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Pentagon, VA Make Progress in Breaking Medical Records Logjam: Carter
Mar 04, 2016 | Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Thursday that his efforts to bring in top talent from Silicon Valley were making progress in solving one of the Pentagon's long-standing problems -- the integration of military service records with the Veterans Administration.
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Ailing Blue Water Veterans Search for Agent Orange Evidence
Mar 05, 2016 | During the Vietnam War, hundreds of US Navy ships crossed into Vietnam's rivers or sent crew members ashore, possibly exposing their sailors to the toxic herbicide Agent Orange. But more than 40 years after the war's end, the US government doesn't have a full accounting of which ships traveled where, adding hurdles and delays for sick Navy veterans seeking compensation.
Pentagon, VA Make Progress in Breaking Medical Records Logjam: Carter
Mar 04, 2016 | Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Thursday that his efforts to bring in top talent from Silicon Valley were making progress in solving one of the Pentagon's long-standing problems -- the integration of military service records with the Veterans Administration.
Carter said that Chris Lynch, the new head of Defense Digital Services at the Defense Department, had "solved some important problems for us" by bringing coders and other experts with him "for what we call a tour of duty" on a temporary basis at the Pentagon. One of the problems Lynch, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former Microsoft executive, has worked on was improving data sharing in the department "to make sure our veterans get access to their benefits," Carter said. "Chris turned the whole thing around in a couple of weeks." The records transfer issue has plagued both the VA and Defense Department for years. In 2013, the VA and the department gave up on their joint strategy to build a single, integrated record. The Pentagon later decided to purchase a commercial off-the-shelf system by awarding a $4.3 billion contract to a vendor team led by Leidos last year.
Carter spoke at a Microsoft breakfast in Seattle towards the end of a week-long West Coast trip, his third to Silicon Valley, to talk up partnerships between the department and the tech community. On Wednesday, Carter announced that he would be setting up a Defense Innovation Advisory Board whose chairman would be Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Alphabet, Google's parent company. The board will be similar in concept to the Defense Business Board, which advises the department on best business practices, but will instead "inform DoD culture, organization and processes with feedback from top tech innovators," according to a statement.
The board will not involve itself in strategy issues and military operations but will instead focus on "technology alternatives, streamlined project management processes and approaches -- all with the goal of identifying quick solutions to DoD problems," the statement said. Carter said Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, would join with him in selecting 12 other members of the new board. The board members were expected to be individuals who had "excelled at identifying and adopting new technology concepts," the statement said. Essentially, Schmidt was being brought into the Pentagon "to advise me on how to remain innovative" in cybersecurity and stay ahead of potential adversaries, Carter said, and also to "build bridges" to the tech community.
Pentagon, VA Make Progress in Breaking Medical Records Logjam: Carter | Military.com
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Ailing Blue Water Veterans Search for Agent Orange Evidence
Mar 05, 2016 | During the Vietnam War, hundreds of US Navy ships crossed into Vietnam's rivers or sent crew members ashore, possibly exposing their sailors to the toxic herbicide Agent Orange. But more than 40 years after the war's end, the US government doesn't have a full accounting of which ships traveled where, adding hurdles and delays for sick Navy veterans seeking compensation.
The Navy could find out where each of its ships operated during the war, but it hasn't. The US Department of Veteran's Affairs says it won't either, instead choosing to research ship locations on a case-by-case basis, an extra step that veterans say can add months -- even years -- to an already cumbersome claims process. Bills that would have forced the Navy to create a comprehensive list have failed in Congress.
As a result, many ailing vets, in a frustrating race against time as they battle cancer or other life-threatening diseases, have taken it upon themselves to prove their ships served in areas where Agent Orange was sprayed. That often means locating and sifting through stacks of deck logs, finding former shipmates who can attest to their movements, or tracking down a ship's command history from the Navy's historical archive. "It's hell," said Ed Marciniak, of Pensacola, Fla., who served aboard the USS Jamestown during the war. "The Navy should be going to the VA and telling them, 'This is how people got aboard the ship, this is where they got off, this is how they operated.' Instead, they put that burden on old, sick, dying veterans, or worse -- their widows."
The aircraft carrier USS Bennington is one of the Navy's "blue water" ships that have been added to VA's list of warships presumed to have been exposed to Agent Orange
Some 2.6 million Vietnam veterans are thought to have been exposed to -- and possibly harmed by -- Agent Orange, which the US military used to defoliate dense forests, making it easier to spot enemy troops. But vets are only eligible for VA compensation if they went on land -- earning a status called "boots on the ground" -- or if their ships entered Vietnam's rivers, however briefly. The VA says veterans aren't required to prove where their ships patrolled: "Veterans simply need to state approximately when and where they were in Vietnam waterways or went ashore, and the name of the vessel they were aboard, and VA will obtain the official Navy records necessary to substantiate the claimed service," VA spokesman Randal Noller wrote in an email.
Once the VA has that documentation, the vessel is added to a list of ships eligible for compensation, streamlining future claims from other crewmembers. But proactively searching thousands of naval records to build a comprehensive list of eligible ships -- as some veterans have demanded -- "would be an inefficient use of VA's resources," Noller said. But because the historical records are sometimes missing or incomplete, veterans groups say the fastest and surest way to obtain benefits is for vets to gather records themselves and submit them as part of their initial claims. More than 700 Navy ships deployed to Vietnam between 1962 and 1975. Veterans have produced records to get about half of them onto the VA's working list, with new ships being added every year. Still, veterans advocacy groups estimate about 90,000 Navy vets are not eligible to receive benefits related to Agent Orange exposure, either because their ships never entered inland waters, or because they have yet to prove they did.
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