Ruse de Guerre

VA fakes red-handed surrender after latest perimeter probe in the war on veterans

I.

Tom Cruise makes the same movie most of the time. Sure, he occasionally branches out. But mainly, he is entrusted to deliver simple, vivid stories. He does it well, but changing a few characters and redrawing the scenery doesn’t fool anyone. They’re all Top Gun.

We’ve had Top Gun for stock cars (Days of Thunder). Top Gun for military lawyers (A Few Good Men), civilian lawyers (The Firm), sports agents (Jerry Maguire), and billiard hustlers (The Color of Money). Heck, there was even a Top Gun for high school footballers (All The Right Moves) made a few years before and serving as basically the Inception of Top Gun.

The plot has been sublimated into our limbic systems. Rivalry, tragedy, romance, perseverance, and the redemption of final victory, usually with some daddy issues sprinkled in somewhere.

By the time the race driver Cole Trickle channels the ghost of his dead buddy Rowdy Burns to translate adrenaline into the courage to overtake his opponent, you can’t distinguish the soaring background anthem from the echo of Lieutenant Nick Bradshaw’s piano-backed crooning.

Because contrivances to create hooks for nostalgia are also part of the package, and part of why these stories melt together.

I mean, who the Hell plays piano wearing sunglasses, anyway? Goose, that’s who. And Rooster. And Stevie Wonder.

Repeat plotlines, wielded effectively, can be lucrative. Even when they are products and producers of staggering decrepitude. Like the movie Cocktail.

The lesson isn’t lost on the federal bureaucracy we pay for, and the myriad ways it makes us pay for doing so.

---

II.

The Veterans Administration (VA) dabbles in the same art form as Tom Cruise, pretending to show us something new when we’re seeing the same plot unfold with different actors.

Every so often, we get new faces, new voices, and re-packaged rhetoric. But the VA has been breaking promises with American veterans since Jesus girded up his sandals and slung a sling. Since before it was even called the VA.

Captain Nathan Algren was sufficiently traumatized by his combat trials, and left so adrift by the lack of veteran outreach, that he turned to alcoholism and selling firearms before fleeing abroad on a swordplay vision quest. So says the libretto of The Last Samurai, a.k.a. Top Gun for Civil War mercenaries.

I kid. But it’s actually more tedious and tragic than funny. We’ve seen this movie so many times, we can practically write the screenplay ourselves.

As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq took their bloody course, scandal after scandal plagued the veteran community. Subpar hospitals. Poor care. Yearlong waiting lists for mental health referral. Delays in claims processing. Every problem flowed from a lack of sufficient resources.

At the same time, legislators and technocrats tacitly conspired, as they do, to underfund support and infrastructure services, raid pensions, and cut manpower. These measures compounded pressure on active service families before they even moved into the veteran category.

The current iteration features optimistic emails flooding veteran inboxes while 80,000 jobs get cut, ballooning backlogs. Meanwhile, promises of miracle efficiencies unleashed by bleeding edge technology arrive via snail mail, printed on legacy brochures stuffed into the same envelopes denying routine claims requiring nanoseconds and amoebic sentience to process.

The VA still doesn’t believe I’m married to my wife, despite having access to no less than sixteen federal databases certifying the evidence contained in the marriage certificate I mailed them a year ago. Which they never processed but managed to misplace. In my last letter, I included a screenshot from their own system, which depicts the fact they’ve been asking me to prove for two years.

It’s a fractal of planetary frustration with a collective magma volume capable of swallowing ten suns.

After a quarter-century slog in far-flung hellholes requiring deployment tempos that should be verboten outside of existential wars, the veteran population continues to be a popular target for vultures. The budget sits under a perpetual magnifying glass, scrutinized for a solitary fat cell.

Meanwhile, almost 8,000 veterans take their own lives every year. This is the tragedy element of the plot, and as grimly dependable as executive shitbaggery.

And yet, it doesn’t get a stray eyeball of VA or Congressional study. Because there’s no money in keeping veterans alive.

But let us descend for a moment from the music video generalities of entertaining critique. The VA likes to play its role with the complexity and nuance of any respectable villain. Recent chicanery provides an example, and a reason to stay tuned.

---

III.

A couple weeks ago, the VA offended veterans, advocates, and elemental fairness by instigating a change to the rules determining disability compensation.

There was no rollout, no engagement, no announcement to veterans or the general public. Just a surreptitious exercise of banal administration. Which, history counsels, is the method by which most mass evil is distributed.

In plain English, the rule would have based compensation on the level of disability with treatment.

So if you lost a leg in Afghanistan but prosthesis allows you to walk, and thus work, the rule would find you substantially less disabled. This is a wholesale departure from assessing the disability in and of itself, compensating for it, and encouraging veterans to seek treatment to enrich their lives as much as possible.

This rule change would end most disability compensation, and require veterans to constantly show the VA how much or little their treatments were working. It would also create a fiduciary mandate for the VA to require veterans to accept treatments advised by VA practitioners, which would fundamentally erode the agency of men and women who have already incurred life-altering limitations by obeying orders.

This rule change, like most, wears the disguise of sensibility. It says to us that it is earnest and wants to save our tax dollars, although we know we won’t get those dollars back.

It’s not sensible at all. It’s a garden variety Catch-22. We need only basic empathy to see that clearly.

Pretend you’re a veteran under the VA’s proposed rule.

(A) If you don’t need treatment to function, you won’t be considered disabled. If you choose to live with physical pain rather than risk opioid addiction, then you don’t need treatment. If you choose to rebuild your mind with meditation and long walks instead of talking therapy, you don’t need treatment. This would create an incentive to maximize treatment to prove you need it, which would also discourage making progress that might reduce your entitlement. You’d have to choose between staying all the way broken and losing financial support that is key to helping you cope.

(B) If you do get treatment, you won’t be considered disabled to the extent it is effective.

Therefore, virtually no one would be considered disabled. Actual impairment would increase and healing would be slowed.

You might be asking yourself how the VA could possibly have the authority to make such a sweeping change. I truly wish we would all ask this question a lot more often.

When Congress writes laws, it leaves them purposely vague for a few reasons. First, to give federal agencies the interpretive latitude to adapt the law to best suit its intended purpose. Second, to give lobbyists and lesser shitlords enough space to ghost-write rules in service of various interests, most of whom have funded elections to acquire this privilege. Third, to avoid being pinned down by clarity, so that anything which backfires or proves unpopular can become a flaming bag of shit left on someone else’s doorstep.

Because laws are vague, most of the law that impacts everyday life is made not by those we elect, but by unelected bureaucrats in federal agencies. They interpret laws into federal rules to apply the law, then enforce those same rules as though doing so with full Congressional intent in their pockets. When often, the law has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and refined by judicial review until the impact bears zero resemblance to what voters supported at the ballot box.

Federal agencies often reinterpret laws into updated rules, especially after elections. They want laws to mean something different. Or to be more charitable, they believe Congress intended a different application.

That’s the conceit of the VA move just attempted. But it backfired. Despite the quasi-clandestine tactics, watchful eyes noticed. The outrage machine was fired up. Widespread rejection of the decrepitude took shape.

The VA subsequently paused enforcement of its new rule. Then it rescinded the rule altogether, saying it had no plans to do anything further. Which is a bit like Jeffrey Dahmer claiming he’s gone vegan.

And it’s at this point in the timeline that the VA is rolling the credits on the standard plot. Hoping we’ll tune out. But they’re not drawing the curtain for good. They’re just going to change a few characters and redraw the scenery before replaying the same plot.

The VA has waged a multi-generational campaign of varying intensity to erode, squeeze, pilfer, and embezzle. The goal is to escape the full costs of wars fought without a mature or lucid plan to fight them or pay for them, during or after their conduct.

You see, veterans are only useful to politicians for the time a war is politically profitable. When faux patriotism can be economically cultivated by dramatizing it into votes or money, veterans are valuable only as stage props.

When that time passes, we become a liability. We hold down money which would be better spent lining the pockets of funders or benefactors, or held up by officials as a budgetary scalp in the populist “government is the problem” psychodrama.

The VA and its adjacent and affiliated scavengers are pro-soldier propagandists when it benefits their narratives. They become deeply and deceptively anti-soldier at all other times.

In those other times, they probe the perimeter containing the entitlements and funding meant for veterans and families. They look restlessly for a way in. When veterans and advocates discover their attempts, they feign contrition and pretend to yank their hands out of the cookie jar.

What really happens is they regroup and look for another way in.

When the VA says it is rescinding its new rule, it is employing a ruse. The hope is that we’ll believe what we want to believe and turn complacent. That attention will melt. We’ll be distracted. Our defenses will drop. Then the same move will be tried again on a different axis of approach with smarter tactics. This was the playbook employed to cut the value of the military pension a half dozen times over the past four decades. It’s tried and true.

When they eventually breach our defenses, it’ll be because we’ve bought into two related fictions.

First, that politicians give a molecule of a shit about veterans. They only care when they need to be seen caring so we will continue doing their dirty work. Which is the definition of not caring at all.

Second, that the political label adorned to a politician’s lapel pin has any bearing on any of this. This is not a left/right issue. Pillaging military and veteran accounts is equal opportunity fuckery enjoyed in its various forms by all politicians, including some who wear uniforms.

That makes sense. Defense contractors and war profiteers didn’t buy all that influence for nothin’. They expect chateaucrats to keep up their end of the deal by reducing personnel costs and releasing savings into the big trough, so they can fatten themselves on it.

And there’s another reason. Military life is the sole vestige of America’s legacy work culture, which included things like guaranteed pensions vested at career tenure, affordable health care, tenure-indexed wages, and opportunity for working class heroes to breach the executive level and have a voice in policy.

At some stage, capitalists didn’t want this stuff anymore because they wanted more superyachts. So they stopped doing it, which birthed a union movement. Then a war on unions eventually brought most of those down too.

The military services are a last throwback.

The last thing politicians want is word getting out that what they label socialism is actually just the framework we’ve adopted to underwrite our nation’s security with a stable labor force. If that word gets out, more Americans might notice. This could disrupt the campaign to siphon all wealth and vitality out from under Americans while they’re distracted by Amygdala Theater, a campaign which is otherwise progressing nicely.

Woe betide a political persona or faction construed as responsible for limiting the slop accessible in the federal trough. Funders will not be pleased.

But they hate facts even more. So let’s close with a few.

---

IV.

Let’s lay down some truth.

1. The VA backed off not because it’s the right thing to do or because veterans pushed back. But because the Trump presidency will effectively conclude with the midterms unless every MAGA voter yanks a lever, and veterans are a notoriously right-wing constituency. Don’t mistake self-interest for giving a toss.

2. The VA views veteran disability compensation as a benefit, not an entitlement earned by service.

3. The VA and its propagandists will assail veterans with dependable tropes, such as rampant disability fraud, a lax or over-generous rating process, runaway government spending as a generality, and the notion that many wealthy veterans don’t need the compensation.

4. These narratives are all wrong and/or irrelevant.

5. People sign up for service knowing they might get badly disabled in war or via industrial exposure.

6. People also know and are reassured they will be cared for if anything happens to them -- it’s in every recruitment brochure ever printed.

7. When the US decided to double down on two wars, it should have concurrently ramped VA investment in anticipation. That didn’t happen and never happens.

8. Paying the costs of war should not be easy. If it is easy, then going to war is easy. If we let government swerve or discount the disability bill, we make it even easier for politicians to keep choosing war as a way to solve every problem, or to invent problems to solve, or to distract from domestic politics or create an electoral advantage for themselves with certain constituencies of voters.

Disability fraud is a tiny fraction of disability claims.

Around 1 million of America’s 18 million veterans are considered disabled enough to draw compensation. But most disability dollars go to those leasty able to function and provide for themselves. There is no huge issue of able-bodied veterans choosing to suck down bon-bons rather than work.

Post-9/11 veterans are more disabled as a cohort than any other in history, which makes sense. Deployment lengths and cumulative tempo were unprecedented because our government chose to conduct wars with a fraction of the required headcount. You know, to save money. You know, because these were going to be short wars.

Veteran disability should be the last cushion we dig under on the last couch we raid for a few nickels to hold up as proof of fiscal responsibility.

The first cushion should be sweetheart deals that reduce effective taxation for multi-national corporations who benefit from the tranquility of the global commons resulting from our global activism. This is the unstated reason for our defense budget and its primary benefit.

If indeed it is a benefit. It’s fair to question whether the US has created its own trade deficit by making it cheaper and easier for companies to utilize tranquil shipping lanes and peaceful commerce. Some say we’ve crafted a global footgun and paid handsomely for the privilege of global policing to sustain our own economy.

That’s one Hell of a prison.

I don’t know if I buy into all that. But I know it’s not something disabled veterans should be paying to troubleshoot.

Doug Collins assures veterans we can be his wingman. Then he says “show me the money.” I say he can’t handle the truth.

But you can. So here it is: the VA will be back, trying again, sooner than you think. Stay frosty. Write your legislator. Use your voice.

Fortune doesn’t favor the handsome, or even the brave.

Fortune favors the vigilant.

Tony is an American veteran and independent writer.