Two high-profile articles paint a picture of a more progressive and benevolent VA.

NOTE from Larry Scott, VA Watchdog dot Org ... The VA's spin-meisters worked their magic for some "good press" for the agency on Veterans Day.

We see the use of words like "rebranding" and "reshape" when referring to the challenges the top brass face at the VA.

The VA does not need to be "rebranded" or "reshaped," as these are just words that refer to a perception of the agency.  The VA needs to be changed from top-to-bottom to fulfill its mission.

Why?  Just read the VAOIG and GAO reports ... they are self-explanatory.

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No Longer a Soldier, Shinseki Has a New Mission

By JAMES DAO and THOM SHANKER

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/us/politics/11vets.html?_r=1

(NOTE:  A Shinseki MILESTONES chart can be found here ...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/11/us/20091111VETS.html )

It was a sad homecoming of sorts. On Tuesday, Eric Shinseki, the secretary of veterans affairs, returned to Fort Hood, Tex., where he was a division commander in the mid-1990s, to pay tribute to two veterans affairs employees who died in the shootings there last week.

But the visit also underscored Mr. Shinseki’s current mission: to modernize his problem-plagued agency, which was struggling to care for aging veterans even before the flood of young ones from Iraq and Afghanistan began.

For months, Mr. Shinseki has been crisscrossing the country as President Obama’s pinstriped evangelist for veterans’ care, raising concerns about a coming tide of post-traumatic stress cases, traumatic brain injuries and other physical and psychological scars of battle.

Having led soldiers in Vietnam as a young West Point graduate, until a mine tore off part of his right foot and nearly ended his Army career, he can speak about the “baggage” of war with deep feeling.

“All of us who went through combat, we were carrying a little bit of baggage from the experience, the stress,” he said in an interview before the Fort Hood shootings.

Even before the shootings, Mr. Shinseki was in a rush, telling people he figured he would have three years — the average tenure of a cabinet secretary, he says — to revamp the Department of Veterans Affairs.

In nine months, he has pushed the department to make it easier for veterans to receive compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder. The agency has expanded the list of illnesses presumed to have been caused by Agent Orange, smoothing the way for an estimated 200,000 Vietnam-era veterans to receive benefits. And he has requested what would be the largest single-year increase in the department’s budget in three decades, $15 billion, or 16 percent.

Mr. Shinseki has also pledged to streamline the backlog-plagued disability compensation system and is pushing to revamp an archaic computer system so electronic records track a veteran from enlistment to death.

Perhaps most ambitious is his goal of getting 131,000 homeless veterans off the street in six years. “I don’t think you can do this sort of thing if you don’t put a big number on the table,” he said.

But as much as anything, Mr. Shinseki talks about bringing “a change of culture” to the department. Widely viewed as indifferent or obstructionist by veterans’ groups, it needs to become more of an advocate for the people it serves, Mr. Shinseki says.

“I think what’s important for me is to make sure we aren’t seen as adversarial,” he said.

Veterans advocates who describe the department as a bastion of antiquated technology and hostile paper pushers, say he will need to do that and more to improve the sprawling agency, the government’s second largest after Defense.

“He faces one of the greatest rebranding challenges in American government,” said Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq veteran and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “When I came home, my father, a Vietnam-era vet, said: ‘Don’t go to V.A. I wouldn’t go unless I was on fire.’ ”

The problems are daunting. Nearly 8 million of the 23.4 million veterans are enrolled in the veterans system, which administers compensation for disabled veterans and runs the nation’s largest health care system.

And the numbers are growing, partly because of the two wars, partly because of the recession, partly because the department has expanded certain programs and partly because it has reinstated benefits for hundreds of thousands of veterans who lost them several years ago.

At the same time, the department is widely criticized as inefficient or incompetent. Thousands of veterans have reported records being lost or destroyed. Applicants for compensation wait months for claims to be processed and years more for appeals to be adjudicated. And although the health care system is widely praised, it has had its share of scandals, including botched prostate surgeries and improperly cleaned colonoscopy equipment.

“They can’t do it the way they’ve done it in the past,” said Bob Wallace, executive director of the Washington office of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “It won’t work.”

Mr. Shinseki, who grew up in Hawaii, the grandson of Japanese immigrants, has been in this kind of rush before. When he became the Army chief of staff in 1999, he pushed hard to modernize his hidebound service to prepare for new kinds of warfare.

Over protests, he ordered active-duty soldiers to wear black berets — once worn only by elite Army Rangers — as a symbol of unity and excellence. He also championed a lighter, eight-wheeled armored vehicle called the Stryker that is now in used in Afghanistan.

“If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less,” General Shinseki was fond of telling his commanders. (He has resurrected the line.)

He became perhaps better known for running afoul of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense in the Bush administration, when he said, on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that far more troops would be needed to secure the country. He was marginalized by the Pentagon leadership, but time proved him right.

Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and a member of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said Mr. Shinseki has been pleasantly open about missteps, as when the administration proposed passing on some health care costs to veterans. There was an outcry among veterans, and Mr. Shinseki helped kill the proposal.

Later, when the agency was slow to send checks to veterans attending college on the post-9/11 G.I. bill, Mr. Shinseki ordered offices to open on a Saturday to issue payments to eligible students.

“Before, they would have said, tough, live with it,” Ms. Murray said.

But amid the plaudits, some advocates wonder how well a general can run a bureaucracy filled with unionized civil servants. He can hire and fire at will only a few dozen of the department’s 298,000 employees. And some friends worry whether Mr. Shinseki, famously plainspoken and earnest, can survive in sharp-elbowed Washington.

“He’s less likely to shape things to be palatable,” said Maj. Gen. Eric Olson, who is retired and served three times under Mr. Shinseki. “He’s more likely to go in and say: ‘This isn’t right, this isn’t how things should be done. Why can’t we fix it?’ And that’s not always the way to get things done in Washington.”

Mr. Shinseki acknowledged that he does not always know what works best in Washington. But in his four years as Army chief, he said, “I got enough done without having to do something unnatural for me. I think what’s natural for me is trying to tell the story that soldiers need told. It’s not my story, it’s their story.”

He suggests that he was as surprised as anyone when Mr. Obama, whom he had never met before the election, asked him to join the cabinet.

When friends express skepticism about whether he is enjoying his job, he says he tells them: “I get up every day and look forward to coming to work. The day isn’t long enough to solve the problems. I wish it was longer because there is lots to do.”

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'She is the face of the new generation'

At VA and among vets, Duckworth is trying to reshape perceptions

By Ed O'Keefe
Washington Post Staff Writer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/200
9/11/10/AR2009111018995.html

Five years ago this week, an insurgent shot down the Army Black Hawk helicopter that Tammy Duckworth was co-piloting in Iraq. Now an assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Duckworth lost her legs in the attack.

On Thursday, her Black Hawk crewmates who pulled her from the wreckage will be in Washington to celebrate her "alive day" -- what some veterans call their "second birthday" to mark their brushes with death. She will lead them on a tour of the Capitol and the White House.

"After all, they defended all this; they might as well see it firsthand," she said.

In a whirlwind, Duckworth has moved from the battlefields of Iraq to the halls of power in Washington, becoming part of a team headed by VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki, a former Army chief of staff, and Deputy Secretary W. Scott Gould, a Navy veteran, that is trying to overhaul an agency that's been called moribund and out of touch.

More than 24 million U.S. veterans are alive today, according to VA. Of those, about 1.5 million served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Duckworth, 41, knows that her age, gender and injuries set her apart from most of the veterans she meets. But part of her job is connecting older veterans with younger ones, traveling at least twice a week to visit VA facilities and speak before veterans.

At the annual convention of the Fleet Reserve Association in Virginia Beach in late October, she told the story of Joe Dan Worley, a Navy medical corpsman she met while recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Worley lost a leg in Iraq.

"Joe Dan did what every Navy corpsman has done in the history of this nation: He grabbed his aid bag and ran into the kill zone," Duckworth said. "He sat there and took care of every single Marine until he knew that they were in line to be medevaced and that they had been cared for. Only then did he use his own blood to put a 'T' on his forehead, and only then did he give himself a shot of morphine and pass out."

He was 22, she told the crowd, which erupted in applause.

"Joe Dan has been there throughout our nation's history, and different versions of Joe Dan are sitting in this room here today," Duckworth said.

"More and more veterans are surviving debilitating and devastating injuries received during combat," she noted as she stood on her own two prosthetic legs, wearing a bright red skirt suit.

She made jokes, too, bragging about her mastery of foul language. She flew "ash and trash" missions around Iraq, she said, using "ash" instead of profanity -- because the presence of the ladies auxiliary at the event meant she couldn't curse "in mixed company."
Generation gap

"I was in a different military, and I wasn't familiar with the combat capabilities of females," Joe LaPadula, 79, a Korean and Vietnam war veteran from Omaha, said afterward. "She's a good person," LaPadula said of Duckworth. "She saved somebody's life, and they saved hers."

"She is the face of the new generation," said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "Iraq and Afghanistan veterans aren't old white guys."

Most days, Duckworth is in her office before 8 a.m., and she often works past 8 p.m. In her wheelchair, she rides the Metro from her apartment in Ballston to VA headquarters, directly above the McPherson Square station.

She is helping to lead a VA reorganization meant, among other things, to reduce red tape.

"If I, as a Ph.D. candidate and a well-known congressional candidate leaving Walter Reed, had to negotiate a bureaucracy and found that it was somewhat challenging, what does the 21-year-old PFC with a brain injury do?" she asked.

An outspoken critic of the Bush administration's Iraq war policy, Duckworth lost a 2006 race for Congress in Illinois but later was appointed the state's veterans affairs director. While recovering at Walter Reed she met then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, who visited her several times.

His concern moved her, she said, and soon she was campaigning for him. As president, Obama nominated Duckworth to join Veterans Affairs in February. She isn't shy about her ambition, expressing an interest in eventually joining the State Department and saying she would she'd run again for elected office if the right opportunity emerged.

Obama has said the nation has "a covenant with her veterans," and first lady Michelle Obama meets regularly with military spouses and has invited military families to the White House for holiday celebrations.
Obama's critics

The administration has its critics, however.

"Inviting military families to the White House is a lovely gesture, but there remains a concern in our community that the military is simply not a priority for the Obama administration," said Meredith Leyva, who founded CinC- House.com, a popular Web site for military spouses.

Critics are especially concerned with how the administration handled the rollout of the post-9/11 G.I. Bill. VA promised higher education benefits to thousands of veterans, but for most the money did not arrive in time to cover expenses. Duckworth and other officials publicly apologized, and VA issued emergency checks.

Though some see the incident as an example of VA incompetence, others say the department's quick reaction signals a newfound willingness to fix problems.

"When they are approached with an issue, they're pretty quick to respond to it," said Terry Howell, an editor at Military.com, a veterans news and social-networking site. "And it may not always seem like the right response, but . . . we've never seen them react so quickly in the past."

Duckworth said, "When you serve this many people, there are always going to be people that are not satisfied for whatever reason."

"We're going to be the advocate, and if we're going to make a mistake, it's going to be to the benefit of the veteran, not to the benefit of the bureaucracy," she said.

Besides, on her alive day, she said, "I've got to be able to look at [my crewmates] in the eye and say, 'Hey, I'm not screwing up in Washington; I'm doing my job, and I'm fighting as hard as I can.' "

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TOPICS: veterans, veterans' benefits, VA, Department of Veterans' Affairs, Veterans Day, Eric Shinseki, Tammy Duckworth