‘We’re Not There Yet,’ Says Top U.S. Officer

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Tacoma News Tribune
June 19, 2008
Pg. 1
Joint Chiefs Chairman Visits Fort Lewis – Next Up, McChord
By Michael Gilbert, The News Tribune
On a rare visit to the Northwest, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday at Fort Lewis that the military seems hard-wired to look skeptically at its wounded and injured members – especially those whose wounds aren’t physically apparent.
It’s a complaint he said he’s heard again and again across the services.
“The system kicks into, ‘OK, now you’ve got to give blood and DNA until you prove that you’re not malingering,’” Adm. Mike Mullen observed during a visit to the post’s new battalion for wounded and injured troops. “It’s a tremendous burden on them. … The system is predisposed to make it hard, not easy.”
It was one of many tough issues that Mullen, the nation’s top military officer and senior adviser to the president, dug into during a daylong visit to the post.
The trip is his first here since Mullen became chairman in October, and the first by a chairman since Gen. Richard Myers visited in 2003.
He’s scheduled to spend much of today at McChord Air Force Base.
Mullen and his wife, Deborah, stayed longer than scheduled at the post’s Warrior Transition Battalion to talk with staff members who are helping more than 800 troops return to duty or make the transition to civilian life.
He said he and others at the top of the U.S. military have to find a way to change the culture so that soldiers who are hurt are given the benefit of the doubt.
He listened as others told him about challenges in helping soldiers recover from their injuries. And he told the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Karl Bolton, to e-mail him personally – not through the chain of command – the details of a pilot project that connects wounded soldiers with people willing to help in their hometowns.
“It was great that he was so interested,” said Jennifer Sweet, a social worker with the battalion.
It was one of several stops where Mullen fought the clock.
His schedulers had to scratch a Q&A with local reporters and a visit to cadets at the annual ROTC summer training camp. A tour of the post’s high-tech digital training center was cut short.
But Mullen extended a 90-minute town hall-style meeting with 1,200 soldiers – it could have easily gone another hour, said his spokesman – and then stayed late to personally hand out commemorative coins to nearly every soldier there.
He lingered over lunch with a small group of captains. The Army has a critical need to keep its combat-experienced junior officers in the ranks.
And he got to compare the living arrangements for soldiers in the post’s most spartan barracks with one of the spacious, apartmentlike barracks that opened this spring.
Mullen will do it all over again today beginning with another town hall meeting with McChord airmen at 8 a.m. It’s the last stop on a swing that also took him to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and the Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms, Calif.
The troops at Soldiers Field House asked him questions about an array of issues.
What’s the Army doing to recruit more mental health specialists? Why can’t non-Stryker units get Stryker vehicles? Why aren’t security contractors held accountable for their misdeeds in Iraq? What about giving soldiers a “gas COLA” – a pay raise to cover rising prices at the pump?
The pace of deployments also came up. Mullen told them the Army is committed to giving twice as much time at home as soldiers must spend overseas.
But reaching that goal – and ending the stop-loss policy that requires soldiers to stay in the Army and go overseas past their terms of enlistment – will take time, he said. Changes will depend on conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the Army’s growth to 547,000 soldiers over the next several years.
“I’d like to see stop loss go away tomorrow if I could make it happen,” Mullen said. But he said the Army will continue to require some soldiers to stay past their end-of-service date for at least the next several years.
“Given the priorities and the missions we have right now, I don’t see it going away.”
He praised the work of Fort Lewis soldiers who recently returned from Iraq.
“You made a huge difference. You left Iraq this time in a lot better shape than when you showed up,” the chairman said.
But it’s too soon to say the progress there is permanent, Mullen said. The topic is of keen interest at Fort Lewis, where the I Corps headquarters and two Stryker brigades are expected to be deployed to Iraq next year.
“The trends are good, but we’ve got to get it to the point where it’s sustainable and irreversible, and we’re not there yet,” Mullen said.
Col. David Funk, who commands one of those two brigades, asked Mullen what he would counsel the next commander in chief.
“How would you answer?” Mullen shot back.
Funk said his reading of history says that once the United States gets committed to a military engagement, it finds it difficult to pull out. It’s not lost on soldiers, he said, that one presidential candidate is calling for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and the other is saying they should stay.
Mullen said he has put together a team of advisers to plan for the change in administration next January, regardless of who wins.
He urged all soldiers to vote – and just as forcefully urged them to keep their politics to themselves. “There is an absolute need for those of us who wear the uniform to remain neutral. … Advocacy is not something we can do,” he said.
“We as members of the military will carry out the orders of the president of the United States, which is what we swore to do.”
 
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