I'm told sometime in the past month the Office of Management and Budget approved a six-page claim form that veterans use to apply for disability benefits, replacing a 23-page application that was so complex that only a bureaucrat could comprehend it.
The Veterans Affairs Department has yet to post the form for use on its Web site, which is replete with forms, but, as a public service, here it is.
Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, says the shorter form goes a long way toward reducing vets' paperwork burden when applying for benefits, but he would like to see a one-page form.
That's one of the best suggestions to come out of Wednesday's Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing on the post 9/11 GI bill.
The suggestion came not from the Veterans Affairs Department, but from Marco Reininger, an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and now a student at Columbia University in New York. He said VA could make it easy for vets to track the progress of their claims by posting a widget on its GI bill website.
He said this would help soothe the frustration that veterans experience when trying to determine the status of their benefit payments.
"If I can never predict when VA [will make] a payment to my school, it is difficult to account for what individual checks are covering my tuition and fees," Reininger told lawmakers. "We need a mechanism that would allow me to track my GI bill claim from the moment I file to the day when it actually pays."
VA should model itself after Amazon.com, he said. "I can track a book from an Amazon.com warehouse to my apartment," he said. "Why can't I get the same transparency from VA?"
In a sign of the times, the operators of unmanned aerial vehicle won the Air Force's 2010 Team of the Year award.
The service, in partnership with the Air Force Association, picked top NCOs who remotely operate sensors in UAVs flying over Iraq and Afghanistan and have superior technical expertise. They "attract the praise of their superiors and provide leadership and inspiration to others," a release said.
The winners are:
Master Sgt. John Allen, 3rd Special Operations Squadron at Cannon Air Force Base, N.M.
Master Sgt. Richard Jones, 78th Reconnaissance Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
Tech. Sgt. Ryan Carabajal, 111th RS at Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base, Houston, Texas
Senior Airman Abby Korovich, 17th RS at Creech Air Force Base, Nev.
Senior Airman Jon Turney, 29th Attack Squadron at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M.
The Defense, Labor and Veterans Affairs departments launched a Web site on Thursday that offers a comprehensive guide to benefits, employment, health care and family support information.
Much of the information on the new veterans National Resources Directory Web site already exists elsewhere on the 'Net, but it will serve as real handy guide for information that otherwise could take hours of searching to find.
The directory is a single point of access to a wealth of information from more than 10,000 sites operated by federal, state and local governments, and organizations offering services to veterans.
Ah, what a concept, state and local information for vets combined with information from VA, Defense and Labor.
I live in New Mexico, one of the 36 states whose drivers licenses will no longer qualify as identification for domestic air travel as of the New Year. That caused me to worry that I might never return from my holiday trip to Hawaii.
This meant I needed to renew my passport, a process I started the day after Thanksgiving, with a fear that the passport would not arrive before I left on vacation this month. The State Department Web site says it takes two to three weeks to process a passport application even with its expedited service, which I opted for.
Those concerns were alleviated when my wife and I received our passports on Dec. 7 via express mail. That's six business days (almost to the hour) from when we put them in the mail.
I considered this a miracle akin to the Internet, a testament to the Postal Service and the State Department.
Megan Mattson, a spokeswoman at State, told me that even though the department cautions the public that it can take two to three weeks to get a new passport with the expedited delivery option, it's not uncommon for it to take only a week.
Despite the Real ID Act's Jan. 1, 2010, deadline, which will make many drivers licenses in 36 states Unreal ID (unless the Department of Homeland Security extends the deadline), Mattson told me that the volume of passport applications this year is running about 2.7 million behind 2008's volume. State has issued 13.5 million passports in 2009 so far, compared with 16.2 million in 2008.
I'm thrilled to have my new passport but still miffed that I need to use one for domestic travel. That's a policy that was a hallmark of the old Soviet Union, and by today's standard, the Peoples Republic of China.
Since the United States started operations in Iraq, a small group of military women, known as Lionesses, has provided support to combat units, and the House Armed Services Committee thinks its time they received recognition and support from both the Defense Department and the Veterans Affairs Department.
The Lionesses were initially tapped to support culturally sensitive missions men could not perform, such as body searching Iraqi women.
Their mission has since evolved to support military civilian affairs operations in Iraqi cities, with a gentler touch than their male colleagues.
These women have made a real difference in Iraq, the committee said in its report on the fiscal 2010 Defense authorization bill, but they have had a hard time gaining official recognition for their work from either Defense or VA when they leave active duty.
The committee wants Defense to establish formal procedures to document the work these women perform and consider establishing a military Lioness specialty.
Although "hooah" is an Army term not used by the Air Force, in the case of Tech. Sgt. Darrell DeMotta, an Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controller I had the pleasure to meet this week at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M., the term definitely applies.
JTACs are Air Force grunts who call in and direct air strikes and medevac missions, serving with Army infantry units or Special Forces teams. DeMotta has done three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, hauling around a load that would make any infantryman really grunt: three radios, laser gizmos, a computer, body armor, canteens, weapons, and more.
Hero is an overused word, but it definitely applies to DeMotta. During a 2007 tour in Iraq, he was credited with saving the life of an Iraqi policeman shot by a sniper and dragged a soldier out of a house to safety after three of his team members were shot during a raid of a suspected terrorist cell. He then controlled helicopters and fighters while setting up a medical evacuation of injured soldiers.
His boss at the time, Msgt. Timothy Crusing, part of the 2nd Air Support Operations squadron, said DeMotta soldiered on despite the danger during that incident. "He never stopped controlling aircraft during the ordeal, despite the ground threat," he said. "It was an extraordinary act under the circumstances."
Last month DeMotta, a survivor of six attacks by improvised bombs, received a Bronze Star for exemplary service during his 2007 tour in Iraq while he was deployed at Kirtland, where at the moment he runs JTAC missions in cyberspace.
The first JTAC assigned to the Distributed Mission Operations Center, which is run by the 705th Combat Training Wing at Kirtland, DeMotta now deals with digits like a natural computer geek, helping to spearhead development and use of simulators that replicate the JTAC mission.
During a tour of the simulation facility, DeMotta displayed in-depth knowledge of not only the JTAC systems, but also all the aircraft systems, describing each in simple and understandable terms.
DeMotta is the kind of warrior that the public unfortunately rarely meets. And I consider it a privilege to have spent time in his company.
I turn 65 on Feb. 8 (e-cards welcome), and with some dread I went to the local Social Security Administration office here in the Original Las Vegas (as in New Mexico) to fill out my application for Medicare hospital benefits.
Thanks to some really good SSA technology and the able help of Frank Aragon, an SSA staffer here, guess what the total elapsed time it took to execute this transaction - as well as put in for a replacement SS card. Five minutes!
I think we should make this the benchmark for all citizen/government transactions.
