Blog post

IAVA Daily Brief 11.30.09
Posted by Terrell Frazier on November 26

 Here are some of today's top stories and happenings at IAVA.  Prefer to receive real-time updates about major stories and legislation that IAVA is tracking?  Follow us on Twitter @IAVAPressRoom or subscribe to receive the brief in your inbox each morning at www.iava.org/dailynewsbrief.

MUST READS

1) President Will Lay Out Specific Afghanistan Timetable Tuesday Night

President Obama plans to lay out a specific timetable for how he sees the American war in Afghanistan ultimately ending when he announces his decision Tuesday night to send more forces, senior administration officials said Sunday. Although the speech was still in draft form, the officials said the president wanted to use the address at the United States Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday night to convey his exit strategy and not just the immediate order to deploy roughly 30,000 more troops.

2) Military Divorces Edge Up as War Takes its Toll

Divorce rates among Army enlisted soldiers continued a gradual and steady increase for the seventh straight year with nearly 10,000 married G.I.s ending marriages during fiscal 2009, according Pentagon figures released Friday. Four percent of marriages among enlisted soldiers failed. The trend mirrors findings by Army battlefield researchers earlier this month that revealed a similar year-by-year increase in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq who complain of failing marriages. The evidence shows that long and multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan are damaging military marriages, says Lt. Col. Paul Bliese, a research psychologist.

3) Families of Military Suicides Seek White House Condolences

At a time when the Pentagon is trying to destigmatize mental health care in hopes of stemming the alarming rate of suicide among service members, the question of whether the survivors of military suicides deserve presidential recognition has taken on new significance — especially as families seek White House condolences. Under an unwritten policy that has existed at least since the Clinton administration, presidents have not sent letters to survivors of troops who took their own lives, even if it was at the war front, officials say. The roots of that policy, which has been passed from administration to administration via White House protocol officers, are murky and probably based in the view that suicide is not an honorable way to die, administration and military officials say.

AFGHANISTAN

Choppers are critical to the counterinsurgency campaign that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, is waging, but until spring there weren't enough of them, and even limited road surveillance gobbles time for choppers. By December, the US-led coalition will likely have nearly 10 times more choppers in the volatile south than it did nine months ago. Experts say that is still not nearly enough to patrol all the roads that US, Afghan and allied troops use, but it's a major improvement.

The Army’s Joint Readiness Training Center is re-creating the effort in Afghanistan for thousands of soldiers on a sprawling 100,000-acre complex in Louisiana. Each three-week session involves more than 2,000 support workers, from the writers and logistics experts who spend more than a year plotting scenarios, to the pyrotechnists who set explosions, to the hundreds of role players recruited from Louisiana towns or Afghan immigrant communities to populate nearly two dozen imitation villages — all to help soldiers become comfortable with the demands of a counterinsurgency.

The American-backed campaign to persuade legions of Taliban gunmen to stop fighting got under way recently. Meetings are part of a battlefield push to lure local fighters and commanders away from the Taliban by offering them jobs in development projects that Afghan tribal leaders help select, paid by the American military and the Afghan government.

IRAQ

In the past two weeks, there have been two attacks by men wearing Iraqi Army uniforms that have revived the specter of the death squads, stirring concern at the highest levels of the Iraqi and American commands. Before dawn on Wednesday, men dressed in Iraqi Army uniforms stormed a house in a small village north of Baghdad, rounded up six members of a family, including women and children, and killed them, Iraqi officials said. The attack occurred nine days after men dressed in Iraqi Army uniforms raided a house near the Abu Ghraib district of Baghdad Province and killed 13 civilians.

A day after Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, announced a virtual library of Iraq’s National Museum, the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki inaugurated its own YouTube channel. The first video, not surprisingly, featured Mr. Maliki himself, speaking before an Iraqi flag and a bouquet of roses. He pledged to use “new and advanced” media to reach Iraqis at home and abroad and “those who follow the issues of Iraq.”

A series of bombings in Iraq, just before a major Muslim holiday, killed at least six people and wounded 44 others on Thursday. The two deadliest attacks Thursday were in the towns of Iskandariya and Yousifiya, south of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said. Two bombs detonated in quick succession about 11 a.m. at a busy marketplace in Iskandariya, killing at least two people and wounding 28 others, including children, the official said. In the second attack, a parked car bomb exploded at a taxi and bus stop in Yousifiya. The blast killed at least two people and wounded 10 others, the official said. As Iraqis prepared to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, public places like markets were packed with shoppers. In Baghdad, three bombs attached to civilian vehicles caused casualties.

Hundreds of nontactical vehicles in Iraq could not be accounted for on paper during an audit of contracting records, according to a Defense Department Inspector General’s report released last week. In all, the report estimated 74 percent of the nontactical vehicles, such sedans, trucks, vans and sport utility vehicles bought or leased through the Government Services Administration were not properly accounted for.

MILITARY AFFAIRS

Some Regular Army enlisted soldiers soon will be told to either deploy or leave service as the Army phases out the controversial stop-loss program. Soldiers who do not re-enlist or extend will be subject to the rules of a new program approved by Army leaders in mid-November. Under the Enlisted Involuntary Early Separation Program, in some cases soldiers may be involuntarily separated before their expiration term of service, or ETS. As announced last spring, stop-loss restrictions will not apply to active-component units that deploy to Iraq, Afghanistan and other contingency areas after Jan. 1.

Former German Defense Minister and current Labor Minister Franz Josef Jung has resigned over a fatal Afghan airstrike ordered by German forces, the Labor Ministry said Friday. It comes just days after the head of the German army stepped down over the same incident. The resignation of Gen. Wolfgang Schneiderhan, the army's chief of staff, came after Germany's Bild newspaper reported he knew civilians could be killed when the Sept. 4 airstrike was ordered. The attack in the northern province of Kunduz killed at least 90 people, according to reports at the time. Bild said 142 people were killed. Local Afghan officials said at least half of the dead were civilians, and NATO acknowledged soon afterward that civilians had been killed.

To fight the Taliban, NATO is focusing on southern Afghanistan since that's where they're concentrated. But that doesn't mean all is quiet in the northern front. In fact, over the last two years, the Taliban have made a comeback in the northern province of Kunduz, where they can threaten a key NATO supply line. And it's not just locals. Fighters from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group linked to al-Qaida, have also been spotted and might have helped Taliban militants develop more sophisticated tactics.

INSIDE WASHINGTON

The leading Senate Democrat on military matters said Sunday that President Barack Obama's anticipated plan for significantly expanding U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan must show how those reinforcements will help increase the size of the Afghan security forces. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that more Afghan army and police are central to succeeding in the 8-year-old war and more U.S. trainers and equipment can help meet that goal.

Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says. The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Bin Laden's escape laid the foundation for today's reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says.

CONGRESSIONAL SCHEDULE

THE SENATE

The Senate will convene at 2:00 p.m.

SENATE FLOOR ACTIVITY of INTEREST

No issues today

COMMITTEE HEARINGS of INTEREST

No issues

THE HOUSE of  REPRESENTATIVES



The House will reconvene at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, December 2, 2009

HOUSE FLOOR ACTIVITY of INTEREST

No issues today

HOUSE COMMITTEE HEARINGS of  INTEREST



No issues today

FUTURE  HOUSE COMMITTEE HEARINGS of  INTEREST



December 2, 2009  Veterans’ Affairs Committee Hearing:  VA Health Care Funding: Appropriations to Programs  10:00 a.m.; 334 Cannon HOB

December 3, 2009  Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity Roundtable  1:00 p.m.; 334 Cannon HOB

A wide-range of views, positions, and publications are represented in these articles. These views, positions and publications are not endorsed by nor do they necessarily represent the views of IAVA