Joseph Galloway, military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, a former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” writes today that Gen. Shinseki’s selection as Secretary of Veterans Affairs is Obama’s “smartest and best appointment he’s made so far.”
It sends a signal to millions of our veterans, and to the active-duty military, as well, that the serious business of caring for those who’ve borne the burdens of fighting our wars will now be in the right hands — the hands of a fine soldier who bears the scars of war himself.
That Obama chose Shinseki to reform the stumbling, bumbling, expensive bureaucracy that is the VA is an unmistakable signal that business is going to be anything but usual in the future.
Scripps Howard News Service political analyst Martin Schram writes today that the Department of Veterans Affairs needs to be renamed the “Department of Veterans Advocacy” in an effort to address one of the major sources of the agency’s failures: mindset.
There are two overriding reasons the VA has failed to provide many veterans with timely benefits and care they earned: Money and mindset. Perhaps you can find sufficient money. But despite your impressive authority, you will bump up against an adversarial mid-level mindset of some who function as if they work for a Department of Veterans’ Adversaries.
We need to change the VA’s name - call it the Department of Veterans’ Advocacy. Let all who work there understand that their job is to be our veterans’ advocates. Their job is to help each veteran assemble the facts of his or her case to determine the benefits they have earned - benefits that it is our duty, honor and privilege to pay to those who fought to keep us free.
