Analysts Discuss the Military’s Treatment of Veterans

JIM LEHRER:

And the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks.

David, what's your analysis of what's going on? You heard what Dana just said and what the man from Salon.com just said.

DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times:

Well, I think, first, Gates is doing a good job. You can imagine what just happened, that the Army went into a defensive crouch. And some secretaries of defense — normally, the previous one — may have gone along with that defensive crouch, but Gates seems impatient with it, and he seems to be firing people left and right.

I saw him out on 395 firing people as I drove by. So, it is a sign of new leadership.

The deeper question of what causes it, which Mark Benjamin and others were talking about, and what Dana Priest was talking about, it seems to me there are a couple of things that one can surmise. One is the accounting system in this government is totally screwed up, on this, as in so many other things.

Priest was talking about the supplemental budget, not going in the real budget. We have so many gimmicks, it becomes hard to normally appreciate where the money is going, how accountable it is.

The Veterans Affairs has gotten a decent amount of money, 77 percent increase, as they'll quickly tell you. But how it's being accounted for, because it's all done with tricks and mirrors for budgetary reasons, it fuzzes up everything.

And the second thing, which I think underlines a lot of this, is that they didn't — when they realized they were going to have a much bigger war on their hands than they thought, I don't think anybody sat back and said, "What are the downstream effects of this going to be?" And the outpatient, and the brain injuries, and all that stuff was a downstream effect of a surprisingly big war.

JIM LEHRER:

Mark, some people have suggested that Bob Gates has now done away with no-fault government for a while in the United States. Is it that big a deal, do you think, what Gates has done?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist:

Well, I give him credit. I mean, he has stepped up and said, "The buck does stop here, and I want answers."

And one of the people that did get fired, Gen. Weightman, I thought gave us a view of what happened here. We're talking about troops, wounded warriors, who are going up to 18 months, in some cases, in this limbo-like status, that David has described, before they're determined whether, in fact, they can be returned to duty or they're going to be discharged, and when they're discharged, what kind of support and subsidy they will receive.

And he explained one of the reasons why this case — in the past, many of these people would have just been discharged, but they can't discharge them, because they don't have enough troops. It's that simple. They don't have enough troops.

They're having trouble, Jim, right now. They're having waivers on criminal records, on academic non-achievement to get people into the military. They had to keep these people in the military.

I mean, that's one of the — in addition to the bureaucratic maze that David has described, and incompetence, there was an imperative here to keep people in uniform, not to let them return to civilian life. That's an amazing statement about where we are as a people.

Gen. Weightman put it very bluntly. He said this is the longest war we have fought in this country without a draft, and it's true, since the Revolutionary War. And, you know, it is a long, long time.