Monthly Archives: October 2008

DoD announced last week that the Military Health System (MHS) would like service members and their families to respond to new questionnaires designed to help MHS leaders understand their needs and expectations.

“These questionnaires are part of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ commitment to supporting wounded, ill and injured service members—ensuring that their care is DoD’s top priority,” said S. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs.

The questionnaires—one for wounded, ill or injured service members and one for their family members—are available on-line beginning today and will remain open for completion until Oct. 15. Both questionnaires ask for feedback concerning a service member’s experience and satisfaction with the care he or she has received since becoming wounded, ill or injured.

To encourage candid responses that will lead to positive change in the delivery of care for our service members and their families, all survey responses will remain anonymous. Analysis and results of the survey will be available in November 2008, at http://www.health.mil.

“Care is continually improving, but MHS leaders recognize there is still more to be done,” said Casscells.

On-line questionnaires are available at: http://www.health.mil/Pages/Page.aspx?ID=18.

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=57702

Last weekend there were several people from DOD’s and the Army’s PAO office. In fact, the Army accessions command even sponsored a very nice catered lunch for many of us in attendance that were or are in the Army. One of the topics was this exact subject, which is the lack of guidance for bloggers in the Army. They had told us of up coming changes and guidance that was being worked on, so I guess that is what this story is about.

I had posed a couple of questions/ideas to them, one of which was a plan to teach officers and NCOs about Army policies and guidelines so they can better direct their soldiers. See the way things are supposed to happen today are for a soldier to let their commander know about their blogging, give them the website address, and if the commander wants to; he/she reserves the right to read each posting in order to ensure that no opsec is violated, etc. However there really is no guidance for leaders at any level on what is deemed acceptable or not.

The famed Kaboom blog where CPT Gallagher wrote while he was still a LT is a good example. His command shut him down for failing to clear just one particular blog, even though he had followed the process on every other blog entry he wrote. So is that the guidance, all or nothing? Is there no escalation of offense and punishment? Well it was up to his commander, with no guidance to shut CPT G down. Other commanders have taken an approach of verbal counseling, then written counseling, and then maybe ordering a soldier not to blog, if they had multiple infractions. My immediate commander read my blogs after the fact and enjoyed reading what I wrote about dealing with being an ETT in Afghanistan. The 3rd Brigade Team Chief (O-6 Colonel) I had, came into country after I did and had told me he and the rest of the guys he was with were reading my blog stateside in order to try and get as much information as they could on what life was like as an ETT. They used my blog as a form of education, so of course they had no problem with my writing.

So giving guidance like this is good, but it is going to take more than this in order to facilitate blogging like the Army says it wants to do and like LTG Caldwell has shown he does do. They need to inject into the NCO and Officer leadership courses that are attended throughout a career what it means to blog and what is acceptable and not acceptable. They also need to be educated on how to handle situations when soldiers underneath them either fail to follow regulation or blog about stuff that could have a detrimental effect on someone (family, friends, etc.)