Sunday, Jun 30th
Last update06:38:08 AM GMT
Military Glance
The Army needs to double its staff of substance-abuse counselors to handle the soaring numbers of soldiers seeking alcohol treatment, said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s No. 2 officer.
The man had been staying at the shelter at the Volunteers of America Veterans Resource Center but was recently told he had to move out because he had been there for a year, the maximum amount of time residents can stay there, said Dennis Kresak, president of the Volunteers of America of Greater Ohio.
The man had been uncooperative about leaving in recent weeks and would not meet with veterans representatives, Kresak said.
Every year since 2005, the Senate has voted to eliminate the policy that denies widows the ability to collect both a military survivor's benefit and the full annuity bought when their military husbands were alive. But in each of those years, the fix was dropped when House and Senate negotiators wrote the final bill in private.
"What we always hear is that there is just no funding for us. 'Sorry, this is not your year,'" said Vivianne Wersel, chairwoman of the Government Relations Committee at Gold Star Wives of America.
On December 27, in the eastern Kunar region of Afghanistan, ten Afghans, eight of whom were schoolchildren, were dragged from their beds and shot by US forces during a nighttime raid. Afghan government investigators said the eight students were aged from 11 to 17 years.
Warning that US military power faced new limits and constraints, he said that weaponry, tactics and enemies had overtaken the "familiar contingencies that dominated US planning after the Cold War".
"We have learned through painful experience that the wars we fight are seldom the wars that we planned," said Mr Gates, as he presented the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defence Review and the 2011 budget plan to the Senate armed services committee.
TVNL Comment: The PNAC dream of total war seems to be fading.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates promised "dramatic changes" in how the Pentagon uses retired officers to advise the military, as he faced scathing criticism at a Senate committee Tuesday.
Gates ordered a Pentagonwide review by Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn of the programs in December after a USA TODAY investigation found that retired officers could make far more money as "senior mentors" than they did as active-duty officers. In addition, those officers can collect pensions and work for contractors who sell to the Pentagon.
The Defense Department just released its king-sized, $708 billion budget for the next fiscal year. Much of the proposed spending is fairly detailed — noting exactly how many helicopters the Pentagon plans to buy and how many troops it plans on playing. But about $56 billion goes simply to “classified programs,” or to projects known only by their code names, like “Chalk Eagle” and “Link Plumeria.” That’s the Pentagon’s black budget.
TVNL Comment: Why is there a black budget at all? How is that constitutional? It is clearly used for illegal and unconstitutional operations. How do we permit this?
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