How Does A Military Veteran Feel About Recent Events?

File photo (Bumble Dee/shutterstock.com)

The civilian must accept his or her role in world events and decisions. Elected representatives appropriate money and approve U.S. activities in other countries and in our own.

Solders go where they are ordered by their commander.

Asking warriors to do everything poses great dangers for our country — and the military. Our armed services have become the one-stop shop for America’s policymakers.

"FOREIGN POLICY" 

"Here’s the vicious circle in which we’ve trapped ourselves: 

As we face novel security threats from novel quarters, emanating from civil unrest, pandemics non-state terrorist networks from cyberspace, and from the impact of poverty, genocide, or political repression, for instance — we’ve gotten into the habit of viewing every new threat through the lens of “war,” thus asking our military to take on an ever-expanding range of nontraditional tasks.

But viewing more and more threats as “war” brings more and more spheres of human activity into the ambit of the law of war, with its greater tolerance of secrecy, violence, and coercion — and its reduced protections for basic rights.

Meanwhile, asking the military to take on more and more new tasks requires higher military budgets, forcing us to look for savings elsewhere, so we freeze or cut spending on civilian diplomacy and development programs. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role.

“If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war, and “war rules” appear to apply everywhere, displacing peacetime laws and norms. When everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission, displacing civilian institutions and undermining their credibility while overloading the military."

How The Pentagon Became Walmart

If the civilian wishes change, then change can be at hand if the elected official is contacted and a strong input from the citizenry makes the demand heard. Violence is deafening and self-defeating. "

What Has Happened To Great Leaders And What The Next Ones Are Facing

Left to right and top to bottom above: Colin Powell , Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter and General Norman Schwarzkopf

The next great world leaders will be faced with the following:

• Facing geopolitical and economic realities, stopping war interventions and investing in relationships within and without our country by offering mutual collaboration.

• Ceasing dwelling on threat and build long term infrastructure, education and international development.  The threats will melt away. 

• Investing for the long term based on a strategy dealing with challenges in education, communication and society value transitions.

• Developing government working modes that know how to strike a balance between long and short term actions. We must let them know what we think regularly by communicating with them. 

• Knowing that most cultures and societies in upheaval today are watching our national models and choosing whether or not to support them, ignore them or attack them. 

Let us hope they are up to the challenge

The world is crying for great leaders. They are out there, but I believe they are hesitant to step forward. It is worth examining why and what has happened to some recent United States great leaders.

This author watched for over 35 years in aerospace as the massive machine of government ground up men of integrity who had a true sense of leadership, purpose and service.

Unknown to the average American is the swinging door of military personnel who enter the defense industrial complex and then move on into government civil positions, lobbying activities or enterprises tapping their former service background for gain and greed.  Statesmanship and integrity have a difficult time surviving in that environment. The potential for waste, fraud and abuse is tremendous:

Star Creep and the Revolving Door

Oversight organizations such as POGO have highlighted many cases of abuse where former military personnel have been involved. The POGO data base at the link below has public record details regarding these type of occurrences:

Contractor Misconduct Data Base

Colin Powell had difficulties in a government role because real integrity fares poorly in the big machine and he made the mistake of trusting the NSA and the CIA, as well as Lockheed Martin, SAIC and CSC on Iraq war policy.

Dwight David Eisenhower was one of the last, great, ex-military presidents who led well in government. He warned us at the ink below about the big machine gathering power as he left office:

Eisenhower Farewell Address

Harry Truman could not have made the type of hard decisions and "Buck Stops Here" operations in this day in age. The machine would have crippled him.

Jimmy Carter had integrity but did not fare well because the huge gears of government were grinding away by then.

General Schwarzkopf demonstrated true leadership potential in the first Gulf War but very prudently moved away from the government he served as a military officer when he retired. He was a Vietnam vet who knew the machine too well..

I worked in Aerospace through 7 Administrations and all I saw was the machine getting bigger, grinding up leadership principles, young soldiers, creating new enemies and spewing foreign interventions and profits for large corporations.

Our hope for the future is that the massive machine of government will be re-sized small enough so a true leader with statesman qualities will be inclined to take the helm and steer it in a direction away from political stagnation while fostering a resumption of the premiere place the US has had in history. 

We found the STRATFOR Article by George Friedman exceptional in its analysis of the limited power of the President and the absolute necessity of anyone holding office to be capable of evolving coalitions effectively in governing domestically and on the world stage: 

U.S. Presidency Designed to Disappoint

Here are some select extracts: 
*** "The American presidency is designed to disappoint. Each candidate must promise things that are beyond his power to deliver. No candidate could expect to be elected by emphasizing how little power the office actually has and how voters should therefore expect little from him. So candidates promise great, transformative programs. What the winner actually can deliver depends upon what other institutions, nations and reality will allow him." 

*** " The power often ascribed to the U.S. presidency is overblown. But even so, people -- including leaders -- all over the world still take that power very seriously. They want to believe that someone is in control of what is happening. The thought that no one can control something as vast and complex as a country or the world is a frightening thought. Conspiracy theories offer this comfort, too, since they assume that while evil may govern the world, at least the world is governed."

Remembering Bob M. Kulzer August 25, 1939 - May 2, 2023

 

Bob M. Kulzer Obituary

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Have Americans Lost the Art Of Independent Thinking Or Are We Misinformed?

                                                     Image:  Mission to Learn dot com

Americans have grown acclimated to viewing the world through media sound bites, opinionated, biased news financed by money driven politicians and lobbying firms that spend enormous amounts to influence our opinions.

As a result, we have very little trust because the product of this buzz portends negative, stagnated government, growing like a money- eating beast and putting generations in hock with unwarranted wars through a focus on big corporations and big business.

Has independent thinking by researching a personal perspective become a lost art in our day in age?

Are we just too busy to develop a credible opinion of our own due to the fast pace our social values demand?

 Or are we misinformed?

THE VALUE OF TRUST

Trust is hard to establish in the modern era. We see very little true statesmanship in the good people we send to Washington who promptly become ground up in the huge machine there in order to survive. 

Communications and expectations are two vital elements in measuring trust.

To an extraordinary extent, the age in which we live is requiring us to redefine trust and the degree to which communication and expectations contribute to it.

Consider simpler times a few years past (say 50). Trust was necessary in many venues as a means of survival on a day-to-day basis. We relied on others extensively for our well being from our local store to our banker, from the policeman to the politician. And we knew them all better, we could reach out and touch them and we were not viewing them in sound bites and web sites, nor were we being bombarded with multiple forms of input to digest about them.

THE CHALLENGE

Mass marketing and communications has created expectations beyond reality in venues from romance web sites to building wealth and the role of nations.  We must come down to earth and become much 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 this is a personal responsibility. We must become involved, make prudent judgments and think for ourselves. 

THE ENVIRONMENT

Charles Lewis’ Book, published before the current administration, Looks at the “Lies Your President Told You and Other Mistruths”.  Perhaps he will update it to include our experiences in the last 2 years. 

 INTERVIEW WITH "THE PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT"

 

Author Charles Lewis

"The most disturbing discovery in my nine years of research and writing is this: leaders don't need to distort information and the truth. All they have to do now, in our fast-paced, short attention-span world, is just delay the truth, by years, months, and weeks. We still don't have key documents from the Iran-Contra scandal, the second biggest political scandal in the U.S. involving a White House since Watergate. That was a quarter century ago! Is that coincidental?  No." 

 Here’s the question you have to ask yourself before reading Charles Lewis’ new book, 

"935 Lies The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity" 

Are we as a country so jaded that we’ve come to accept untruths and    
misinformation from our government as just the cost of living in a democracy?

Lewis, who teaches journalism at American University and who founded  the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), does his best to remind us that we can and should expect more from our leaders. 935 Lies expands upon a CPI project that tracked the number of false statements that the President George W. Bush administration told in the two-year build up to the war in Iraq. The lies were aimed at persuading Americans that Iraq posed a threat to our national security.

Deceit, however, is bipartisan, as Lewis shows.

POGO: What is the big-picture effect of the public being repeatedly lied to by our leaders?

Lewis: Over time—many years which have become decades—persistent prevarications by those in power leads to cynicism, distrust and citizen disengagement. Which, you may have noticed, we substantially have had now for decades. Distrust and disapproval of Congress, for example, is at unprecedented, historic levels. Voter participation in elections has been woeful for years. Etc.

POGO: You describe the problem of misinformation as endemic to our society-- why did you choose to focus on lies told during the Bush administration? Of course they’ve continued since then.

Lewis: The "935 lies" mentioned in the Prologue of my book, regarding the false and erroneous statements by President  George W. Bush and either other top administration officials between 9/11/01 and 9/11/03, were compiled in a 380,000-word database and  published by the Center for Public Integrity in Iraq: The War Card in January 2008, near the five-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

That prompted me to examine the extent to which this had occurred before, over time, since approximately 1950 to today. And of course, the Johnson administration misrepresentations about the Gulf of Tonkin and the U.S. involvement in Vietnam more broadly, pre-dated the Bush/Iraq war by 40 years.

It also demonstrates the extent of what J. William Fulbright called "the arrogance of power" and the fact that lying by those in power is bipartisan. My book also examines untruths in the Obama administration and others, and "mortally consequential" lies by corporations dating back to the 1940s.

POGO: What should a leader’s punishment be for intentionally lying to the public? Should he lose his job—or worse?

Lewis: A leader's accountability should be directly related to the seriousness of what he/she has lied about. In real life, whether a leader should lose his job depends on the circumstances of the moment, and obviously, the political will of the people.

Unfortunately, we generally don't punish our politicians for lying, as we seem to have  a bifurcated, bipartisan perception of "truth" in the United States, to the extent that in one poll, four years after George W. Bush's second term had ended, more than 60 percent of Republicans still believed there were weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.

We, as a society, have become increasingly confused, unable to discern the difference between truth and falsehood. And as Hannah Arendt  and others have noted, that is a dangerous state of affairs, when we no longer can ascertain what is factual and what is not, who to believe  and who NOT to believe.

We live in a society that doesn't have "real-time truth" about those in power. How can a democracy predicated upon an informed citizenry and  self-government exist successfully if the people don't know the facts about those in power?

As some point, I hope the public decides to get angry and demand more truth, but getting there from here is an enormous specter to imagine.  First of all, there is no longer a "general public" but instead numerous  carefully studied, dissected electorally and commercially micro-publics  throughout the United States.

Marketing, advertising and high-tech wizardry by those in politics have rendered the concept of "the public"  less meaningful and media political advertising has become a huge source    of revenue for that industry and fanned the fires of fractious, vituperative partisanship during and between election cycles.

We are the only advanced democracy in the world without free air time for politicians during election time.

The only way the McCain-Feingold  campaign finance law could be passed by Congress years ago was when McCain and Feingold agreed to take out the "free air time for    politicians" section of their bill—then the National Association of Broadcasters and others backed off their opposition to the legislation and it passed, among other concessions made. The broadcasters now make a billion dollars per election cycle from political ads...

It is a grim situation which has been deteriorating in many ways for decades. And it will take years, decades, to ameliorate."

Charles Lewis’ New Book Looks at the Lies Your President Told You and Other Mistruths

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Thank You And 4 Gifts from Ken Larson At "Smalltofeds"

(Please click above image to enlarge)

Approaching two decades in volunteer small business consulting, I appreciate the many individuals who have contacted me for advice. You have come from several venues – through the Micro Mentor and SCORE Foundations, LinkedIn and other social media sites.  It has been a pleasure serving small business. 

____________________________________________________________________________

My work with you has kept me active in retirement, in touch with my profession and engaged in a continuous learning mode.

Please feel free to download any of the 4 free books pictured here, as well as other useful information at the BOX in the right margin of https://www.smalltofeds.com . You may also download the books free of charge from: https://smalltofeds.academia.edu/KenLarson

Although originally written some time ago, the small business contracting books contain live links in the Adobe text to updates for any given topic at the “Small To Feds” Blog. The books have been written at the request of my volunteer clients to cover topics in the order small business generally encounters them in government contracting.

My best wishes for success to you in your small business enterprises.  

 

Ken Larson

Despite Failures So Far, VA Inks New Oracle Cerner Health Records Deal

 

“MILITARY TIMES” By Leo Shane III  

“Veterans Affairs officials on announced an extension of their contract with Oracle Cerner to continue their embattled electronic health records overhaul, promising that new safeguards in the agreement will improve the existing software system’s performance.

The deal means five more years of partnership between the department and the digital information firm, both of which have come under scrutiny for work so far on the $16 billion project.”

________________________________________________________________________

“Veterans Affairs officials on Tuesday announced an extension of their contract with Oracle Cerner to continue their embattled electronic health records overhaul, promising that new safeguards in the agreement will improve the existing software system’s performance.

The deal means five more years of partnership between the department and the digital information firm, both of which have come under scrutiny for work so far on the $16 billion project. Only a few sites are using the new records system, despite five years of effort so far, and future rollouts have been postponed indefinitely until key improvements are made.

Glitches in the system have produced more than 150 cases of veterans suffering harm from medical record mistakes and shortfalls. Administrators reported last fall that the system failed to deliver more than 11,000 orders for specialty care, lab work and other services, all without alerting health care providers the orders had been lost.

Neil Evans, acting program executive director of VA’s health records project, acknowledged in a statement that “the system has not delivered for veterans or VA clinicians to date, but we are stopping at nothing to get this right.”

The contract announcement does not change the full halt on new deployments announced by the department last month. VA officials have said that they will not schedule any more system deployments “until VA is confident that the new [record system] is highly functioning at current sites and ready to deliver for veterans and VA clinicians.”

Getting military and veterans health records onto the same system has been a goal of federal administrators for decades. The Pentagon had some issues implementing the Oracle Cerner software but not as many setbacks as the VA.

The new agreement — five one-year contracts, to allow annual performance reviews of Oracle Cerner’s work — includes new accountability measures such as financial penalties for system down time and regular reporting of software shortfalls.

In a joint statement, House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Mike Bost, R-Ill., and Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., who leads the committee’s technology panel, said they remain skeptical that the new agreement will produce better results.

“The main questions we have about what will be different going forward remain unanswered,” they said. “This shorter-term contract is an encouraging first step, but veterans and taxpayers need more than a wink and a nod that the project will improve.”

Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Jon Tester was more optimistic following the news but added that “this is just the start of what’s needed to get this program working in a way deserving of our veterans and taxpayers.”

Oracle Cerner officials told House lawmakers during a May 9 hearing that they support the pause in rollouts and are committed to fixing the system problems in coming years. With the contract negotiations complete, that work will begin again at the five sites currently using the new records system.”

VA Records System Gamble

About Leo Shane III

Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

A Resident Veteran Comments – St. Paul Pioneer Press Investigative Article On Minnesota Veterans Home Hastings

 The Minnesota Veterans Home in Hastings on Friday, Mar. 3, 2023. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

On March 5, 2023 and subsequent articles, the St. Paul Pioneer Press has covered the investigation ongoing into the Minnesota Veterans Home Hastings (MVH).

I was somewhat shocked at the article and its lack of understanding of the root causes behind the symptoms they perceive to be observing. Having lived at this facility for over a decade I believe I can offer them some enlightenment.

_________________________________________________________________

I am a 76 year old resident who has resided at the Hastings Veterans Home (MVH) for 16 years. I arrived after serving two combat tours in Vietnam and 36 years with defense companies building weapons being used by our country today. I was treated for PTSD and Depression at the VA Hospital in Minneapolis and referred to the MVH for continued care.

During my stay at MVH I have volunteered to small business and to veterans of all ages. I work today with veterans returning from the Middle East.

Ken Larson

I have met and admired the vast majority of administration and staff at MVH during my stay. They work under difficult conditions. Many citizens make the mistake of thinking the state veterans homes are a part of the larger Veterans Administration. State veterans homes are not part of the VA.

Budgets are always tight at the State level because the state budget must be balanced by law. State budgets are NOT like the federal government which is now approaching a $32 Trillion National Debt.

A state domiciliary is subject to state policy makers. They are also overseen by the Federal VA because the VA provides a great deal of the funding necessary for operations. State funding contributes a solid share as well, and residents like me contribute the bulk of our social security and/or disability payments to run the facility.

Contributing to the oversight function, are the federal and state health departments, OSHA, HIPPA and other regulatory functionaries. Therein lies a major cause of much of what you see in the way of management issues reported by the Pioneer Press, both today and below in 2010:

Pioneer Press March 2023

Pionieer Press November 2010

Management and staff fear their government regulators, and as human beings, they yield to that fear in the way they treat each other in setting policy and managing their staffs. As in so many other functions involving government in our country, bureaucracy reigns supreme.

I have not found the care wanting here at MVH. I admire the front line administration, maintenance, housekeeping and food services staffs, the social workers and nurses who have sacrificed a great deal before and during COVID and those who will continue to do so.

Management and staff turnover under difficult health care issues in this country is to be expected. In my view the real issues are above the level of the facilities like the MVH domicile facility and at the pinnacle where “‘Policy Wonks Meet Bureaucracy”. This dynamic duo then follows the money trail to Hastings, and metes out their regulatory functions at a facility that is over a hundred years old, operating under lean budgets and staffing.

That facility and the other one like it in Minneapolis just happens to be GOLDEN to many veterans who are struggling to move on.

I suggest our Senators and Congressional Representatives, consider simplifying practices and focus on the human elements that cause stress resulting from regulatory pressures on people that simply wish to do their jobs.

The Pioneer Press article reports on symptoms, not real causes. Simplify and clarify policy and regulation, focus on the care of the worker and service to the veteran with clear, non-threatening and effective practices.

Above all. be aware of what stacks of regulation and power brokers can do to lower level participants.