New Book Explores Military Acquisition After World War II

By John Valceanu

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON  – A new military book published by the Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense describes changes in military weapons systems acquisition during the 15 years following World War II.

“Rearming for the Cold War 1945-1960” by retired Air Force Col. Elliott V. Converse III is the first in a five-volume series of books focusing on the history of the acquisition of major weapons systems by the Defense Department. The book’s 766 pages contain a detailed examination of military acquisitions during the early years of the Cold War, and they are full of case studies, personality profiles, charts and photographs.

During a recent joint interview with AFPS and The Pentagon Channel, Converse said the book and its companion volumes were not written for historians. Rather the effort is “primarily aimed at the acquisition workforce, the people who do acquisition day-to-day and perform acquisition for their careers.”

It’s anticipated that defense policy decision makers would also gain something from the books, he added.

Converse earned a doctorate in history from Princeton University and served as the lead historian on the Defense Acquisition History Project team. During the joint interview, Converse said he was attracted to studying this “very dramatic” period of time.

“This was the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, Americans realized we might be vulnerable if they can put a satellite up there,” Converse said. “There was great concern that our weapons systems counter a threat like that. There was a lot of drama in the 1950s and 1940s.”

Following World War II, U.S. defense policy makers were convinced that the United States’ ability to maintain military supremacy rested on having superior technology, Converse said.

“One important thread that runs through the volume is the consensus that American leaders had at the end of World War II that the United States would seek security in the future by maintaining an advantage in the most technologically advanced weapons systems over any possible opponents,” he said. “They realized that the U.S. could not have an army as big as the Soviets or the Chinese or probably deploy as many systems as they could. So, the theory was that by having the most advanced systems, we’d be able to offset that advantage in terms numbers and equipment.”

That idea of the necessity of maintaining technological superiority to ensure national security affected how weapons systems were developed, produced and deployed, Converse said. It also determined how the Defense Department and the military services organized their acquisition efforts and led to changes in the acquisition workforce.

The book, he said, offers a prime example of how the United States’ perceived need to maintain an edge over its adversaries in advanced weapons technology affected the process of acquisition by its discussion of the acquisition strategy called “concurrency.” Using this approach, production activities would begin before the weapons system was fully developed and tested.

The strategy of concurrency “was in contrast to the way systems were developed before World War II,” Converse said, noting the pre-war system “was a sequential, deliberate system. You would design the weapon, you would develop the prototype, you would test it, you would produce it. All that would be done in series.

“By this new acquisition strategy,” he continued, “production activities began before development was completed. Sometimes, production contracts were let even before … an aircraft had ever flown its first flight. Prototypes, in terms of aircraft, were not generally developed. A new system was selected on the basis of a paper design competition.”

Concurrency was used on a limited basis during World War II, Converse said, and the Navy and Air Force tried to use the strategy after that war ended and before the Korean War started, attempting to speed up production by overlapping development and production. Once the Korean War began, he said, all the services adopted concurrency as an acquisition strategy.

“Its record was not very good during the Korean War,” Converse said. “A lot of the technologies needed for the advanced systems had not yet been developed, and some that had been developed were not proven sufficiently. Another problem was that the people defining requirements for new weapons systems often set requirements that were beyond the state of the art.”

In practice, he said, testing was often inadequate because of the haste to rush weapons systems out to the field, and they often discovered problems with the systems when they were fielded. Those problems frequently required that the systems had to be modified and changed, he added, which drove up cost and which meant that forces in the field still didn’t have systems that operated properly.

The problems associated with the strategy of concurrence were forgotten after the Korean War, Converse said, as the U.S. entered into an arms race with the Soviet Union to develop ballistic missile systems that could deliver nuclear warheads from continent to continent. Each of the services used concurrency in their acquisition programs to develop ballistic missiles, he said, and they encountered the same problems with concurrency that had been encountered during the Korean War. But the situation was now different.

“The difference was that these programs had the highest national priority, which meant that the program managers … all had generous budgets to get their jobs done,” Converse said. “They also had special authorities that exempted them from going through the different layers of bureaucratic approval necessary to get things done when they were developing their weapons systems. And these programs were great successes.”

Some of the systems were developed and deployed within four to five years which, according to Converse, was “an amazing amount of time for such advanced systems.” In the 1960s, he said, decision makers tended to overlook the problems associated with concurrency and it became the preferred acquisition method.

“Few people recognized that the reason the ballistic missile system program worked was that they had nearly unlimited funding and special authorities in those programs. Other programs did not have those, and that’s where problems with concurrency surfaced,” Converse said.

In response to those problems, by the 1970s the Defense Department went back to a more deliberate acquisitions strategy, Converse said.

“You didn’t go on the basis of paper designs. You would require two contractors, each to develop a prototype of the system. Then, those prototypes would be tested and, in theory, better decisions [would be] made,” he said.

Converse said understanding concurrency as an acquisition strategy during the Cold War is important because it addresses a central problem that still confronts the Defense Department.

“If your national strategy is to get security through having the most advanced technology, you have to deploy that technology rapidly and have it in the field so as always to maintain that edge over the opponent,” he said. “If that’s your strategy, then you have to find a way to insert advanced technology rapidly enough but at the same time to have it cost reasonably and overcome those problems I talked about before. That’s been a central dilemma.”

Since the 1950s, the United States has tried to find ways to maintain military technological superiority while dealing with the difficulty of rapidly fielding systems that might not yet be sufficiently developed or proven, Converse said, noting that’s “a problem that people working in the field today still face.”

Despite facing the same conundrum, Converse warned against trying to create exact analogies between current situations and those of the past.

“People have said that history does not repeat itself -- it rhymes,” Converse said. “You can’t draw exact lessons from the past because the situations are not the same. … The value of history is that by taking a look at the past you can see how your predecessors in this field addressed problems. … History tends to broaden your perspective.”

Converse presented his book May 10 to an audience in the Pentagon during the second installment of the DOD History Speaker Series.

He was joined for a panel discussion by several other authorities. Benjamin F. Cooling, a professor at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, set the book in the overall historical context of defense acquisition. Jacques S. Gansler, a former undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, offered his perspective on the book based on his experience managing DOD acquisition. Roy L. Wood, dean of the Defense Systems Management College, moderated the panel.

DOD Details Civilian Personnel Telework Changes

By Jim Garamone

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON  – Defense officials announced decisions designed to strengthen telework and make it more attractive to supervisors and employees, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for civilian personnel policy said here yesterday.

Paige Hinkle-Bowles said the changes to the telework program require DOD leaders to promote telework within their respective components.

In an interview with the Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service, Hinkle-Bowes said the changes look to overcome barriers that previously limited the use of the telework tool for defense managers.

The changes are far-reaching. All civilian positions in the department need to be marked as being eligible or not eligible for telework. “All employees need to be notified if they are eligible for telework in the position they are in,” Hinkle-Bowles said.

Also, any employee in a telework-eligible position who opts to telework must sign a telework agreement with the supervisor, and both the supervisor and employee need to attend training on the program. In the past, the program required only the employee to attend training.

The final big change is to incorporate how to include emergency and contingency operations into the telework policy and how to use telework in those operations, Hinkle-Bowles said.

In fact, the department has practiced keeping the government open in the face of possible threats ranging from a pandemic flu outbreak or natural disasters to localized emergencies such as snow storms.

“We would like telework to change a bit more than it has,” Hinkle-Bowles said. “A big part of the policy is to have the culture change so people understand that telework is really work, and employees are held accountable. Supervisors should have a way to hold those employees accountable and keep the work moving.”

The most recent data, from 2009, showed that about 5 percent of DOD employees teleworked. Hinkle-Bowles said she believes the trend is up, but 2012 statistics won’t be available from the Office of Personnel Management until this summer.

Government leaders are pushing the program. They see telework as a way to cut down commute times and relieve pressures in government offices. It’s also a quality-of-life issue that can be employed to attract and retain the best workers. The changes grew out of the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010.

Most office employees will qualify for the telework option. However, some employees, by the nature of their work, will not. Some show-stoppers include jobs requiring daily handling of classified materials, jobs requiring face-to-face interactions with customers, or jobs requiring face-to-face interactions with co-workers.

Still, “as long as the employee is doing the work from an alternate work site, it really should be transparent to the office and the customers,” Hinkle-Bowles said.

Changes Aim to Strengthen Military Health System

By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, March 2, 2012 – A proposed new governance structure will make the military health system more effective and produce savings, and the system’s 9.8 million beneficiaries worldwide will never miss an appointment, the Pentagon’s top health affairs official said.

In a Feb. 24 interview with the Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press service, Dr. Jonathan Woodson, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and director of the TRICARE Management Activity, discussed three governance reforms under way for the military health system.

Woodson, a vascular surgeon, said it’s been a transformative decade for the nation and the Defense Department.

“Our defense health program budget was about $19 billion in 2001, [and] this year’s budget is about $53 billion,” he said. “So we clearly need to not only focus on accessing quality care, but [also on] producing value for the amount of money we’re spending on health care.”

As the health care budget grows and the Defense Department’s top-line budget shrinks, Woodson added, “a natural tension is created in terms of being able to train, man and equip the force, yet provide for quality health care.” He said everything possible must be done to reduce costs in the military health care system before adjusting fees for medical services.

The effort began in June, Woodson said, when then-Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III established an internal task force to review the military health system’s governance. The task force reported back in September, evaluating health system governance options as well as options for the governance of multiservice medical markets and of the national capital region’s health system.

Based on the report and on consultations with the services’ top civilian and military leaders, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other senior Defense Department officials, the current deputy defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, now has directed that three reforms be instituted in the military health system.

One involves creating a defense health agency to take on the functions of the TRICARE Management Activity and assume responsibility for implementing shared services across the system. TRICARE is the civilian care component of the military health system.

“One of the things we looked at is whether new MHS governance could produce greater efficiencies and savings,” Woodson said. The main structure being proposed, called the Defense Health Agency, “looks to do a better job administering what we call shared services,” he added.

“Right now we have essentially three administrative structures -- the Army, Navy and Air Force -- that run health services,” the Defense Department’s top doctor explained. “The thought is that we would combine functions that are common to the services, and thereby produce savings.”

He cited health information technology as an example, noting that it is extraordinarily costly and is common to all of the services. “There [is] no reason why the services should develop their own products,” Woodson said. “This can be done in a shared fashion and produce savings.” Other common areas, he added, are medical education for physicians, nurses, medics and pharmacists, and medical logistics.

Another proposed reform will establish market managers for multiservice medical markets, except for the national capital region. The managers’ enhanced authorities will allow them to create and sustain a cost-effective, coordinated and high-quality health care system, Woodson said.

The third reform involves transferring responsibility for running military treatment facilities in and around Washington, D.C. -- including Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland and Fort Belvoir Community Hospital in Virginia -- to a national capital region directorate within the new Defense Health Agency.

Carter also is establishing a planning team, Woodson said, with leadership nominated by the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness and Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, to ensure timely implementation of the governance plan after it’s reviewed -- first by the Government Accountability Office and then by Congress.

Each organization has more than 100 days to review the proposal, so changes in the medical system’s governance, if approved, probably would not be instituted until early next year, Woodson said.

“The whole idea is to look forward,” he said, “understanding that we need to bend the curve of the health care budget to look at a governance structure that makes us more effective, more agile and adds value to the services and their ability to deliver high-quality care.”

Commandant: Coast Guard’s Wide-ranging Mission Set Increasing

By Karen Parrish
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON  – If something touches the nation’s waters, the “multi-mission” Coast Guard probably has some responsibility for it, according to that service’s only four-star officer.

Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Robert J. Papp Jr. told the Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service the complex mission set has evolved over the service’s 221-year history, since Congress in 1790 authorized the building of 10 vessels to enforce federal tariff laws and prevent smuggling.

“We were the maritime force of the nation when the nation couldn’t afford a Navy,” Papp said, noting the Coast Guard predates the Navy by four years. Over time, he added, the Coast Guard has amassed a wide range of responsibilities: stopping drugs, saving lives, screening and inspecting vessels, maintaining aids to navigation, enforcing fisheries laws and pollution standards, and even searching foreign ports for sources of harm to the United States.

The admiral said he sums up the service’s 11 statutory missions this way: “We protect those who use the sea, we protect the nation against threats from the sea, and we protect the sea itself.”

The admiral said to meet those missions, a “good Coastie” needs specific qualities, some of which – such as patriotism and selfless service -- are common to service members of all branches. The defining characteristic for Coast Guardsmen, he added, is a love and understanding of the sea in its turbulent moods.

“You have to understand that everything that occurs on the ocean … is multiplied in terms of difficulty, particularly when you’re doing it at night or in the midst of a storm,” Papp said. “And that’s when the Coast Guard gets its work done.”

Looping back to the mission mix, the commandant said adaptability is the other Coast Guard essential.

“Rather than be able to focus just on defense, or just on law enforcement, a Coast Guardsman’s got to be versatile … and have some level of knowledge and competency in a broad range of activities,” he explained.

The admiral noted a Coast Guard cutter crew’s January rescue of six Iranian mariners in waters off Iraq highlights one of the service’s lesser-known efforts.

“A lot of people say, ‘You’re the Coast Guard; what are you doing over there?’” he noted. “[But] it’s not just U.S. coasts. There are a lot of coasts around the world … [and] we offer the United States options in terms of national security.”

Papp said most people don’t realize the Coast Guard has operated in the northern Arabian Gulf for nine years, filling “a niche capability for the Department of Defense that Central Command needed.”

Iraq has offshore oil platforms that produce 90 percent of the country’s wealth, but a territorial dispute between Iraq and Iran means those platforms are under constant threat, he explained. Coast Guard patrol boats, along with Navy patrol craft, provide security for those platforms under command of the Coast Guard’s Patrol Forces for Southwest Asia, he said.

“That’s just one example of Coast Guard people overseas,” he said.

The Coast Guard pushes the boundaries of the United States’ maritime security, the commandant said, because port security begins where ships that end up in U.S. ports start out -- places like Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and Singapore.

Papp said since 9/11, the Coast Guard –- as the nation’s representative to the United Nations International Maritime Organization -- has pushed for treaties to help in increasing America’s port security.

“We now are able to send inspectors overseas to verify the security procedures in the ports of countries that wish to trade with the United States,” he said. That effort involves a couple of dozen U.S.-based traveling inspectors and small Coast Guard commands, each also about two dozen strong, in Europe and the Far East.

“That is really what I view as a low-cost effort … to help provide security,” Papp said.

U.S. ports are the other end of the Coast Guard’s layered port security.

“We’ve done a great job over the last 10 years in restoring and rebuilding our boat fleet in the ports, repopulating our Coast Guard stations and sectors, and creating something we call deployable specialized forces … which are basically [special weapons and tactics] teams afloat,” he said.

Papp said he worries about maritime security’s “middle layer” -- vast expanses of ocean.

“Our country needs to have a persistent presence to intercept any identified threats that might be coming toward the United States,” he said. “That’s really our weak point right now.”

High-endurance ships that can stay on station and survive the weather are critical to that middle range, he said, and the large Coast Guard cutters built to provide that presence are now more than 40 years old.

“They’re falling apart, they’re very expensive to maintain, and we need to be about the process of getting those rebuilt,” Papp said.

The constricting federal budget will make that “very difficult,” he acknowledged.

“We’ve always liked to consider ourselves a lean and agile force,” the commandant said. “But … because people keep pushing responsibilities to [us,] [we] end up doing more with less, which is something that’s cursed us over the years.”

The Coast Guard’s increased missions are within the service’s capabilities, but not its funding, Papp said.

“Unless somebody’s going to infuse massive amounts of money into the Coast Guard budget, we can’t handle this on our own,” the admiral said. “We’ll do the best we can with the resources we have, and I will identify the resources that are needed for our country, but then we’ve got to come up with an all-of-government solution.”

The Coast Guard has worked hard since 9/11 to build its uniformed strength back to what it was in 1990, Papp said. “But we’ve taken on a whole lot more responsibilities over the last 10 years as well,” he added.

Officials: Women Can Suffer Same Deployment Ills as Men

By Terri Moon Cronk
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON  – It once was thought that servicewomen neither were exposed to the same combat situations as men nor developed the same psychological injuries. But officials now recognize otherwise.

“With the type of combat we’re in now, … it’s probably the only place where men and women really are equal,” therapist Jeanine Aversa says in “The Long Road Home,” this month’s installment of the Pentagon Channel series “Recon.”

The segment made its debuted on the Pentagon Channel yesterday and will run through February. Officials estimate that the percentage of women in the military has doubled in the past 30 years. But that increase, the “Recon” segment noted, has come with a rise in problems such as homelessness, drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder among female veterans.

The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments work together to address service members’ physical, mental and emotional injuries, including those of women, so officials say it’s now easier for female veterans to ask for help.

Kate McGraw, acting deputy director for the psychological health, clinical standards of care at the Defense Centers for Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., said a “huge influx” of congressional funding and Defense Department support on the issues facing female veterans have helped address psychological health and traumatic brain injury.

“Because there are more people deploying and the frequency has increased over time,” McGraw said, “we’re also seeing an increase in support for the effects of deployment.”

Focus groups, growing numbers of support groups and a mental health anti-stigma campaign are part of the DOD and VA support for female veterans, she said.

Battling the stigma of seeking mental health counseling also has remained a concern among military leaders, McGraw noted. Some service members don’t seek help, she explained, because they believe doing so could hurt their careers.

“The fears don’t necessarily have a basis,” she said. “So this is an attempt to try to de-stigmatize those fears.”

Peculiar to women is an apparent higher rate of “co-occurrence” of PTSD and depression when compared with men after returning from deployment, McGraw said. And other behaviors also can play a part in women’s lives, she said.

“Women tend to have a higher incidence of binge drinking … and a higher incidence of eating disorder behavior … as compared to males,” McGraw said, citing recent literature on studies conducted during the past five years.

Women made up only seven-tenths of 1 percent of the military when now-retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught entered service in 1957. Although her active-duty experience was nothing like what today’s women service members have undergone in Iraq and in Afghanistan, she said, she emphasized that many more doors are open to women in the military now than before.

“But that progress has come with a price,” she said.

Veteran Jen Crane knows about that price. She began to have panic attacks while searching for work after she left the military. She couldn’t continue her military job as a paralegal in the civilian sector, so she took a bartending job. There, she was introduced to cocaine. She said it brought her anxiety down and made her social.

Eventually, however, Crane’s penchant for drugs nearly cost her everything.

“Because I was using, [I was told to] get help. I was a soldier, a warrior. I can handle anything,” she said she believed. “I felt like a monster.”

Crane turned to prostitution to support her drug habit, and became homeless and broke. As her situation spiraled downward, she decided to take her life.

“I was going to do it with drugs, because it was going to be slow and painful. That’s what I felt like I deserved,” she said. But before she could act on her plan, police arrested her for drug possession.

Crane went to court, and began receiving counseling from Aversa. With support from her therapist, the courts and her family, today she is married, has a child and is the national spokeswoman for a nonprofit organization, traveling around the country to tell her story.

Experiences like Crane’s are helping to change the care female veterans receive. “We’re undergoing a culture change within the Department of Veterans Affairs,” Patricia Hayes, the VA’s chief consultant on women’s health, told “Recon.”

VA estimates that 6,500 female veterans are homeless and live on the nation’s streets -- double the number from 10 years ago. VA also reported that one in five women veterans reported military sexual trauma during their military service, and the number of women with PTSD is increasing.

The wartime roles for servicewomen have changed because of their exposure to combat today,” Hayes said. Women were close to bombings in Vietnam, but not like in Iraq and Afghanistan, she said, which have involved carrying an M-16 rifle and being alert for roadside bombs.

Women need time to adjust after returning home, Hayes said.

“They need time to work through [what] they’ve been exposed to,” she added. “A lot of women say they’re thrust right back into family life. They tell us, ‘The laundry is piled up.’”

McGraw outlined signs that someone is struggling with readjustment issues. She cited symptoms such as the inability to get a good quality sleep, nightmares, or the feeling of reliving events from a deployment when awake, disturbing dreams about deployment events, changes in mood, irritability feeling increasingly on edge or keyed up, or getting startled easily.

Veteran Genevieve Chase, who suffered a traumatic head injury after the vehicle she was riding in exploded, said told “Recon” that in spite of the struggles women try to overcome, their patriotism remains intact.

“Even the women who are trying to get on their feet or have been struggling through military sexual trauma, substance abuse, suicide or any major issue, … when they come home, every single one of them is still proud of their service,” Chase said.

The Pentagon Channel’s “Recon” series is a monthly, 30-minute broadcast that provides an in-depth look at operations, missions, military events, history and other subjects highlighting the accomplishments of U.S. military men and women. All “Recon” programs are posted on the Pentagon Channel’s website.

DOD Urges Troops, Civilians to Watch for Human Trafficking

By Lisa Daniel
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON  – From the nightclub waitress you meet on deployment to the young man who launders your uniform at the drycleaners back home, Defense Department officials are warning military members and civilians to be on the lookout for possible victims of human trafficking.

The request for vigilance is part of an effort throughout the federal government to stop human trafficking, a form of modern slavery that forces millions of men, women and children from every country of the world into forced labor, prostitution, involuntary servitude and debt bondage, according to DOD and State Department officials. Some 2 million children are believed to move through the global sex trade each year, according to the State Department’s annual assessment on human trafficking.

The United Nations, the United States and other governments in the past decade have passed stricter laws and allocated more resources in the fight against human trafficking, and President Barack Obama declared January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.

In the government’s interagency approach toward prevention, prosecution and protection involving human trafficking, the Defense Department’s role is one of prevention, according to John F. Awtrey, DOD’s director of law enforcement policy and support, part of the department’s personnel and readiness office.

Human trafficking is a worldwide phenomenon -- No. 3 behind drugs and weapons, Awtrey said in a Jan. 31 interview with the Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service.

“While traffic victims generally come from the poor places in the world, their destination … is all over the world,” Awtrey said. “A lot of countries where our service members are deployed have evidence of a lot of trafficking, and it’s here in the United States as well.”

DOD’s role primarily is of prevention and, specifically, education so that service members and civilian employees can report suspicious activity, Awtrey said.

“We don’t want our service members to be inadvertent supporters of trafficking,” he said. “It’s a crime; it’s a criminal business enterprise. And the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who say, ‘Well, I just go there to get some drinks,’ if it’s a place where the women working in there have been trafficked and are being held against their will, then you’re supporting that business.”

The Defense Department began training all service members and civilians on indicators of human trafficking after some service members were found in 2004 to be patronizing businesses in Korea involved in trafficking women from Russia and the Philippines, Awtrey said.

Since then, the Uniform Code of Military Justice has made it illegal for service members to visit brothels -- the main business involved in human trafficking, Awtrey said. Other businesses common to human trafficking are nightclubs and bars, restaurants, spas, nail salons and dry cleaners, as well as domestic work in people’s homes.

Evidence of human trafficking can be hard to spot, Awtrey acknowledged. “It takes people using their sixth sense to say ‘Something isn’t right here,’” he said.

A high turnover of young workers and an inordinate amount of private security are indications, he added.

“If you see something that’s odd, … if there seems to be too much security, … if you’re in the middle of America or you’re downtown in Germany … and there are people [in a restaurant] that look like guards, those guards are there to keep the workers from talking to you about something they shouldn’t, or from escaping,” Awtrey said.

It was that kind of vigilance from an employee at Fort Campbell, Ky., that allowed the FBI to break up a human trafficking ring in the surrounding community, Awtrey said. The worker frequented a Chinese restaurant off base in Tennessee about once a month and noticed every time he was there, the staff -- all young -- was new. His hunch was right.

“That’s part of trafficking -- that they never keep people in the same place for long,” Awtrey said. “In human trafficking, unlike with drugs and weapons, people can be sold over and over again. They are a reusable commodity, unfortunately.”

Human trafficking usually occurs not on military installations, but in the surrounding communities. The exception has been overseas, where it was found among subcontractors in Iraq who brought in foreign workers, confiscated their passports, and paid them far below what they were promised, Awtrey said. “We came down hard in Iraq” to correct the problem, he said, but it requires constant vigilance.

“It sounds simple enough sitting around a room at the Pentagon, but making sure it happens on the ground [in theater] is another story,” he said.

Suspected human trafficking should be reported up the military chain of command, to local authorities, or to the nonprofit National Human Trafficking Resource Center at 1-888-3737-888.

Battaglia Calls Reducing Suicides a Top Priority

By Karen Parrish
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12, 2011 – Military leaders are committed to reducing suicides in the ranks, Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Bryan B. Battaglia, the Defense Department’s top enlisted leader, said here Dec. 9.

Battaglia, senior enlisted advisor to Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke with Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service reporters after the recent release of a report on military suicides by the Center for a New American Security.

The report concludes that suicide among service members and veterans challenges the health of America’s all-volunteer force. From 2005 to 2010, service members took their own lives at a rate of about one every 36 hours, according to the report. It also states that while only 1 percent of Americans have served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, former service members represent 20 percent of suicides in the United States. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates 18 veterans die by suicide each day.

“Whether it be [a suicide] every 80 minutes or one every 80 weeks, one is obviously one too many,” Battaglia said. “I’m committed to continuing and exhausting all efforts in order to reduce suicide across the entire total force.”

Military leaders in all the services are committed to reducing suicides, Battaglia said.

“With regards to education, engagement, intervention -- when a service member is feeling down or even possibly falling down, [leaders] need to engage, and they are,” Battaglia noted. “When a service member or family member is struggling, they need to intervene. And they are. Suicide is a total-force issue, and we’re going to continue to work hard in order to make it a total-force solution.”

Since 2000, the military has implemented several initiatives designed to identify those service members at risk for suicide, the sergeant major said.

“We enabled some … tracking methods, to help us better understand suicide; we built some resiliency programs into our system,” he said. “Total Force Fitness, for example, is a program that provides families an enriched factor of resiliency [and] builds toughness.”

Total Force Fitness, a series of best practices to help families build resilience, has gained momentum over the past few years and “has, will and can” help service members, veterans and families to build resilience, Battaglia said.

The sergeant major said commanders and front-line leaders up and down the chain of command must continue to educate and engage service members and family members struggling with weighty personal challenges.

“It’s important for that individual service member to know that there’s no problem so serious … that someone has to decide to take [their] life,” Battaglia said. “We can help solve the problem together.”

Convincing someone suffering from suicidal thoughts to seek help is “a big step,” he acknowledged, both within the military and across society as a whole.

“We have some of the best mental health providers and doctors that the country has to offer,” he added. “They work around-the-clock in providing care and compassion [and] treatment for service members and families.”

Leaders can help people gain the courage to take the first step toward seeking help, Battaglia noted.

“A lot of responsibility lies on the commander for establishing and maintaining a [positive command] climate, [but] all of that commander’s subordinate leaders share a similar responsibility … all in support of the mission and welfare of that organization,” he said.

Battaglia said one important point he wants to share with service members who are struggling with personal issues is that help always is “a fingertip away” -- pushing the buttons on a phone or knocking on a door can be the first step to a better life.

“All of our troops know this -- we care,” he said. “Our men and women have chosen to do what 99 percent of their societal peer group chose not to -- and that’s to serve in uniform as valued members of our armed forces.”

DOD and the VA are also working to reach the veteran population to help those at risk, Battaglia said, while the growing number of American companies seeking to hire veterans can help former service members find stability.

“Sooner or later we’re all going to leave uniform,” he said. “Employment and a good source of income certainly are firm ways to establish a solid lifestyle.”

Veterans are still part of the total force, and “help for them, again, is only a fingertip away,” the sergeant major said.