Presidential Candidates' Platforms

What are their plans for the military and our veterans?

by Heidi Russell Rafferty 

Who deserves your vote?

As rhetoric flies furiously, sorting through which candidate should become your commander in chief can be daunting. Your vote will affect each military family, from health care quality for injured veterans, to programs for troops transitioning into the civilian workplace, to increased funding for the Montgomery GI Bill.

Congressional contenders use their legislative track records as evidence that they’ll continue to give top priority to veterans. As commander in chief, all of them have visions of what they will change to make our lives better. But in a world of sound bites and press events, how can service members, veterans, and their families sift through the wheat and chaff to know what to really expect from our candidates?

The Wounded and Fallen

Candidates from both parties are equally outspoken about health care for wounded veterans, given the spotlight on Walter Reed Army Medical Center as well as ongoing VA budgetary issues.  Most pledge a stronger commitment to improving the system.

McCain supports repealing a historic ban on receiving both disability and retirement pay at the same time.  He notes that he’s successfully pushed for provisions to compensate disabled retired veterans for the disparity. 

Additionally, to help disabled veterans with their health care, McCain cosponsored a measure to allow them to enroll in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (the same insurance offered to senators and congressmen).  He’s also supported higher payments to disabled veterans and survivors of veterans who died because of service-connected injuries. 

Obama’s efforts on behalf of veterans include the Lane Evans Veterans Health and Benefits Improvement Act, which allows new veterans to get mental health care up to five years.  It also requires the VA and DoD to work together to track new veterans entering the VA to monitor emerging health trends and for better budget planning.

Clinton, like McCain, wants to eliminate the prohibition on concurrent receipt of disability and retirement benefits for veterans.  Additionally, she wants to eliminate the backlog of disability claims.

She’s also the cosponsor of the Dignified Treatment of Wounded Warriors Act, which provides increased funding for improved diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation. She pushed for the Heroes at Home Act, which ensures adequate care for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) sufferers. 

If elected, Clinton pledges to appoint “a high-level, experienced veteran responsible for streamlining and coordinating all health care, educational and career programs for veterans, reporting directly to me,” she said.

The Families

The effect of the War on Terror on the spouses and children of service members is also top-of-mind for most of the candidates.  While divided over whether the Bush course of action was faulty, all agree that at some level, families need a heightened level of support. 

Here are some of their thoughts:

Clinton supports an amendment to require that no unit or member of the armed forces be deployed unless the rest period is at least equal to the deployment period. 

She also recognizes that many families struggle financially during deployments.  So she worked to make sure military families receive financial literacy education beforehand.

She co-sponsored an amendment that expanded the Family Medical Leave Act to allow families of wounded warriors six months leave to take care of their loved ones.  Additionally, Clinton co-sponsored the Military Death Benefit Improvement Act to raise benefits from $12,000 to $100,000.

In an online video of a campaign speech in Iowa in September, Obama proposed a full withdrawal of combat troops leaving only residual forces behind. And according to an August New York Times report, Obama told the national convention for the Veterans of Foreign Wars that troops “cannot and should not bear the responsibility of resolving grievances at the heart of Iraq’s civil war.”

McCain supports an across-the-board pay raise.  He also sponsored legislation to provide deployed troops with a prepaid calling card or an equivalent telecommunications benefit every month.

Huckabee believes that troops should not have an extension beyond the current 15 months.  He also says troops should have as much time at home as deployed overseas. Huckabee notes that the Bush administration has plans to increase the Army and Marines by 92,000 during the next five years, but he wants to increase the forces in two to three years.  He’d also want to increase the military budget to Reagan-era levels of six percent of the national budget to maintain standards and expand training facilities.

Other republicans don’t want to withdraw from Iraq.  At a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in August,  Thompson criticized democratic candidates for their stance on pulling troops.

Romney supports Bush’s Iraq Policy.  In November, Romney announced that he would add at least 100,000 troops to the armed forces.  He also wants to commit at least four percent of the gross domestic product to national defense.  Additionally, Romney said he would create a “permanent rapid innovation force” within the military rapidly deploying to assist the military’s technological needs on the ground.