[Vision2020] System Cheats Troops

[Tom Hansen]

An editorial from the March 19, 2007 edition of the Army Times

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System Cheats Troops

The moldy walls and leaking pipes at Walter Reed Army Medical Center will
surely be fixed - the whole world is watching.

But fixing squalid quarters is the easy part. The graver issue is how the
disability system cheats those who sacrifice the most in service to their
nation. 

This problem is deep-rooted and institutional, and can't be plastered over.

As staff writer Kelly Kennedy details in this issue of Army Times, wounded
soldiers and Marines average lower disability ratings - and less
compensation - than sailors or airmen. 

Likewise, wounded enlisted troops are less likely to get a 50 percent or
greater disability rating than are officers. One-third of injured Army
officers get disability ratings of 50 percent or greater, compared to only
21 percent of enlisted soldiers. These facts play into the worst stereotypes
of military culture - that officers are a privileged elite and that the Army
and Marine Corps, whose troops bear the greatest burden in battle, care the
least for their people. 

There is no acceptable reason for either. 

The medical disability system is unfair and broken. The individual services
conduct their own disability ratings processes with little Defense
Department oversight. 

Troops endure months and years of administrative runaround while trying to
secure benefits that should be awarded to them almost automatically.
Instead, they are caught in a dehumanizing bureaucracy that devalues their
sacrifices as it crunches numbers to minimize their benefits. 

It is notable that the budget for disability retirement pay hasn't increased
in five years - even in the midst of a war. Can it be that disability
ratings have been cruelly linked to budgeted resources? 

Fixing this will not be easy, nor inexpensive. But these men and women did
their duty. Now the country, as a matter of honor, owes them more than a
little whitewash on dirty walls. It owes them a complete and immediate
overhaul of the disability process - no matter how much it ends up costing.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil
and steady dedication of a lifetime." 

--Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr.