This editorial will appear in Thursday’s print edition.

Is the Army making it hard for many of its more valuable Reserve officers to resign?

It sure looks that way. A process that is supposed to take about eight weeks is being drawn out – in some cases by up to two years. That’s creating real difficulties for many soldiers, forcing them to put personal decisions like marriage and higher education on hold while the military gets its act together.

The problem is so widespread, according to a spokesman for the GI Rights Hotline, that it seems like a deliberate strategy of delay to so frustrate officers that they will give up and stay in the Reserves. Others say much of the problem is due to the fact that many Reserve supervisors have full-time civilian jobs that interfere with their administrative duties. Read more »

This editorial will appear in Thursday’s print edition.

The way Madigan Army Medical Center treated Oregon’s 41st National Guard Brigade last year was unacceptable, the Army admits, and changes have been made to address the problem.

It just won’t say what those changes are. According to the Army, that information – as well as details about the investigation – are classified.

Talk about unacceptable.

It’s understandable that privacy issues might be involved, but that can be handled by redacting names. Government entities do that all the time. Another reason the Army gives for keeping the information secret is that it pertains to quality assurance – which sounds like an awfully broad and convenient classification.
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This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

The prosecution of war crimes at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Afghanistan promises to become one of the Army’s most honorable episodes – if it focuses as much attention on commanders as it has on enlisted soldiers.

The trials and hearings at Joint Base Lewis-McChord have revealed an attitude of intolerance of atrocities and criminal behavior that might have been dismissed as the cost of doing business in previous wars. Last week’s sentencing of one defendant, Spc. Jeremy Morlock, shows how tough the Army has gotten.

Morlock pleaded guilty to three counts …

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This editorial will appear in Thursday’s print edition.

Here’s a mind-boggling fact from a Johns Hopkins University researcher: Nearly a third of the military’s medical evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2007 were due to musculoskeletal, connective tissue or spinal injuries – more than twice the number of evacuations resulting from combat wounds.

Any soldier could suggest a reason for that: the sheer weight of all the gear they have to carry around.

Although the Army Science Board recommends that soldiers carry no more than 50 pounds, a 2003 Army study found that on extended foot patrols, they carry an average load of 87 to 127 pounds. This is often under hot, grueling conditions in mountainous terrain.

Little wonder that soldiers who haven’t hit their late 20s yet are experiencing degenerative arthritis, cervical strains and other conditions.
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This editorial will appear in Wednesday’s print edition.

Drivers stuck in the increasingly heavy traffic around Joint Base Lewis-McChord can take some comfort from a new report commissioned by Congress. It not only recognizes their pain, it suggests ways to alleviate it.

Most prominently, the National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board urges Congress to move quickly to fund road improvements in communities most affected by expansions at military installations – including JBLM – either by special appropriations or by reallocating unused stimulus funds. We second that recommendation.

Much of that new traffic on Interstate 5 near JBLM is a result of the military implementing the base closure and realignment plan (BRAC) approved by Congress in 2005 – which is taking units from bases scheduled for closure and distributing them to 18 others that are expanding. Read more »

This editorial will appear in Tuesday’s print edition.

Much is in dispute in the John Towery affair, the case of the Army employee who spied on local antiwar protesters under a false name.

Here’s a fact that is not in dispute, according to recently released records: The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department used a confidential informant to penetrate the ranks of South Sound antiwar protesters and provide detailed information about them – including their Social Security numbers, in some cases. That information was shared with other local law enforcement agencies, including the Tacoma Police Department.

Then things get a little fuzzy.

The informant was Towery, then an employee of Joint Base Lewis-McChord’s Force Protection Division, which provides support for local law enforcement and security operations. Towery’s Army supervisor was aware that he was spying on the protesters and had approved the informant relationship with Pierce County. Read more »

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

Julian Assange, the chief of WikiLeaks, is a pirate willing to endanger people’s lives with mass releases of secret U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic documents.

But he’s no worse than whoever stole those documents in the first place. Suspicion has settled on Pfc. Bradley Manning, an unhappy 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst, who’s been arrested and charged with downloading thousands of highly sensitive and classified messages while deployed in Iraq.

Does the U.S. Army really give low-ranking soldiers in their early 20s access to secret communiqués whose exposure could threaten American foreign policy? The Defense Department now promises to track users of its information systems the same way credit card companies track card-users to detect fraud. It seems that MasterCard has a better handle on computer security than the Pentagon.

So far, news accounts of the leaked diplomatic messages suggest there are no outright bombshells among them. Like previously leaked dispatches and reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they mostly filled in the details of a larger picture already known to the public.

It comes as no surprise, for example, that Hamid Karzai’s brother is corrupt, Arab leaders are terrified of Iran’s nuclear program, America has been unable to keep Iranian weapons from reaching Hezbollah in Lebanan and al-Qaida continues to receive enormous funds from Saudi donors.

Some of the messages are downright comical. The Obama administration is depicted as begging and bribing foreign countries to take Guantanamo detainees of its hands. Slovenia was offered a visit with Obama. Belgium was told that taking more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”
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This editorial will appear in Wednesday’s print edition.

The Army has a battle on the horizon – but it’s on the home front, not in a war zone.

As U.S. forces leave Iraq and eventually also draw down in Afghanistan, the Army will have to confront a problem it’s put off for years: recruiting standards. Army leadership should already be planning their strategy.

In order to get enough recruits for fighting on two fronts, the Army chose to relax its standards – taking many enlistees who in years past wouldn’t have been accepted, ones with histories of drug use and other problems. In fact, an Army report released in July concludes that almost 20 percent of the soldiers who entered the Army since 2004 would not have been eligible for entry before. That’s nearly one in five.

Put people who already have problems into stressful situations – like extended, repeated deployments to a war zone – and it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see higher suicide rates, drug use and serious lapses in discipline.
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