector in Baghdad, and into the countryside to help Iraqis build their country.

Mr. Gates said it would be obvious fairly soon if Iraqis are indeed living up to their obligations, and that the depth of their commitment would be a factor in how long the temporary American troop increase would last.

At the same time, he said that Iraq would continue to be a very dangerous place, at least as long as Americans are, in effect, “the prisoners of anyone who wants to strap on a bomb and blow themselves up.” But given the enormous stakes, Mr. Gates said, “failure in Iraq is not an option.”

    White House Pushes Hard on Iraq Plan, NYT, 11.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/world/middleeast/11cnd-capital.html?hp&ex=1168578000&en=9de2f83aac6506fc&ei=5094&partner=homepage

U.S. Selecting Hybrid Design

for Warheads

January 7, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD,
DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER

This article is by William J. Broad, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 — The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country’s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades. It will propose combining elements of competing designs from two weapons laboratories in an approach that some experts argue is untested and risky.

The new weapon would not add to but replace the nation’s existing arsenal of aging warheads, with a new generation meant to be sturdier, more reliable, safer from accidental detonation and more secure from theft by terrorists.

The announcement, to be made by the interagency Nuclear Weapons Council, avoids making a choice between the two designs for a new weapon, called the Reliable Replacement Warhead, which at first would be mounted on submarine-launched missiles.

The effort, if approved by President Bush and financed by Congress, would require a huge refurbishment of the nation’s complex for nuclear design and manufacturing, with the overall bill estimated at more than $100 billion.

But the council’s decision to seek a hybrid design, combining well-tested elements from an older design with new safety and security elements from a more novel approach, could delay the weapon’s production. It also raises the question of whether the United States will ultimately be forced to end its moratorium on underground nuclear testing to make sure the new design works.

On Friday, Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Energy Department, said the government would not proceed with the Reliable Replacement Warhead “if it is determined that testing is needed.” But other officials in the administration, including Robert Joseph, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, have said that the White House should make no commitment on testing.

Congress authorized exploratory research for the weapon three years ago, and has financed it at relatively low levels since. But now the costs will begin to increase.

If Mr. Bush decides to deploy the new design, he could touch off a debate in a Democrat-controlled Congress and among allies and adversaries abroad, who have opposed efforts to modernize the arsenal in the past. While proponents of the new weapon said that it would replace older weapons that could deteriorate over time, and reduce the chances of a detonation if weapons fell into the wrong hands, critics have long argued that this is the wrong moment for Washington to produce a new nuclear warhead of any kind.

At a time when the administration is trying to convince the world to put sanctions on North Korea and Iran to halt their nuclear programs, those critics argue, any move to improve the American arsenal will be seen as hypocritical, an effort by the United States to extend its nuclear lead over other countries. Should the United States decide to conduct a test, officials said, China and Russia — which have their own nuclear modernization programs under way — would feel free to do the same. North Korea was sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council for conducting its first test on Oct. 9, and it may be preparing for more, experts said.

Both administration officials and military officers like Gen. James E. Cartwright, head of the Strategic Command, which controls the nation’s nuclear arsenal, argue that because the United States provides a nuclear umbrella for so many allies, it is critical that its stockpile be as reliable as possible.

“We will not ‘un-invent’ nuclear weapons, and we will not walk away from the world,” General Cartwright said in a recent interview. “Right now, it is not the nation’s position that zero is the answer to the size of our inventory.”

“So, if you are going to have these weapons, they should be safe, they should be able to be secured, and they should be reliable if used,” General Cartwright said in the interview, conducted before the Department of Energy’s decision was announced.

The current schedule, which is subject to change, would call for the president to make a decision in a year or two and, if approved, to begin engineering development by fiscal year 2010 and production by 2012.

The two teams competing to design the weapon, one at Los Alamos in New Mexico, the other at the Livermore National Laboratory in California, approached the problem with very different philosophies, nuclear officials and experts said. Livermore drew on a single, robust design that, before the testing moratorium, was detonated in the 1980s under a desolate patch of Nevada desert. The weapon, however, never entered the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

The Los Alamos team drew on aspects of many weapons from the stockpile and pulled them together in a novel design that has never undergone testing.

A winner of the competition was to have been announced in November. But federal officials said they had a hard time choosing between the two designs, calling both excellent.

The question now, arms experts said, is whether a mix-and-match approach combining the two will produce a clever hybrid or an unworkable dud. They said the nuclear laboratories, bitter rivals for decades, have never before shared responsibility for designing a weapon.

“There has not been what I would consider a real partnership,” said Philip E. Coyle III, a former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon and former director of nuclear testing for Livermore. “In some respects, it’s unprecedented.”

Ray E. Kidder, a senior Livermore scientist who pioneered early arms designs, said the hybrid approach appeared to be based more on the politics of survival for the laboratories than on technical merit.

“It’s spreading the wealth,” he said. Federal officials, Dr. Kidder added, “tend to do that fairly rigorously so as to keep the labs alive. To foreclose the possibility of closure, they try to divide the work load.”

General Cartwright cast that problem differently, saying that it is critical to keep America’s “intellectual capital” in producing weapons alive. “We are starting to get to the point where the people who actually have experience designing a weapon are reaching that point at which they will start to leave the industry,” he said. “And are we able to attract the minds that we will need to sustain this activity?”

Nonetheless, several nuclear experts expressed doubts about the wisdom of using a design that has never undergone testing, saying future presidents might lose confidence in the arsenal’s potency and be tempted to conduct test explosions.

“It’s one thing to have all the components working and another to have them all working together,” said Raymond Jeanloz, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who advises the government on nuclear arms. “To me, that’s the key technical issue that has yet to be resolved.”

In the few years since its debut, the reliability program has grown from a fringe effort at the nation’s nuclear arms laboratories into a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s nuclear policy.

Advocates say a generation of more reliable arms would give military commanders the confidence to abandon the current philosophy of holding onto huge inventories of old weapons, and could speed a shrinkage of the American arsenal from some 6,000 warheads to perhaps 2,000 or less.

Critics say a main justification for the program vanished in November when a secretive federal panel known as Jason found that the plutonium “pits” at the heart of many nuclear warheads aged far better than expected, with most able to work reliability for a century or more.

“This research eliminates a major rationale,” Lisbeth Gronlund, a nuclear arms specialist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group based in Cambridge, Mass., said in a November statement.

Since that study was revealed, the administration has emphasized other reasons to build a new warhead, especially new, highly classified technologies to make the weapons virtually impossible to use if they fall into unfriendly hands. Other objectives are to simplify manufacturing, reduce toxic byproducts and improve safety of triggering devices.

As a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the United States and other nuclear weapons states have committed, at least on paper, to the ultimate goal of “the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles” of weapons. But General Cartwright cautioned that much of the criticism of the program was cast in terms of achieving that disarmament, and he said the government’s policy, and that of the new warhead program, was to maintain a nuclear stockpile “that would be the smallest practical to maintain its credibility.”

He described the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile as “an artifact of the cold war — cold war both in its delivery systems and its characteristics and certainly in its technology.”

“We stopped testing a while back. So, from the testing standpoint, we have not been fielding new weapons,” General Cartwright said. “From the standpoint of engineering and design, there has been only marginal activity, mostly reacting to the age of components.”

U.S. Selecting Hybrid Design for Warheads, NYT, 7.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/washington/07nuke.html