It's time for our great installment!
Military policy!
Tomorrow, a brief break ... Ed Gillespie writes to Ptolemy and Ptolemy tells you about it!
Kerry:
Treat military families better. All military personnel in war zones get body armor. All families who have paid for body armor out of pocket to date get reimbursements.
Will raise military pay and improve military housing. Review and reform military health care system. Review and reform military family education system. Guaranteed right to timely deployment information. Undo Bush's cuts in hazard pay and death benefits.
Undo Bush cuts and fee adjustments in the VA health care system. Provide health care for reservists and their families as well. Restore family separation allowances and impact aid for schooling. Augment the life insurance policies of all active personnel.
Stop the Bush policy of evicting families of killed personnel from military housing. Give the families a year in that housing, and provide continued pay during that year.
Active reservists will be allowed to withdraw from their IRAs penalty free to cover unexpected expenses for themselves or their families.
Modernize military units with IT. All vehicles to be fitted with keyboards, touch screen monitors, and email command capability.
Cut as yet unspecified weapons programs and use money to recruit an additional 40,000 troops to the Army. Relieve reservists and guard units with these new army units.
Base closings will be halted until a complete review of military deployment is made, so as to use troops most efficiently at home and abroad.
Recruitment and training will be focused on increasing the number of MPs, military engineers, psyops personnel, special forces, civil project managers, and peacekeeping troops.
Augment military efforts with a peacekeeping force ... not a reserve or a Peace Corps, but a Civilian Stability Corps, who would be sent out to help set up courts, public works, education, economic institutions, public planning, and public safety in recent war zones and failed states. Like military reservists, they will have peacetime jobs as judges, engineers and the like; they will be called into service to restore roads, renovate schools, open hospitals, repair power systems, draft a constitution, or build a police force. A Civilian Stability Corps can reduce pressure on the military to do these jobs alone, especially when the UN leaves (read Kosovo or Iraq).
Nader:
Focused on arms control, nuclear control, and cooperating with NGOs, the UN, and other nations on peaceful world projects. So are Bush and Kerry, but Nader has no soldiers/vets/military policy per se. He wants to focus on a new foreign policy, so as to reduce as yet unspecified redundant weapons and their massive costs.
Education, health care, and other social programs are for the entire population or at least those who require it, so restoration of military benefits to Clinton levels or above are not addressed. You get it as a soldier or as a citizen.
New programs for the military are not addressed, nor recruiting, base closings, etc.
No plan for war zones like Kerry's Civilian Corps, but wide ranging plans for cooperation, which will be addressed in foreign policy diary.
Bush -
Increase defense spending further. Focus expenditures on fighting terrorism. Continue to increase regular pay for soldiers (no mention of future plans for hazard pay ... cuts?). Target pay increases for rank and retention.
Continue plan to underfund military housing improvements by 25% as compared to Clinton administration.
Continue to eliminate military housing units in service. Designated as inadequate, but that's not what the people living there have to say about it.
Subsidize out of pocket living expenses for military families (but no mention of body armor).
Prolong military committments and training missions, but continue to pay the soldiers for it (how nice).
Continue joint missions with indigenous forces like the Northern Alliance, the Kurds, and the Pakistanis.
Continue work on missile defense.
Use the FBI more for military intelligence, or at least pay them out of the Pentagon budget.
Build stealth ships to evade radar, and long-range missile subs.
Unmanned aerial vehicles which provide greater, longer-endurance intelligence and combat capabilities directly to the war-fighter at far less cost and risk to military personnel than manned aircraft;
Unmanned underwater vehicles that can greatly extend the range and capabilities of submarines and surface ships at less cost and without risk to sailors;
The Army's Land Warrior technology, which digitizes the communications and intelligence capabilities of the individual infantry soldier to enhance situational awareness and combat capability (those stormtrooper suits we all loved so much three months ago);
Small precision bombs, which increase the quantity of targets that each individual aircraft can strike;
Bunker-defeating munitions to target the growing threats of deeply hidden weapons of mass destruction (these are the small nukes); and
Space-based radar and space control systems, which enhance our surveillance capabilities and our capabilities to collect and utilize information from space (on the way to the Moon).