U.S. Military Has 1,000 Full-time, 22,000 Part-Time Sexual Assault Response Coordinators

    Outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently reported on the efforts his department has made against sexual assault within the ranks of the military. A year ago, President Obama directed Hagel to conduct a full review of progress being made, and while Hagel reported a decrease of twenty-five percent in the prevalence of sexual assault, he said "[t]here’s much more to be done."
    One area of progress Hagel cited was simply in the reporting of such assaults, which he said has increased by 50 percent in just a year. He said it is believed now that one in four assaults are reported, whereas two years ago it was one in ten. The statistics are based on surveys taken throughout the military.
    The improvements are due, at least in part, Hagel believes, from increased confidence victims now have in the ability of the military to deal with these crimes. "Compared to 2010," Hagel said, "because more survivors participated in the justice system than ever before, we’ve been able to hold more perpetrators accountable."
    Another factor may be the sheer number of personnel the Pentagon now has committed to dealing with the problem. "We now have over 1,000 full-time certified response coordinators and victim advocates," Hagel revealed at the press conference, "and over 17,000 volunteer personnel ready to assist survivors."
    To confirm Hagel's statement, an email inquiry was sent to the defense department asking if Hagel's statement meant that these 1,000 response coordinators literally work full time on sexual assault matters as opposed to combining this work with other duties. Laura Seal, a DoD spokesperson replied, "The answer to your questions is: Yes. In addition, more than 22,000 Sexual Assault Response Coordinators and Sexual Assault Response Victim Advocates have been certified in a process administered by the National Organization for Victim Assistance. These [additional 22,000] Coordinators and Advocates do not work on the issue on a full time basis." A followup email seeking explanation for the discrepancy between the 17,000 and 22,000 figures was not returned.
    With 1.4 million personnel on active duty and another 718,000 civilians working for the defense department, the 23,000 response coordinators/victim advocates comes to one for every 91 members of the department.
    Major General Jeffrey Snow, who addressed the press with Secretary Hagel, stressed that while sexual assault reports have increased, sexual assault and other forms of unwanted sexual contact in the military are actually on the decline, saying that "[r]ates of unwanted sexual contact are down significantly for both men and women from levels seen in 2006." Using available data, Snow said "we estimate that about 19,000 service members experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2014."


Note: A version of this post first appeared at The Weekly Standard.

Pentagon's Counter-IED Force to Shrink by Two-Thirds This Year

    News broke this week that under a plan released by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the United States Army will be reduced to its smallest force since before World War II.  Though not directly related to that plan, another announcement this week by the Defense Department gives a foretaste of what those cuts may look like.  Plans are underway for massive cuts to the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), the organization that has led military's efforts to combat the weapon of choice among insurgents and terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. JIEDDO's current staff of 3,000 will be reduced to 1,000 by the end of this fiscal year, and further plans could see the number fall as low as 400 down the road.

    Army Lt. Gen. John D. Johnson, the director of JIEDDO, said guidance from then-Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called on him to "scale JIEDDO down" and draw up plans for what "an 'enduring' JIEDDO might look like in the future."  The Army News Service reports:

"There is a full appreciation that JIEDDO functions should endure. The key is that it be scaled to what the nation can afford," Johnson said. "And we have to be smart as to how we structure it so it can be rapidly expanded as necessary based on the nature of the threat and the challenges we are going to face in the future."... 

Johnson said he will spell out to the deputy secretary what could be done with 400 personnel, and what risks are associated with it. 

"There are certain parts of an organization like this that if you reduce it beyond a point, it could take six months, a year, even longer to re-establish it," he said. "And in that time period, our soldiers and Marines in the field are suffering from the effects of IEDs, and it ends up costing us more to try to fix the problem without necessarily having the sophistication of understanding the entire system of systems."

    Lt. Gen. Johnson was positive about the coming changes, but expressed some concerns as well.

Some parts of JIEDDO can't be easily scaled. One of the areas he's looking to protect, Johnson said, is the intelligence integration functions of JIEDDO. 

"My concern is, right now, we have a fairly persistent look at the organizations that most commonly use IEDs," he said. "If we were to take our eyes off, what are the chances that there would be an adaptation or permutation in the way they use IEDs that we didn't anticipate, and how long for us to catch up?" 

    JIEDDO has worked with other countries, such as Pakistan and Colombia, to help then deal with their own threats from IEDs, and was even involved in discussions after the Boston Marathon bombing to see what lessons could be learned from that domestic attack.
    News of the reductions first surfaced in October 2013.  At the time, Johnson was also positive about adjusting the size and scope of the organization, but was adamant about its continuing mission:

The future is important because the IED fight is far from over, he said.  

“In the last 12 months, there were more than 14,000 IED-related events outside of Afghanistan causing more than 32,000 casualties,” he said. “These weapons have been used by threat networks and criminal entities around the world and even here at home as we saw recently in the Boston Marathon bombings.”  

“The inevitable next fight is somewhere in our future,” he said. “We must be able to rapidly posture for that fight. We must continue to lean forward and stay abreast of how our enemies are using IEDs and what new tactics and technologies they are employing. This will allow us to develop the capabilities to defeat the IED, the tactics to attack enemy networks and train our forces so they are prepared for the IED environments we will face in the future.” 

Note: A version of this post first appeared at The Weekly Standard. 

Chuck Hagel's Archives: Access Denied

    Barring any last minute revelations, a second cloture vote by the Senate on Tuesday should guarantee Chuck Hagel will be the next Secretary of Defense.  And as long as the University of Nebraska-Omaha (UNO) and Hagel himself continue to refuse to allow anyone to access Hagel's considerable archives from his years as senator, currently housed at UNO, the chances of any such revelations are slim.  But although James T. Shaw, director of collections at UNO, says that the archives are not available because a trained archivist has not yet organized the entire record, there seems to have been a considerable amount of work accomplished sifting through the 1700+ boxes of documents and other artifacts. In fact, in the past three years, at least two exhibitions of Hagel's archives have been presented by UNO.

    The first exhibition was in 2010 and lasted for almost two months.  A press release described the rather extensive display:

The exhibition – A Senator’s Walls: A Selection of Photographs and Artifacts from the Offices of Senator Chuck Hagel – features more than 300 items from Hagel’s offices in Washington, DC; Omaha; Lincoln; Kearney; and Scottsbluff. The items on display include photographs, awards, gifts, cartoons, newspapers and magazines, presenting a visual history of the senator’s activities during his two, six-year terms in office.

    The press release also contains this statement that seems to contradict Shaw's recent statement that the complete archives will not be made available until the entire collection is indexed and organized:

The collection, known as the U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel Archives, will open partially to researchers by 2012.

     The timing has apparently changed considerably since 2010 since Stephen R. Shorb, the Dean of the Criss Library at UNO, recently told The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper that he anticipated the archive will not be ready for another two and a half years. He did not indicate if this would be the partial access the 2010 press release spoke of or full access.

    The second exhibition of Hagel's archives was prepared to coincide with a visit from Hagel just this past November.  The Gateway, UNO's campus news organization, reported on the visit and special display created at the Criss Library:

Jessica Agler, archivist at the Chuck Hagel Archives, organized the event with her team and created a display of Hagel’s historic 1996 gubernatorial victory against Ben Nelson. 

Agler said there are 1,700 boxes of paper, 1,000 videos and cassettes, 500 books, and about 1,500 framed photos and plaques in the archive. Holly Newman Dzyban, student archivist, went through the artifacts and organized much of the exhibit in the Criss Library. 

“Some of the things I really enjoyed were the political cartoons and we have reproduced some of those upstairs,” Dzyban said. 

While there was a hefty amount of artifacts to sift through, Agler wanted students to be able to see the exhibit, come to the meeting and hear Hagel’s frank opinions about issues facing the nation.

    Charley Reed, Media Relations Coordinator at UNO, said in a recent email to The Weekly Standard, “The archive must be fully processed in line with archival best practices to assure that the archive is presented responsibly and to professional standards.”  It is not clear from the reports on the two exhibits if the student archivists are doing most of the work preparing the archives for final access or if their involvement was primarily to prepare the preliminary exhibits.  In any case, it is difficult to see how Senate staffers and journalists, who regularly do extensive research for their jobs, are insufficiently qualified to review the partially categorized Hagel material.

    Ironically, the 2010 press release about that Hagel exhibition contained the following statement:

The Hagel artifact exhibition at UNO kicks off during October, which is American Archives Month. This year’s theme is “I Found it in the Archives.” 

    When it comes to the Hagel archives, however, the only people finding anything are the college student archivists.  And unless Hagel or UNO reverse course, journalists, senators and their staff seeking information regarding the defense secretary nominee's past writings and statements won't be able to say “I Found it in the Archives.”  Come Tuesday, time to do so will have run out.

Department of Defense Rejects GAO Recommendation Regarding "Sexual Assault Victimization" in the Military

    On January 23, news broke that outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had issued a directive that the military's ban on women in combat would be lifted.  The New York Times reported that his decision was in response to unanimous agreement among the Joint Chiefs of Staff as expressed in a letter to Panetta:

Mr. Panetta’s decision came after he received a Jan. 9 letter from Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who stated in strong terms that the armed service chiefs all agreed that “the time has come to rescind the direct combat exclusion rule for women and to eliminate all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service.”

     The Times article said it was unclear why the Joint Chiefs decided to act now after years of discussion, although there is speculation that recent threats of legal action may have played a role.  However, a Government Accountability Office report issued on January 29 raises some questions about the timing of such a monumental change in policy.

    I first reported the GAO report in a January 31 blog post at The Weekly Standard where I addressed the fiscal impact of allowing women in combat positions.  However, the broader focus of the report is spelled out in its title: "DOD Has Taken Steps to Meet the Health Needs of Deployed Servicewomen, but Actions Are Needed to Enhance Care for Sexual Assault Victims." An explanation of the special focus on sexual assault victims appears early in the report [emphasis added]:

The roles for women in the military have been expanding and evolving, particularly since the Persian Gulf War more than 2 decades ago. Formerly, servicewomen served primarily in supportive roles in overseas U.S. military operations. Today, servicewomen are integral to combat support and counterinsurgency operations, and they serve in many roles they previously did not hold. In late 2011, for example, women began serving aboard Navy submarines. In early 2012, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced that changes to its assignment policies would result in more than 14,000 additional positions being opened to women, including positions in select direct ground combat units. Further, while sexual assault victimization is not unique to women, the presence of women in new roles suggests that continued vigilance with respect to this issue is needed. Given the expanding and evolving role of women in the military, the health and wellness of servicewomen plays an important role in overall military readiness. 

    According to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012, this report was originally due by December 31, 2012.  As mentioned above, the report was released on January 29, but given that the paragraph above does not mention the lifting of the women in combat ban, the GAO report was apparently finalized prior to Panetta's announcement. This policy change, much more far reaching that even the change opening "14,000 additional positions" in early 2012, exponentially increases the need for "continued vigilance" regarding "sexual assault victimization" that the GAO calls for.  Therefore, the timing of the announcement lifting the ban and the DOD's reaction to the GAO report recommendations is curious.

    The GAO made two recommendations at the conclusion of its inquiry regarding "sexual assault victimization":

To enhance the medical and mental health care for servicewomen who are victims of sexual assault, GAO recommends that DOD (1) develop department-level guidance on the provision of care to victims of sexual assault; and (2) take steps to improve first responders' compliance with the department's requirements for annual refresher training. DOD did not concur with the first recommendation, but cited steps it is taking that appear consistent with the recommendation. DOD concurred with the second recommendation.

     In this short summary of the DOD's reaction to the draft report, which the DOD reviewed before the GAO prepared and issued the final version on January 29, the GAO notes that the DOD "did not concur with the first recommendation, but cited steps it is taking that appear consistent with the recommendation." This summary sounds sanguine about the steps the DOD is taking to conform to the GAO's first recommendation, but it fails to convey the lengths to which the DOD appears to have gone to avoid concurring and to avoid fully cooperating with the GAO staff conducting the review.  Here is the full paragraph from the body of the report discussing the DOD's recommendations.  It is quite lengthy, but I have taken the liberty of highlighting all the references to the DOD's reticence to fully engage the GAO:

In written comments on a draft of this report, DOD stated in its cover letter that, overall, the department did not concur with the report's findings and conclusions. However, DOD's cover letter did not provide an explanation for this comment. In an enclosure to its letter, DOD stated that it did not concur with our first recommendation that the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs develop and implement department-level guidance on the provision of medical and mental health care to victims of sexual assault that would specify health care providers' responsibilities to respond to and care for sexual assault victims, whether in the United States or in deployed environments. DOD's justification of its assessment, however, did not make clear why the department did not concur. Instead, DOD provided examples of steps it has been taking that may help to address the findings in this report. Specifically, DOD stated that, while the second version of DOD Instruction 6495.02, entitled "Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) Program Procedures" has been in coordination for nearly 2 years and is not yet published, the revised instruction will be comprehensive and will contain two medical enclosures. According to DOD, the first medical enclosure will address health care provider procedures and direct the Surgeons General of the military services to carry out responsibilities related to the
coordination, evaluation, and implementation of care, while the second medical enclosure will address health care providers' responsibilities related to Sexual Assault Forensic Examination kits. During the course of this review, we met with DOD officials who had knowledge of and were involved in the instruction's revision, but these officials did not discuss or share their draft revisions with us when we presented our findings to them. We cannot verify, therefore, whether the enclosures referenced in DOD's comments will address our recommendation. However, we plan to review the instruction when DOD finalizes it to determine whether it meets the intent of our recommendation. Finally, DOD stated that the department meets its oversight responsibilities with regard to sexual assault response through training in graduate medical education and through monitoring and oversight of the process that governs credentialing and privileging of providers.  However, it is not clear why this statement is applicable to our recommendation. We did not address these points in the finding that led to this recommendation, and our recommendation is focused on the need for additional guidance. 

    The DOD's lack of transparency and full cooperation with the GAO has certainly compromised the effectiveness of this report at the precise time when a huge policy change regarding women is emerging. Not only, as the GAO indicates above, will this require further follow up by the GAO, but it has prevented Congress from having complete information on an important aspect of the issue at a time when Congress must decide whether or not to act.  As the GAO report said:

Given the expanding and evolving role of women in the military, the health and wellness of servicewomen plays an important role in overall military readiness. 

    Implementing this policy change, unless Congress intervenes, will be the first order of business for Chuck Hagel or whoever ends up being confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense. And given the importance of the military readiness of the United States, the Department of Defense owes the GAO, Congress and the American people full disclosure when it comes to how it plans to handle one of the most significant changes to the armed forces in our lifetime.


Note: A version of this article first appeared on February 6, 2013 at The Weekly Standard.

Chuck Hagel's Biggest Obstacle to Secretary of Defense Job: Himself

    President Obama, despite growing opposition, is likely to nominate former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense as early as Monday, CBS News reports.  This move will stand in contrast to the withdrawal of Susan Rice's name for consideration as secretary of state when her possible nomination came under fire for her inaccurate statements about the attacks in Benghazi, Libya on a number of Sunday talk shows.  But Chuck Hagel's time in the Senate will provide questioners at his nomination hearing plenty of fodder, and not just one bad weekend on TV.

    Hagel's oppostion to the Iraq War is no secret.  After initially voting for the Iraq resolution in 2002, Hagel soon became a vocal and vociferous critic of the war, President Bush, and Bush's military and administration officials responsible for prosecuting it.  Extreme left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore, writing at the Huffington Post on Saturday, even credits Hagel with being one of the few who told the truth about the Iraq War with his comment: "People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are."  Perhaps one of Hagel's most outrageous statements regarding the war, and in retrospect the least prescient, was one he made to Condoleezza Rice on the heels of President Bush's announcement of the "surge" in Iraq which was calculated to reverse the deteriorating situation in that country:

So, Madam Secretary, when you set in motion the kind of policy that the president is talking about here, it's very, very dangerous. As a matter of fact, I have to say, Madam Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it's carried out. I will resist it. (transcript via PBS)

    As it turned out, the surge was widely credited with doing exactly what the Bush administration planned, and arguably set the stage for President Obama to largely end America's involvement in Iraq on a relatively positive note.  Hagel's credibility as secretary to "wind down" (to use the president's term) the war in Afghanistan might well be called into question with his spectacular miscall on the surge in Iraq.

    Hagel's surge comments are not the only awkward moments likely to surface at Hagel's confirmation hearing.  On September 11, 2007, Andrew Sullivan, writing at the Atlantic, chose to highlight a pair of senators' comments at hearings held about the Iraq war and the Bush administration's strategy.  The two senators?  Chuck Hagel and Barack Obama.  And one of the witnesses at whom these two senators directed their indignation?  President Obama's first choice for secretary of defense and the military leader responsible for the surge in Iraq, General David Petraeus.

    Chuck Hagel's chances of becoming the next secretary of defense may well rest on his ability to mount a credible defense of his own past public statements.

Update: Suggested opening question for Hagel's confirmation hearing: "Senator Hagel: In 2007, you called the Iraq surge, quote, the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, unquote.  Given that President Obama's first choice to be the next secretary of defense was reported to be General Petraeus, the man who successfully carried out the surge, one: do you stand behind your 2007 statement, and two: would you be open to consulting with General Petraeus on the winding down of the war in Afghanistan if you are confirmed?"