Army Major Kenneth Gettinger served as a planner with the 3rd Corps Support Command (COSCOM) at Camp Virginia, Kuwait, and Joint Base Balad, Iraq during 2003 and 2004, supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Such personnel are part …
Military Personnel
$72.3 million
Fun Facts To Know & Tell
Ever want to know how many U.S. military veterans they are? How many are men, where they live, how much they earn and how educated they are compared to their non-vet peers? How many fought in more than one war?
Of course, it doesn’t make any difference if you want to know – you’ve already paid for the information. It has …
Is Sexual Violence Endemic to the U.S. Military?
Aaron Belkin is at the nexus of the military and its challenges in dealing with sexual matters in the ranks. A professor of political science at San Francisco State University, he founded and directs the Palm Center, a think tank that conducts research into gender and military issues that is part of the UCLA law school.
His new book, …
Captains Courageous
The two soldiers couldn’t have been more different. One was young and handsome enough to be known as “Captain Brad Pitt,” a 2007 West Point graduate trained to deliver ordnance from the Army’s most terrifying flying machine, an AH-64 Apache helicopter gunship. The other was a decade older, a bomb-squad grunt who high school …
How to Help Our Fellow Vets Succeed
The news is so full of the travails of veterans, that I thought it would be a breath of fresh air of to focus on the successes of some of us—and how to translate that into the success of all.
I went to the promotion of a colleague last week, at the new and gorgeous Fort Belvoir Army hospital in Virginia just south of the …
The Nitty-Gritty of Women at War
What are the experiences of women at war, and what to tell clinicians about how to help? I have been asked to write a textbook on this subject, so have done another canvass of the literature.
What is striking is how little …
Payday, for Officers
We posted the enlisted-vs.-civilian pay chart last Friday. One reader noted that doesn’t include officers. So here’s a chart from the same Pentagon report comparing U.S. military officers’ pay to that earned by their civilian counterparts with similar levels of education. The 11th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation …
First Reported Anti-Gay Incident Since Military Ban Lifted
The top enlisted sailor aboard a nuclear submarine was fired in March for not taking action against crew members who spent months harassing a fellow sailor they suspected of being gay. It marks the first known case of alleged anti-gay abuse since the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” last September, which allowed openly gay men and …
Payday
OK – Battleland admits it. The Quadrennial Reviews of Military Compensation make for tough, dry reading, but we like them, anyway. Kind of like GAO reports, but without the violence and sex. The Pentagon issued its 11th edition Thursday. Once again, it makes clear our troops are paid fairly for their sacrifices:
Military compensation
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Wars’ Lagging Costs
Here’s a bracing chart from a new report from the Congressional Research Service detailing the cost of veterans’ care:
In FY1940, the budget authority for veterans’ benefits and services was $561.1 million, and in FY2012 the budget authority was $125.3 billion, or more than 200 times the FY1940 budget authority. In constant 2011
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New Standards for Navy Skippers
The Navy seems to have hit rough seas in recent years, repeatedly canning command officers who have fallen short on the job. To the Navy’s credit, it announces these ousters more loudly and clearly than the other services. But …
Of Memorial Days, and Sons and Daughters
With the holiday upon us, a friend recently asked me how I planned to teach my children about the importance of Memorial Day. As a former Marine and veteran of two tours to Iraq, the question surprisingly caught me off guard. I …