Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Pentagon Forms Committee to Oversee Walter Reed Repairs

Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced Wednesday that the military has formed a committee to oversee improvements to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The co-chairman of the independent review group, Togo West, details the responsibilities of the new committee.


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TOGO WEST: The A-76 procedure is a procedure by which a facility evaluates whether it should take governmental assignments and convert them into private contractor assignments. It almost freezes any hiring until that process is completed.


It was a long process. Once it was done, Walter Reed was down by as much as 37 percent among its most important caseworker, nursing, and the like functions.



JIM LEHRER: In other words, the number of people available to do the work was going down while the number of patients was increasing, both of them dramatically, right?



TOGO WEST: They, the Army personnel there, they, the intermediate supervisors, and, yes, to get to your real question, they, the people in charge, the commander, the surgeon general. And they were soldiering ahead, like the Army, does trying to make do as best they could in time of war and with a lot of funding going to other things.



JIM LEHRER: But they sounded no alarms and did nothing about it?



TOGO WEST: Only Secretary Gates can answer that. What is clear was that what he did sent a message that reverberated throughout the Pentagon, the services, in terms of his determination to get, a, to the bottom of it, but also, b, to see what lessons needed to be learned to care for servicemembers.


This is the all-volunteer military. This is a nation and a service at war in two theaters. He had to do that, in his view, I am certain, and it certainly did send a strong message.

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