Veterans Day 2025 - Remembering Two Of Hastings, Minnesota’s Unforgettable Veterans

Vietnam Veteran Gordon Schmidt

I often met Gordy Schmidt at Lake Rebecca in Hastings on one of his many long walks.
I would fish and he would take in some sun along the trails and at the park. 

I learned of his tremendous craftsmanship with wood and also observed his love of gardening.  

Together with Doug, his gardening buddy at the Vets home, the two had beautiful showcases every year. Gordy specialized in flowers and Doug was the vegetable expert.  I worked with them to get soil samples sent to the U of M and watched their artistry through my window in Building 25 just above the Vermillion River.

Another fond memory is Gordy's keen eye for dangerous tree limbs along the trails and holes in the ground in the parks that could break an ankle.  Together we would take photos of the dangerous areas and send an email to my contacts at the city parks department and they would come out to cut the limbs and fill the holes.  With 25 miles of trails to maintain, they appreciated Gordy's keen eye.

We miss Gordy and his artistry in several venues. 

World War II and Korean War Veteran Bob 

I first met Bob on the shore of Lake Rebecca near Hastings, Minnesota in 2006.   He was perched on a small stool catching sunfish which I later learned he carefully cleaned on a glass-topped coffee table in his garage. He then cooked them for his lady friend Myra, pictured at the lower left in the above photo with Bob.   

I fished with Bob for the next 5 years, until his health became too frail to make it to the lake he had frequented for well over 70 years. 

I learned Bob was a decorated combat veteran of WW II and the Korean War, who had been shot down twice over Europe flying B-17's. Bob and I often discussed our combat experiences,  he in his era and I in mine.  He was a big help in my recovery from PTSD.

After his service abroad,  Bob returned to Hastings where he was a fixture at the Hastings Country Club, managing the facility for many years while also establishing a musical instrument retail store and a couple restaurants in the area.

I brought some Veteran friends who were golf enthusiasts by Bob's garage at his invitation, where he would wander down a line of equipment he had accumulated over the years, filling up a bag with clubs, balls and other tools for the links, then hand it to each vet as a gift or for a pittance if the man felt he had to pay. 

Bob was a self-effacing man who liked a laugh and a good story;  he had many to tell, with his roles in business and social settings as well as foreign travel and wars.   I met several local, prominent people through Bob, which contributed to my feel for the community.  I admired his easy, friendly demeanor with everyone. 

Bob often asked me to accompany he and Myra to the local casino for dinner.  I noted he had the same look on his face when he was playing the slots as he did when he was fishing - always waiting for that big one. I met Bob's two adopted daughters, and many of his extended family in the area and in Canada. His daughter, Jean is pictured with Bob at the lower right in the above photo.

Bob Niederkorn was a genuine, generous individual who served his country, his community and his friends from his heart. 

We miss him at Lake Rebecca,

Three Ways Veteran Business Owners Can Access Capital

 

"FEDERAL TIMES" By Terry Hill

"Veteran-owned businesses are a vital part of the U.S. economy, making up approximately 6% of all businesses, employing nearly four million workers and contributing over $177 billion in annual payroll to the U.S. economy. Despite this impact, many face unique business challenges, particularly when it comes to accessing the capital needed to grow.

For veterans looking to start or grow a business, the right capital setup is key to unlocking your business’s full potential. Here are a few tips to ensure you’re setting yourself up for success."

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"Time spent in service significantly delays the ability to build credit, network business connections and tap into available resources—all of which are imperative for gaining a foothold in the business world.

For veterans looking to start or grow a business, the right capital setup is key to unlocking your business’s full potential. Here are a few tips to ensure you’re setting yourself up for success:

Build and Bolster Your Business Plan

A robust business plan is essential to securing capital with banks or potential investors, whether it’s for seed funding or a late-stage capital raise. This plan serves as a roadmap to assess your business and helps bankers and investors determine if they want to form a relationship with your company.

Your plan should include defined business objectives, target markets and customers, and plans for how you will promote your product or service. From there, you’ll be able to provide estimates for how much capital is needed to execute against these objectives.

Establish Credit to Become Bankable

Your credit score is often the first metric lenders look at to evaluate you as a potential candidate for capital. If you’re an established business, they will review your business credit. But if you’re just starting out, lenders will turn to your personal credit score.

Building and maintaining a good credit score is difficult for many Americans, but for veterans—especially those who have moved frequently or spent time overseas—establishing a strong credit history to support their score can be a particular challenge. This requires a track record of consistent payment history on credit cards and personal loans, such as student loans and mortgage payments. However, during active duty, service members may not have had opportunities to build that track record.

For those who don’t have a strong credit track record, there are myriad ways to improve your credit, such as paying rent and utility bills on time and, if applicable, opening up a first credit card to begin building a strong repayment history. If you have outstanding debt, focus on settling accounts in collections and paying down high-interest debts. Also be sure to review your credit report for errors prior to walking into a meeting with a potential investor.

If you have personal credit, but are looking to build business credit, consider applying for a business credit card. Using it for smaller bills each month, and then paying it off in full before payment is due, can help to increase your score. Doing business with different vendors who work with business credit reporting agencies can also help this process. As you buy supplies and materials from vendors, those purchases and payments get reported to the business credit agencies and, in turn, get tacked on to your credit history.

While trying to build or improve your credit score may feel like an uphill battle, it’s a critical first piece in showing that you are bankable, and that you’re someone that both banks and investors will be excited to work with.

Identify Resources to Help Meet Your Goal

Once you’ve completed a business plan and begun to build – or improve – your credit, it’s time to look to your network. Whether you’re just finding your footing in the business world or looking to take an established business to the next level, having a network of experts you can tap into for guidance is invaluable.

There are a number of education and networking programs specifically designed for veterans and veteran-owned businesses that serve as a great starting point, including: Syracuse University, and Veterans Business Outreach Center. These organizations are focused on the military entrepreneurial community and provide incredible programming, resources, mentorship and guidance to help veterans overcome key challenges.

In addition to seeking out specific educational and networking programs, veteran-owned businesses should strongly consider getting certified through the  System For Award Management (SAM) Site, as it helps you become eligible for federal contracts set aside specifically for retired military. It also enables access to VA-provided resources, such as business training, mentoring, and networking, all of which are essential for businesses as they become more established.

Accessing new capital can feel daunting, especially when you’re just getting started. But with proper planning and the right resources on your side, the likelihood of success is much greater. Time in the service has taught every veteran vital lessons.Never lose sight of the fact that your discipline, passion, resilience and resourcefulness is your company’s biggest asset. If you stay true to who you are and are thoughtful in your approach, the sky is the limit."

Three ways veteran business owners can access capital

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Terry Hill is Managing Director, Co-head of Veteran Initiatives, at JPMorgan Chase Commercial Banking.

A Different Path to War

 

"WAR ON THE ROCKS" By Christphopher Preble

"Americans today enjoy a measure of safety that our ancestors would envy and that our contemporaries do envy. We generally do not need to wage war to keep it that way.

On the contrary, some recent wars have degraded the U.S. military and undermined our security. Policymakers should therefore be extremely reluctant to risk American lives abroad."

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"The U.S. military is the finest fighting force in the world; it comprises dedicated professionals who are willing and able to fight almost anywhere, practically on a moment’s notice. Any military large enough to defend our vital national security interests will always be capable of intervening in distant disputes. But that does not mean that it should. Policymakers have an obligation to carefully weigh the most momentous decision that they are ever asked to make. These criteria can help.

Any nation with vast power will be tempted to use it. In this respect, the United States is exceptional because its power is so immense. Small, weak countries avoid fighting in distant disputes; the risk that troops, ships, or planes sent elsewhere will be unavailable for defense of the homeland generally keeps these nations focused on more proximate dangers. The U.S. government, by contrast, doesn’t have to worry that deploying U.S. forces abroad might leave America vulnerable to attack by powerful adversaries.

There is another factor that explains the United States’ propensity to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy: Americans are a generous people, and we like helping others. We have often responded favorably when others appeal to us for assistance. Many Americans look back proudly on the moments in the middle and latter half of the 20th century when the U.S. military provided the crucial margin of victory over Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union.

But, in recent years, Americans have grown more reluctant to send U.S. troops hither and yon. There is a growing appreciation of the fact that Washington’s willingness to intervene abroad – from Somalia and the Balkans in the 1990s, to Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, to Libya and Yemen in the present decades – has often undermined U.S. security. We have become embroiled in disputes that we don’t understand and rarely can control. Thus, public anxiety about becoming sucked into another Middle Eastern civil war effectively blocked overt U.S. intervention in Syria in 2013, notwithstanding President Obama’s ill-considered red line warning to Bashar al Assad.

But while the American people are unenthusiastic about armed intervention, especially when it might involve U.S. ground troops, most Washington-based policy elites retain their activist instincts. They believe that U.S. military intervention generally advances global security and that the absence of U.S. leadership invites chaos. The essays in this series, “Course Correction,” have documented the many reasons why these assumptions might not be true. The authors have urged policymakers to consider other ways for the United States to remain engaged globally – ways that do not obligate the American people to bear all the costs and that do not obligate U.S. troops to bear all the risks.

But the authors do not presume that the United States must never wage war. There are indeed times when it should. Policymakers should, however, keep five specific guidelines in mind before supporting military intervention, especially the use of ground troops. Doing so would discipline our choices, would clearly signal when the U.S. military is likely to be deployed abroad, and could empower others to act when the United States does not.

Vital U.S. National Security Interest at Stake

The United States should not send U.S. troops into harm’s way unless a vital U.S. national security interest is at stake. Unfortunately, the consensus in Washington defines U.S. national security interests too broadly. Protecting the physical security of the territory of the United States and ensuring the safety of its people are vital national security interests. Advancing U.S. prosperity is an important goal, but it is best achieved by peaceful means, most importantly through trade and other forms of voluntary exchange. Similarly, the U.S. military should generally not be used to spread U.S. values, such as liberal democracy and human rights. It should be focused on defending this country from physical threats. The military should be poised to deter attacks and to fight and win the nation’s wars if deterrence fails.

The criterion offered here is more stringent, for example, than the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, which held that U.S. troops should not be sent overseas “unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies.” By effectively equating U.S. national interests with those of our allies, it allowed for a range of interventions that would not be considered automatically valid under the guidelines spelled out here.  Policymakers should not risk the lives of U.S. troops to protect others’ interests as though those interests were our own.

Clear National Consensus

The American people must understand why they are being asked to risk blood and treasure and, crucially, they must have a say in whether to do so. The U.S. military should not be engaged in combat operations overseas unless there is a clear national consensus behind the mission.

Although modern technology allows constituents to communicate their policy preferences easily, traditional methods are just as effective in ascertaining whether the American people support the use of force. We should rely on the tool written into the Constitution: the stipulation that Congress alone, not the president, possesses the power to take the country to war.

As Gene Healy notes in this series, Congress has regularly evaded its obligations. Although the U.S. military has been in a continuous state of war over the past 15 years, few in Congress have ever weighed in publicly on the wisdom or folly of any particular foreign conflict. Some now interpret Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty or United Nations Security Council resolutions as obligating the United States to wage war without explicit authorization from Congress. This is unacceptable. The president may repel attacks against the United States, but the authority to deploy U.S. forces abroad, and to engage in preemptive or preventative wars of choice, resides with Congress — and by extension the people — of the United States.

Understanding of the Costs—and How to Pay Them

We must also understand the costs of war and know how we will pay them before we choose to go down that path. We cannot accurately gauge popular support for a given military intervention overseas if the case for war is built on unrealistic expectations and best-case scenarios. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is certainly no such thing as a free war.

Deficit spending allows the federal government to pretend otherwise. Politicians make promises, with bills coming due long after they’ve left office. But we should expect more when it comes to the use of force. Advocates for a military intervention should be forced to frame their solution in relation to costs and benefits. The debit side of the ledger includes the long-term costs of care for the veterans of the conflict. Hawks must also explain what government expenditures should be cut – or taxes increased – to pay for their war. The American people should have the final say in choosing whether additional military spending to prosecute minor, distant conflicts is worth the cost, including the opportunity costs: the crucial domestic priorities that must be forgone or future taxes paid.

Clear and Obtainable Military Objectives

We cannot compare the costs or wisdom of going to war if we do not know what our troops will be asked to do. The U.S. military should never be sent into harm’s way without a set of clear and obtainable military objectives.

Such considerations do not apply when a country’s survival is at stake. But wars of choice — the types of wars that the United States has fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere — are different. Advocates for such wars must demonstrate not only that the fight is necessary to secure vital U.S. interests, that it has public support, and that it has funding, but also that the military’s mission is defined and attainable.

Military victory is rarely sufficient, however, as our recent wars and interventions demonstrate. In the case of regime-change wars, ensuring that a successful transition to a stable, friendly government occurs can take a considerable amount of time and resources. Whatever replaces the defeated forces must represent a marked improvement in order for the war to advance U.S. vital interests. U.S. leaders, therefore, must not only define the military objective, but also detail what the resultant peace will look like, and how we will know the mission is complete.

It is easy for Washington to start wars, but we cannot leave U.S. troops on the hook for ending them. Policymakers must account for the tendency of war to drag on for years or more, and they must plan for an acceptable exit strategy before committing troops.

Use of Force as a Last Resort

The four criteria above are not enough to establish a war’s legitimacy, or the wisdom of waging it. After all, modern nation-states have the ability to wreak unimaginable horror on a massive scale. That obviously doesn’t imply that they should. Thus, the fifth and final rule concerning military intervention is force should be used only as a last resort, after we have exhausted other means for resolving a foreign policy challenge that threatens vital U.S. national security interests.

This point is informed by centuries-old concepts of justice. Civilized societies abhor war, even those waged for the right reasons while adhering to widely respected norms, such as proportionality and reasonable protections for noncombatants. War, given its uncertainty and destructiveness, should never be entered into lightly or for trivial reasons.

America has an exceptional capacity for waging war. U.S. policymakers therefore have a particular obligation to remember that war is a last resort. Precisely because no one else is likely to constrain them, they must constrain themselves.

Conclusion

U.S. foreign policy should contain a built-in presumption against the use of force. That does not mean that war is never the answer, but rather that it is rarely the best answer. Americans today enjoy a measure of safety that our ancestors would envy and that our contemporaries do envy. We generally do not need to wage war to keep it that way. On the contrary, some recent wars have degraded the U.S. military and undermined our security. Policymakers should therefore be extremely reluctant to risk American lives abroad.

The U.S. military is the finest fighting force in the world; it comprises dedicated professionals who are willing and able to fight almost anywhere, practically on a moment’s notice. Any military large enough to defend our vital national security interests will always be capable of intervening in distant disputes. But that does not mean that it should."

A Different Path to War

“Like” War – The Weaponization of Social Media

 

Art:  istock

"NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE" By P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking

"A comparatively tiny physical conflict, fought in an area the size of Portland, Oregon, became a global engagement, prompting the exchange of more than 10 million heated messages on Twitter alone.

The lesson was clear: Not only did modern war require a well-planned military campaign. It required a viral marketing campaign as well... "

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"The following is an excerpt from the new book LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media and reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 

To many Palestinians who live in Gaza City, Ahmed al-Jabari was a hero: the commander of Hamas, the militant wing of resistance to the Israeli occupation. To Israelis, he was a villain: a terrorist who exploded bombs on packed school buses and rained mortar shells down on cities. But most of all, Jabari was a survivor. He’d lived through five assassination attempts and boasted that he no longer feared bullets or bombs.

His reckoning came on November 14, 2012, as Jabari and his bodyguard were driving down a residential street in Gaza City. High above them, an Israeli Heron drone loitered. Its high-powered camera zoomed in as Jabari’s car sped past a packed minibus and onto a stretch of open road. Then the drone fired a missile.

Jabari never saw the explosion that ended his life, but millions of other people did. Even as his body smoldered, the IDF’s official Twitter account spun into action. “The IDF has begun a wide spreadcampaign on terror sites & operatives in the Gaza ,” declared @IDFSpokesperson. Then came an info graphic that listed Jabari’s crimes in bullet points, with a big red box reading “ELIMINATED” slapped across his glowering face. After that came the YouTube clip. “In case you missed it—VIDEO—IDF Pinpoint Strike on Ahmed Jabari, Head of Hamas Military Wing.” You could watch Jabari’s car trundling down the street before it exploded in a ball of fire. You could watch him die as many times as you wanted (the video has since been viewed nearly 5 million times) and share it with all your friends.

Within a few hours, IDF aircraft had destroyed dozens of missile caches hidden across Gaza City. “We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead,” @IDFSpokesperson taunted. The challenge didn’t go unanswered. “Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are,” a Hamas spokesperson, @AlqassamBrigade, fired back. “(You Opened Hell Gates On Yourselves.)”

The Israelis called it Operation Pillar of Defense. IDF air strikes perforated the buildings in which suspected Hamas fighters gathered, killing militants and innocent families alike. Hamas fighters responded with hundreds of unguided rockets, eager to kill any Israeli they could. Few reached their targets. Israel had a new, U.S.-provided trump card, the Iron Dome, a missile shield that could intercept the projectiles in midair. The result was an eight-day, one-sided campaign. The IDF hit every intended target; Hamas, almost none. Two IDF soldiers and four Israeli civilians were killed, and another 20 Israelis were wounded. On the Palestinian side, roughly 100 militants and 105 civilians were killed, and another thousand were wounded.

But this wasn’t the only fight that counted. There were now three fronts at work in the conflict, Israel’s chief information officer explained. Two were predictable: the “physical” fight, which Israel easily dominated, and the “cyber” fight, in which the IDF just as easily beat back the efforts of Palestinian hackers. But there was a third front, he said, “the world of social networks.” This front would prove more troublesome, and impossible to contain, soon seeping into every corner of the internet.

The IDF deployed a Twitter account, Facebook pages in multiple languages, Tumblr blog pages, and even a Pinterest page. There were slick infographics and a stream of videos and statistics.

Maximizing follower engagement, the official IDF blog offered small digital rewards for repeat users. Visiting the blog ten times got you a “Consistent” badge; searching the website got you recognized as a “Research Officer.” Memes were fired off in volleys and tested for engagement, the best ones deployed extensively. The IDF’s most widely shared image showed Hamas rockets bearing down on cartoon versions of Sydney, New York, London, and Paris. “What Would You Do?” the caption asked in bold red letters.

By contrast, the propaganda efforts of Hamas’s militants were less structured. Most of its social media response came from millions of unaffiliated observers around the world, who watched the plight of Palestinian civilians with horror and joined the fray. The Twitter hash tag GazaUnderFire became an unending stream of images of atrocities: bombed-out buildings, dead children, crying fathers.

The scourge of war left nothing untouched —including video games and fast-food chains. The IDF hijacked the hashtags for the World Cup, a new James Bond movie, and even the same Call of Duty franchise that Junaid Hussain would weave into his own recruiting (“Playing war games on Call of Duty last night? Over a million Israelis are still under REAL fire#BlackOps2”). Meanwhile, pro-Hamas hackers took over the Israeli Facebook page of Domino’s Pizza, using the opportunity to threaten a merciless reprisal of “more than 2000 rockets” against Israeli cities. When Domino’s regained control of the account, it had a message of its own: “You cannot defeat . . . the Israeli hunger for pizza!”

Even as the missiles flew, the IDF and Hamas continued to narrate the conflict, each posting nearly 300 messages: alerts, updates, and a steady string of taunts. “Warning to reporters in Gaza,” wrote @IDFSpokesperson. “Stay away from Hamas operatives and facilities. Hamas, a terrorist group, will use you as human shields.” @AlqassamBrigade couldn’t let this stand. “Stay away from Israeli IDF,” the Hamas spokesperson mimicked. “We are just targeting Israeli soldiers, fighter jets, tanks and bases.” It was a remarkably juvenile exchange. But these taunts couldn’t be dismissed as easily as the ones you might hear in a kindergarten classroom. After all, they were salvos lobbed by two combatants in a real, shooting war.

There was a temptation, after the sides had settled into an uneasy cease-fire, to dismiss this weird internet flame war as a bunch of digital noise. After all, the angriest tweets were still just tweets — literally, “short bursts of inconsequential information.” But that would have been a mistake. Years after Operation Pillar of Defense had slipped from the public mind, American University professor Thomas Zeitzoff conducted a painstaking study of hundreds of thousands of tweets, which he then mapped across each hour of the physical side of the eight-day conflict.

What he found was shocking. In the case of Israel, a sudden spike in online sympathy for Hamas more than halved the pace of Israeli air strikes and a similarly sized leap in Israel’s own propaganda efforts. If you charted the sentiment (pro-Israel or pro-Palestine) of these tweets on a timeline, not only could you infer what was happening on the ground, but you also could predict what Israel would do next. IDF commanders hadn’t just been poring over battlefield maps. They’d also been keeping an eye on their Twitter feeds — the battlefield of the social network war.

Taking place in 2012, Operation Pillar of Defense offered a glimpse of an emerging way of warfare. It was a conflict in which each side had organized to taunt and troll each other online, even as they engaged in a life-and-death struggle in the real world. Their battles drew in millions more international fighters. Some were passionate supporters of one side; others had just stumbled upon the war while looking for video game news or pizza. They shaped the fight all the same, strengthening the voice of one faction or another — and, by tiny degrees, altering the course of events on the ground."

LikeWar - The Weaponization of Social Media

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

P. W. Singer is a strategist at the New America think tank. Emerson T. Brooking is an expert on conflict and social media and a former research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

A Combat Veteran Sees Irony In U.S. "Peace" Posture Today

 

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

The irony the United States faces, both within our country and globally, is a product of technology, weapons and power races inside human communication bubbling voids. This is high risk.

Both within our country and abroad, we are struggling to understand one another, having not taken the time to learn about each other's respective values, cultures and objectives. We have much more in common than we have been led to believe.

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With the finest technological advances ever achieved to enable conversation, our focus has been to overpower one another and not listen and learn about each other to achieve compromise. Technologies like AI and advanced weapons and warfare will never achieve that end. Without effective human learning, understanding and communication those tools may end us.

Our leadership must understand the risks and communicate, bringing about agreement on actions at a level that facilitates learning about each other to develop solutions based on our mutual interests in avoiding impending disasters.

A win/win result is necessary to avoid everyone becoming survival losers.

The tragic lesson we are learning from our ironic posture in the world today is that someone different than us may not have the same value system we possess, but by learning about them we may be able to make distinctions between our values and theirs.  

That learning process then could permit us to consider accepting the differences, communicate and move forward on constructive objectives.

When governments and weapons makers treasure the economic windfalls in collective military industrial technology or in political power, while refusing to negotiate, then values on both sides collide.

Soldiers and civilians often suffer and die while livelihoods and economies endure massive debt or risk collapse while other world powers are forced to take sides.

All confects, internal or external, eventually result in negotiated settlements. Avoiding them by learning and negotiation in the first place is the most effective war weapon and by far the least costly in materials, debt and lives. 

A look over our shoulders at our recent warfare is useful when viewing our future while making prudent decisions regarding financial and defense security. Every citizen from the individual voter to the politician must consider the risks and the opportunities to avoid the risks.  

Effective negotiation must involve learning the other party's values, not simply the perceived threat they represent to us because we do not know them.

From the neighborhood to the boardroom, from the Statehouse to the Congress and the White House, we would do well to learn more about those different from us before we fight.

The way forward lies in developing a mutual understanding of our respective values and cultures in lieu of conflict, internal or external, using diplomacy and negotiation to save lives and economies.

Nations are evolving technological tools for communication and war fighting at a startling pace. Our diplomacy, and negotiation must keep pace by using those tools with communicative, knowledgeable leadership to keep the peace.

“Forever GI Bill” - Things You Should Know

 

"MILITARY TIMES" By Natalie Gross

"[An updated law brought] significant changes to education benefits for service members, veterans and their families.

The legislation known as the “Forever GI Bill” garnered strong bipartisan support in Congress, passing unanimously in both the House and Senate Here are things you should know about the new GI Bill benefits.

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1. There’s no longer an expiration date.
Previously, veterans had to use their Post-9/11 GI Bill within 15 years of their last 90-day period of active-duty service.  This portion of the law [applies] to anyone who left the military after January 1, 2013. It [also applies] to spouses who are receiving education benefits through the Marine Gunnery Sergeant John David Fry Scholarship for family members of service members who have been killed in the line of duty since Sept. 10, 2001.

2. Purple Heart recipients will get more benefits.

The new GI Bill allows anyone who has received a Purple Heart on or after Sept. 11, 2001 to receive 100 percent of the benefits offered under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which includes coverage of tuition costs at a public school’s in-state rate for 36 months and stipends for textbooks and housing.

Previously, Purple Heart recipients were beholden to the same time-in-service qualifications for the GI Bill as other service members. This meant that Purple Heart recipients without a service-connected disability who did not reach 36 months of service were only eligible for a percentage of the benefits and not the full amount.

Aleks Morosky, national legislative director for Military Order of the Purple Heart, said there have been 52,598 Purple Heart recipients who were wounded in action during post-9/11 conflicts, though it’s unclear how many would immediately benefit from this provision. An estimated 660 Purple Heart recipients each year over the next 10 years will be able to take advantage of the increased benefits.

“We think that anybody who has shed blood for this country has met the service requirement by virtue of that fact,” Morosky said. “Everybody sacrifices, everybody puts themselves in harm’s way, but Purple Heart recipients are certainly among the service members who have sacrificed the most.”
This provision [went] into effect in August 2018.

3. More people are eligible for Yellow Ribbon.

The Yellow Ribbon Program is a voluntary agreement between schools and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to split school costs not covered by the GI Bill, reducing or eliminating the amount students must pay themselves.

The Forever GI Bill [expands] eligibility for this program to surviving spouses or children of service members and active-duty service members.

Previously, only veterans eligible for GI Bill benefits at the 100 percent level or their dependents using transferred benefits were eligible for Yellow Ribbon.

4. There’s some extra money — and time — for STEM degrees.

Some college degrees in science, technology, engineering and math fields take longer than four years to complete, which is why the new law authorizes an additional school year of GI Bill funds on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Scholarships of up to $30,000 [are] available for eligible GI Bill users. Only veterans or surviving family members of deceased service members are eligible for this scholarship — not dependents using transferred benefits.

5. Vets hurt by school shutdowns will get benefits back.

A provision in the new GI Bill  restores benefits to victims of school closures has been a long-time coming for the staff at Student Veterans of America.“

We’ve been getting calls for several years now, beginning with the collapse of Corinthian (Colleges), from student veterans whose lives were put on hold,” said Will Hubbard, vice president of government affairs for the nonprofit, which has more than 500,000 student members. “Every day we wasted until it passed was another day that they had to wait.”

This provision will retroactively apply to GI Bill users whose schools have abruptly closed since January 2015, for credits earned at the shuttered institutions that did not transfer to new schools. This will include the thousands of veteran students who were attending the national for-profit chains Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute when they closed in 2015 and 2016, respectively. It would also provide a semester’s worth of reimbursement for GI Bill users affected by future school closures, as well as up to four months of a housing stipend.

6. The VA will measure eligibility for benefits differently.

This bill changes the way the VA uses time in service to calculate eligibility.

Previously, service members with at least 90 days but less than six months of active-duty service would be eligible for up to 40 percent of the full GI Bill benefits. Under new regulations, the same 90-days-to-six-month window is equal to 50 percent of benefits. Service members with at least six months and less than 18 months of service will be eligible for 60 percent of benefits.

This change will tend to benefit reservists more due to the nature of their service, according to a spokeswoman for the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

7. Reservists can count more of their service toward eligibility.

Members of the National Guard and Reserve [are] able to count time spent receiving medical care or recovering from injuries received while on active duty toward their GI Bill eligibility. This will apply to all who have been activated since 9/11.The Forever GI Bill also allows individuals who lost their Reserve Educational Assistance Program when the program ended in 2015 to credit their previous service toward their eligibility for the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

8. Housing stipends will decrease slightly.

The government [pays] for the expansions represented in the Forever GI Bill through a 1 percent decrease in housing stipends over five years. This brings veterans’ housing stipends on par with what active-duty service members receive at the E-5 with dependents rate. (Veterans on the GI Bill [brought] a slightly higher housing allowance rate than active-duty E-5s with dependents.) This change [took] effect on Jan. 1, 2018 and [applies] to service members who enroll in GI Bill benefits after that date.

On a month-to-month basis, they would never see less money,” said SVA’s Hubbard, explaining that the 1 percent reduction will come off of the total the VA would have spent over five years.

Starting in August 2018, housing stipends previously calculated based on the ZIP code of a student’s school [are] based on where a student takes the most classes.

Also [since] August 2018, reservists continue to receive their monthly housing allowance under the GI Bill on a prorated rate for any month during which they are activated, preventing them from losing a whole month’s worth of funds.

9. Benefits can get transferred after death.

A provision of the new GI Bill offers more flexibility with the transfer and distribution of benefits in case of death.

If a dependent who received transferred benefits dies before using all of the benefits, this provision gives the service member or veteran the ability to transfer remaining benefits to another dependent. This [went]] into effect August 2018 and [applies] to all deaths since 2009.This provision also gives dependents of deceased service members the ability to make changes to their deceased loved one’s transferred benefits.

Ashlynne Haycock, senior coordinator of education support services for the nonprofit Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, explains that currently, only a service member has the authority to make changes to the benefits they’d like to transfer. So, if a service member dies after transferring 35 months of benefits to one child and one month of benefits to another, for example, the family would not be able to make future changes to the GI Bill’s distribution among that service member’s dependents.

10. Surviving family members will get more money, but less time.

Besides access to Yellow Ribbon, spouses and children of service members who died in the line of duty on or after 9/11 will also see their monthly education stipend from the Survivors’ and Dependents’ Educational Assistance Program increase by $200.There’s a downside, however. Though the same program has previously provided 45 months of education benefits, [that decreased] to 36 months in August 2018 to bring it in line with the provisions of the GI Bill.

11. School certifying officials must be trained.

Individuals who certify veteran student enrollment at schools with more than 20 veteran students will be required to undergo training. Previously, training was not mandatory.

"Forever G.I. Bill" Is Now Law

A Tyranny Gage - Leadership And Developing Personal Trust

What do we put in the place of bureaucracies gone afoul to manage things as important and expensive as our national defense, international affairs, and the environment, while shepherding our economic system?

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I had an interesting discussion with a fellow veteran recently about the word "Tyranny", using it to describe what is happening in the world today. That train of thought may be reasonably accurate from a historical perspective, considering how tyranny evolves, grows and employs its methodologies.

We can think of many historical and recent examples of tyranny. What has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza are war applications of tyranny on so many clan, state and international fronts that it makes the general public dizzy and confused, to say nothing about the maze many world governments find themselves in trying to deal with related events as they unfold.

The world is so tightly wired and moving at such warp speed in communications, technology and dangerous weapons that it is extremely difficult to know when tyranny is sprouting because we get overwhelmed with the details and ignore the trends.

Tyranny sprouts within organizations that imbed themselves in economies and assume a life of their own. These organizations become entrenched and difficult to change because they are wired to so much of economic and public life (a defense company in every state, a pork project tacked onto a defense appropriation). 

 We target our elected officials as figureheads for our frustration, when in fact the real culprit is a big, faceless machine grinding onward, never changing, because we (the citizenry and the politician) will not bite the bullet and dismantle it. It risks finally collapsing of its own weight.

Some who analyze tyranny believe the best way to avoid it is to avoid violations of the constitution. That is a bit simplistic in our era. The conundrum is detecting complex circumstances with the potential to become violations of the constitution before they become horror stories and do something about them IN ADVANCE.

As students of history we know much of what we are experiencing today in war and politics is tied to human nature. The big issue: "What do we put in the place of bureaucracies gone afoul to manage things as important and expensive as our national defense, international affairs, and the environment, while shepherding the our economic system ?"   

The US political system classically appoints a blue ribbon panel to study such problems spread the blame and write a detailed report. We must do better then that in the future. The impending trauma will not permit it.  

Mass marketing and communications have created expectations beyond reality in venues from romance web sites to building wealth and dealing with warfare.   We must come down to earth and become more sophisticated in the manner with which we view all this input and sift it in a meaningful way to have true trust. If we do not we run a high risk of tyranny and that fact is inescapable.

To a very large degree trust is a personal responsibility. We must become involved, make prudent judgments regarding our leadership and think for ourselves. 

Above all, must learn from each other to evolve true trust and choose leadership capable of developing it. 

What We Can Learn From People Who Are Different From Us

Time To Retire The Phrase ‘Military Industrial Complex’

 

“RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT” By Dan Grazier

“President Dwight Eisenhower coined this immortal phrase during his January 17, 1961 farewell address to warn Americans. “Sorry Ike: it’s a bit too dated and no longer the right moniker to describe what we’re up against.

The Pentagon, Congress, the defense industry, think tanks, lobbyists, and industry-sponsored media outlets are all very real.  When combined, they make up what is better termed the “National Security Establishment,” which Americans see in action all the time.”

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“It is time to retire the phrase “military-industrial complex.”

President Dwight Eisenhower coined this immortal phrase during his January 17, 1961 farewell address to warn Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the conjunction of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”

As a five-star general, Ike knew, perhaps better than anyone, the self-serving and mutually beneficial relationship between the defense industry and the military. But he neglected to mention Congress’s role in the arrangement, nor could he necessarily have foreseen the ways in which corporate interests would intertwine themselves with the various bureaucracies that keep the Pentagon’s coffers flowing.

While the phrase “military-industrial-congressional-information complex” would be more accurate, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. And like Eisenhower’s snappier appellation, it still suggests an element of conspiracy. But, of course, none of this is theoretical.

The Pentagon, Congress, the defense industry, think tanks, lobbyists, and industry-sponsored media outlets are all very real. When combined, they make up what is better termed the “National Security Establishment,” which Americans see in action all the time.

We see it when a retired general goes on television to explain exactly how the Ukrainian army can defeat the Russians — but only if Congress passes the latest billion-dollar aid package. No mention is made of the rather relevant fact that the general’s think tank is funded by defense contractors who stand to benefit from the aid package he is calling for.

We see it when another general retires from his post as the head of his service branch and turns up six months later on the board of a major defense contractor. Coincidentally, it’s the same defense contractor that celebrated a year earlier when that general announced the company had won the $21.4 billion contract to build a fleet of bombers.

We see it when a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee proposes the U.S. spend 5% of the gross domestic product every year on the military — a $55 billion increase to the current Pentagon budget. Predictably, he fails to mention that the majority of this money would go to defense contracts awarded to the same organizations that have given him more than $530,000 in campaign money since 2019. He fails to acknowledge how flush Pentagon budgets over the past 25 years created the sorry state of the military today.

We even see it when we least expect to, as when the country’s largest defense contractor runs advertisements during the Oscars and posts an interactive map on the company’s website touting the economic benefits of a weapon program. The company wants everyone to know how many jobs could be lost if Congress votes to disrupt the program in any way.

The American people also see the impact of these actions by the National Security Establishment.

We see tens of billions spent on a fighter jet that can only be reliably ready for combat a third of the time. We also see more than $60 billion spent designing and building warships that were so flawed Navy officials apparently can’t get rid of them fast enough. The Navy decommissioned one of these ships less than 5 years after its commissioning ceremony, roughly two decades ahead of the ship’s planned lifespan.

Starting in 2003, the Army spent at least $8 billion, and some sources say the better part of $20 billion, developing the Future Combat System, a family of armored vehicles to replace Cold War-era tanks, personnel carriers, and artillery vehicles. The Pentagon then canceled the program in 2009 with little to show for the effort and expense.

There are plenty of other examples of failed acquisition efforts from the past 25 years which partially explain why annual defense spending is now a whopping 48% higher than it was in 2000. Compounding these efforts is the Pentagon’s reliance on contractors to perform many roles once performed by uniformed service members at a much lower financial rate. The Department of Defense itself analyzed one case where hiring a group of contractors cost 316% more than the government employees tasked with similar work.

In a city where partisanship and political rancor impacts nearly every debate, wasteful and ineffective defense policies are a conspicuous exception. That is because the National Security Establishment is party-agnostic. Military contractors donate money to candidates and lobbyists on both sides of the aisle, those candidates vote for Pentagon budget increases and fund weapons programs long after their failures are widely known, and lobbyists and corporate-sponsored media groups generate public support for those programs.

Without massive structural changes, this pattern is all but certain to continue into future generations. Today’s National Security Establishment has launched several major weapons programs in recent years that, if allowed to continue on their current trajectories, will drive the annual Pentagon budget to truly unprecedented levels.

As programs like the B-21, Constellation-class frigate, Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet, Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, several ground vehicle programs, the Sentinel nuclear missile, and myriad space and cyber systems mature and enter full-rate production in the coming decades, the Pentagon budget will expand to cover the costs.

But this doesn’t have to be the case, if Congress actually does its oversight job. Several of these programs are already behind schedule and over budget. Costs for the Sentinel missile program have increased 81% to $140.9 billion from the original $77.7 billion estimate and it will still be several years before the first missile is installed in its silo. Yet, given the massive financial influence, even these egregious failures are all but glossed over, a simple footnote for most, and then prepared for a rubber stamp.

The services and their bureaucracies, the defense industry, members of Congress, and the paid mouthpieces promoting their interests in the media and during lobbying visits all comprise the all-too-real National Security Establishment. Identifying this network is the first step to avoid saddling future generations with the crushing debt associated with unsustainable U.S. military policies today.

While it is long-past time to update the name, Eisenhower’s warning is still more real than ever. Americans must remain vigilant and guard against the self-serving nature of this apparatus that is more intent on lining its own pockets than it is actually keeping Americans and our allies safe.”

Time To Retire The Phrase ‘Military Industrial Complex’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dan Grazier is a senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center. He is a former Marine Corps captain who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. His assignments in uniform included tours with 2nd Tank Battalion in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and 1st Tank Battalion in Twentynine Palms, California.