Author: By tom philpott Military Update

Concerned Veterans for America, a group of policy advocates funded by the billionaire Koch brothers that wants to shrink the size of federal bureaucracies including the Department of Veterans Affairs, appears to have won a major victory with President Donald Trump’s firing of David Shulkin as VA secretary. Trump announced by tweet he wants his…

VA Secretary David Shulkin suggests he favors expansion of Agent Orange-related health care and disability compensation to new categories of ailing veterans but that factors like cost, medical science and politics still stand in the way. Shulkin told the Senate VA Committee last week that he made recommendations to White House officials last year on…

The three military exchange services and Defense Commissary Agency would be merged into a single resale enterprise under a proposal backed by John Gibson II, the Defense Department’s new chief management officer. Gibson and a team tasked with reviewing military community services – base stores, recreation services, family support services and base schools – have…

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is concerned enough about strengthening the lethality of U.S. forces that he broke with tradition last month to impose a first-ever “universal retention policy” across the four service branches. For decades, the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force have been responsible for retention rules that dictate whether individuals get…

After two years of study and debate, the Department of Defense has made a policy change effective November to allow 16 million more honorably discharged veterans to shop online for discounted military exchange products. Peter K. Levine, acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, signed a memorandum Wednesday announcing the benefit expansion, effective Veterans…

The National Defense Authorization Act (S 2943) signed into law Dec. 23 orders an avalanche of changes to the Tricare healthcare benefit used by service members, retirees and their families. It also makes sweeping reforms to how the military direct-care system is organized and operates. The sheer number of changes and additional studies being mandated,…

Commission on Care leaders defended their 18-point treatment plan for what ails the VA health care system, including a controversial push to let veterans choose their own primary care doctors from new, integrated networks of VA and private-sector physicians. Answering critics who say they went too far or not far enough in proposing to transform…

More than 740,000 active-duty members and 176,000 drilling Reserve and National Guard personnel are expected to opt in to the new Blended Retirement System when the choice becomes available in 2018. The opt-in estimates are the product of a “dynamic retention” computer model to predict how personnel will react to a new retirement choice. The…

Over the past five years, since Republicans won control of the House, the Department of Veteran Affairs has been flogged publicly many times, often for allowing a mountain of backlogged disability compensation claims. As the backlog fell, lawmakers now are learning, they should have paid more attention to how much VA was spending on its…