Not everything is grim for veterans, however. Just as NASA’s “race for space” led to the development of our modern world of computer technology, satellite communications, and so much more that we now take for granted, the long recoveries endured by our injured veterans have led to amazing advances in trauma care, burn treatment, and prosthetics. It is never less than heartbreaking to see the injuries of a soldier wounded in ambush or battle. Yet centers like the facial prosthetics lab at Lackland Air Force Base are developing remarkable techniques to ease the wounded patients’ transition back to normal life, when possible. “Our goal is to give them the best of the best,” says lab director Dr. Joe Villalobos. “We’re going to give them the ideal treatment.” Our veterans deserve nothing less.
Coming Home: Education and Employment
The title of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, passed in 2008, suggests a creditable program. In fact, an expansion is in order. On the one hand, the benefits to pay for veterans to go to college are excellent, but these checks often arrive very late, leaving the beneficiaries scrambling to pay for tuition, food, and housing. There’s just no excuse for that. Also, other worthwhile forms of education, such as vocational schools and Internet-based learning, still aren’t covered. They should be.
As for employment, it’s proved very tough for veterans to come home from overseas and find themselves smack in the middle of the Great Recession. During 2009, the unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans almost doubled. Let us recognize and praise companies that do the right thing for our veterans by giving them opportunities for employment. And let’s offer them tax credits in return, so that other potential employers will be motivated to join in. Congress should be amenable to this idea, since it has already passed the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act, giving veterans preference in hiring for government jobs. Of course (and I hope you’re not surprised), it exempted congressional staff jobs—an act so shameful I hope it’s been rectified by the time this book reaches print.
Where employment is concerned, too many servicemen and -women don’t know their rights, and too many businesses don’t understand their obligations under law. The situation is most complicated for National Guardsmen and reservists: According to the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, businesses are required to take them back when they return home from a tour of duty, but many employers aren’t complying. Some companies refuse to hire them, period, because they don’t want the hassle of replacing them if there’s another deployment.
A veteran can pursue an employment claim based upon the law, but the burden is on him to prove that he lost the job because of his service. This is backward. The burden should be on the employer to establish a legitimate reason for not taking him back. Yet there’s another factor that discourages veterans from making a claim: Incredibly, it can take two years for such employment claims to be resolved.
National Guard and Reserves
In addition to the daunting employment picture for the National Guard and reserves, their overuse in Iraq and Afghanistan has been a tremendous drain on them and their families, their communities, and businesses that would have liked to put them to work. In their civilian lives, a great number of them protect us as our police, firefighters, and paramedics. But since 9/11, as you may be amazed to read, there have been times when almost half of our combat troops in Iraq and more than half of those in Afghanistan have been either National Guard or reserves.
I saw this firsthand during my ten-and-a-half-year tenure as a governor, which included serving as commander in chief of our eleven thousand men and women of the Army and Air Force National Guard. Repeated deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and domestic duty, such as helping out in the aftermath of Katrina, wore heavily not only on the guard personnel but also on their families and employers.
Forgive me for bragging here about my guardsmen, but I’m going to anyway. The 39th Brigade of the Arkansas Guard were actually the first National Guard troops to make it to New Orleans from outside Louisiana. Later, when General Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, and I were on a flight to Iraq, he told me a terrific story about the timing of their arrival. He was being quizzed by President Bush at the Katrina national command center in Texas as to when the guard would get to New Orleans. Then, at that very moment, the TV screen showed the 39th rolling into town. “There they are, Mr. President!” the relieved general shouted. When he told me the story, he said, “I will always love your guys from the 39th!”
As that event proved, we need our National Guard at home for emergencies. Did you know that at the time of Hurricane Katrina a third of the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan? This is insane, since they’re the go-to guys when disaster strikes: hurricanes, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, ice storms, earthquakes, and man-made catastrophes like the horrendous BP oil deluge. Naturally, when large numbers of the guard are overseas, our governors are less able to respond to a crisis quickly and effectively. Getting help from other states eats up precious time and requires lots of red tape. (Oh, I forgot. . . . There’s always the White House to provide a timely and worthwhile response!) Yet thank the Lord, there does exist an avenue that most people are not aware of: a very useful, efficient system known as the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). EMAC allows governors to share assets with other states on a moment’s notice without the endless, time-consuming nonsense that so often slows things down when the federal bureaucracy is involved. Governors know that EMAC, though almost never mentioned in the media, is effective, quick, and responsive. It can make the difference between life-saving response and failure.
By the way, when our guardsmen are deployed overseas, their equipment goes with them. Much of it—including items you’d think we just might need sometime back home, such as helicopters and trucks—somehow gets left over there. So these tours of duty deprive states of both the personnel and the equipment required for emergencies. And without the latter, we can’t even train new recruits.
Finally, there’s one more reason to keep our National Guard here, and that’s law enforcement, particularly along our troubled border with Mexico. It is the law, by the way, that our active-duty military and our reserves cannot participate in actions there.
What Is Our Mission?
“We’ll know it when we see it” may work as a definition of pornography, as a Supreme Court justice once suggested, but not as a definition of victory in a war. And if we don’t know the precise end our military is trying to achieve, we can’t focus on the means to achieve it.
For example, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve been following the strategy of “clear, hold, and build.” In other words, we do it all! That is a dangerous lack of focus. Instead, the goal given to our troops should be to clear the enemy from targeted territory—just that alone. Next, the host country’s troops and police should hold that cleared territory while civilians build, or rebuild, its infrastructure and institutions. To put it bluntly, we’ve had too many of our troops spending too much of their time painting schools and digging wells. They should be allowed to focus on killing Islamic extremists who want us all to die.
Because of this scattershot, imprecise mission, a small group of Americans has borne the brunt of these wars by deploying again and again. The problem is that the DOD is calling on them to do tasks that should instead be undertaken by U.S. civilian agencies and our NATO allies.
As the former top commander of our forces in Afghanistan and a retired army general, Ambassador Eikenberry is in a unique position to know exactly what our military should and should not be doing. For that reason, he’s asked for more civilian personnel so that our troops can concentrate on their military mission, but he’s so far received only about one civilian expert for every hundred troops—nowhere near what he needs. To carry out the many nonmilitary goals of the war in Afghanistan, the DOD needs more support from the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Jus
tice Department, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security.
We could also use much more military support from our NATO allies, but most have shown an aversion to combat. Most of the fighting is in southern Afghanistan, but both France and Germany have been unwilling to go there. (Think there’s a connection? Oui, oui!) Okay, if NATO won’t send or effectively deploy combat troops, let it contribute to stabilizing the country by at least sending more personnel to help with training the police, building infrastructure, and establishing civilian institutions. Then we can get back to the dirty work of fighting and defeating terrorists.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell . . . Don’t Serve
Under the Obama administration, the question of whether or not openly gay men and women should be able to serve in the military has become one of the hot topics of the day. I have asked numerous military men and women ranging in rank from generals to fresh recruits what they thought about this very controversial and divisive issue, but the real question to be answered is what’s in the best interest of the military mission. The military is not about individual preferences but about cohesion of the unit. Let me attempt to address this controversy and shed some light on the likely impact of any policy change.
In 1993 Congress affirmed that the unit comes before the individual, passing legislation that argued “[since] military life is fundamentally different from civilian life” and imposes “little or no privacy,” homosexuals cannot be allowed to serve. If they were, they would create “an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.”
But President Clinton contradicted that law by introducing the absurd concept of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), which President Obama now wants to rescind. Before you applaud, understand that he does not intend to overturn a policy that allows for the recruitment of homosexual soldiers but rather to let them serve openly rather than (as now) discreetly. His aim cannot possibly be to strengthen our military, because it would do just the opposite: create unnecessary tensions, divisions, and stress among men and women who must depend on one another in order to survive. His motivation is purely political, a ploy to strengthen his support from the left. This is the liberal “core” that has been disappointed with him because they expected him to cut and run from Iraq and Afghanistan and close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo. In other words, he is using our servicemen and servicewomen as pawns in shoring up his political base.
In a 2008 Military Times poll of active-duty servicemen and women, 10 percent said they would leave the military if homosexuals were allowed to serve openly; an additional 14 percent said they would consider doing so. That adds up to a quarter of our military forces! One recently retired general has said, “I joined the military when homosexuality was illegal, I served when it was allowed, and I have decided to retire before it was required.” If a wave of resignations hit a private company, if middle and senior managers left in a body, the solution would be to recruit from other companies. But if our career officers and enlisted men walked away, where would we find their replacements? Would the liberal cast of characters in Washington who support this change rush right down to the recruitment office? I don’t think so!
Not surprisingly, conservatives are considerably more likely to join the military than liberals are. In other words, liberal elitists are seeking to impose their will and values upon an institution their like seldom choose as a career and thus don’t really understand. This is dangerous arrogance. It would threaten the very existence of our volunteer military if they succeed in creating conditions that discourage social conservatives from volunteering, since such conservatives are more likely than liberals to object to serving alongside soldiers who are openly homosexual. Those who advocate the same-sex agenda should consider the many potential costs, including the possible need to reinstate the draft.
Lest you think I’m stereotyping conservative views, a June 2010 USA Today/Gallup poll found that 48 percent of conservatives describe themselves as “extremely patriotic,” compared to only 19 percent of liberals and 22 percent of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine. If about 80 percent of liberals in general and young people in particular aren’t patriotic enough to volunteer for the military, then good luck replacing all those conservatives leaving the ranks.
In contrast with the likelihood of resignations if the current policy is overturned, note that over the past decades, discharges for homosexuality have been less than one-half of 1 percent of all discharges. Furthermore, many of these have been for actual sexual assaults, not for just “telling.” This pattern has not been a significant loss compared with the sweeping losses that would result from changing the policy.
Jumping the Gun
As we’ve seen before, this administration sure seems to enjoy taking action before all the facts are in! Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland , who said, “Sentence first, verdict afterward!” they do things backward. (The operative motto of Congress is only slightly different: “Pass first, read afterward!”) In this case, it was wrong of the House to vote to repeal DADT—a major policy change by any standards—before the military finished its own internal review. Admiral Mullen publicly made just that point. Moreover, the House vote, as a done deal, is likely to discourage honest input from the ranks.
Most important, the final decision isn’t even Congress’s to make. President Obama gets the last word (yes, yes, I know), in consultation with Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen. When the decision is made, I can only hope that our commander in chief will step back from the front lines of his ongoing “culture war” and instead dedicate himself to the task of ensuring that our armed forces are as strong and united as possible. Essential to that job is keeping our servicemen and servicewomen as safe as they can be, without the distractions to unit cohesion that can be caused by a leftist political agenda.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
With Enemies Like This, Who Needs Friends?
We Need to Strengthen America’s Position on the World Stage
I’ve spent most of this book discussing the problems we face at home, but I want to take a moment to say that in order for America to be as great as it possibly can be, we must remember our place in the world. Most of us live our lives not thinking about what’s going on in some other country. Trying to cover the cost of rent, groceries, and gas for the car doesn’t afford us the luxury of spending much time pondering what they are thinking in Pakistan. But dealing with friends and enemies in the world community is important, and much of our own national security is at stake.
Nothing presents a more tangled Gordian knot for a new president than foreign policy. Indeed, much of Barack Obama’s case for electing him hinged on convincing voters that President Bush’s approach of staunchly standing by our allies and standing up to our enemies was too simplistic and that a sophisticated, “nuanced” approach to dealing with the world would make nations that dreamed of killing us suddenly love us enough to want to take us to the prom. The Left even gave this approach an appropriately egotistical name: “smart diplomacy.” As if the only reason there were intractable problems in the world was that the diplomats who had dealt with them through the previous decades were morons compared to Obama’s Ivy League brain trust. It’s like the kid in school who waves his A test score in front of the entire class but never gets picked to play baseball. He’s an arrogant nerd, and no matter how smart he is, he can’t hit, he can’t throw, and he can’t run.
As of this writing, the nuance brigade have been applying their superior intellects to American foreign policy for approximately eighteen months, and there’s no question that they’ve had a major impact on our standing in the world. Tin-pot dictators from the Middle East to Latin American to North Korea still hate us; only now they openly mock us as well, defying American threats like a spoiled child who knows that no matter how much his parents threaten, they’ll never really spank him. British leaders question whether our two n
ations’ time-tested “special relationship” has been irreparably shredded. Some of our bravest allies in Eastern Europe feel betrayed at seeing the promise of an American missile shield blithely broken to appease Russian hardliners. And the war in Afghanistan has been simultaneously escalated and muddled. The administration attempted to cover every bet by increasing troop levels while announcing its timetable for leaving. There’s no greater gift to an enemy in wartime than to reveal when you plan to stop fighting. The result: more combat-related deaths in the first eighteen months of Obama’s tenure than in the previous nine years of war. Obama’s handpicked commander was even forced to resign after a Rolling Stone writer quoted him openly disparaging the competence of his superiors.
The one bright spot: Among nations that are traditionally anti-American, President Obama still enjoys high approval ratings. Why am I not surprised?
We Must Remember Our History to Improve Our Future
One of the first things President Obama did upon assuming office was to return the bust of Winston Churchill that the British government had presented to President Bush right after 9/11, on indefinite loan from their national art collection. This didn’t just insult our closest ally; it insulted all Americans. We like Winston Churchill and were proud to have that bust in the Oval Office as a reminder of British solidarity with us, from the First and Second World Wars through the war on terror. Obama’s action wasn’t just boorish; it set an ominous tone for what was to come. What else was going to be tossed out that we liked and believed in but that this new president didn’t?
The British newspaper the Daily Telegraph explained Obama’s strange behavior: “Churchill has less happy connotations for Mr. Obama than for those American politicians who celebrate his wartime leadership. It was during Churchill’s second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. . . . Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President’s grandfather.”
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