Airborne operation

T H E R E D 7 . n et
Friday, August 10, 2012
Airborne operation
Page 2
10th Special Forces Group (Airborne)
celebrates 60 years as ‘The Originals’
Page 7
Crestview girl competes
for Miss Northern
Florida Junior Teen
Page 5
Page | THE RED 7 | Friday, August 10, 2012
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Airborne Operation
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Year No. 2 Edition No. 33
Photos by Pfc. Steven Young | U.S. Army
At top, Sgt. Staciepearl Arjona, a soldier with the 7th Special Forces Group
(Airborne), is assisted July 26 while she puts on an SF-10A parachute at Duke Field.
Arjona was set to take her first jump in the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne)
after Airborne School. Numerous soldiers from the group participated in a static
line jump airborne operation. Above, Soldiers walk up the ramp of a C130 high
performance aircraft at Duke Field. At right (top), a soldier from the 7th Special
Forces Group (Airborne) performs duties of a Jump Master on the ramp of
a C130 high performance aircraft, the Jump Master watched as the drop zone was
approached. At right (bottom), soldiers exit from the ramp over Camp Rudder.
Friday, August 10, 2012 | THE RED 7 | Page Col. Miguel
D. Howe,
Deputy
Commander,
7th Special
Forces
Group
(Airborne),
receives the
guideon from
Maj. Edgar
Alvarez during a Change
of Command
ceremony
July 30 in
the Group
Support
Battalion
classroom.
Alvarez
relinquished
command
to Maj. Jay
Bush.
Photos by
Pfc. Steven
Young | U.S.
Army
Change of command
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Col. Miguel D. Howe, Deputy Commander, 7th Special
Forces Group (Airborne) passes the guideon to Maj. Jay
Bush during a Change of Command ceremony on July 30
in the Group Support Battalion classroom.
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Page | THE RED 7 | Friday, August 10, 2012
Boating course helps soldiers with surviving skills
Pfc. Steven Young | U.S. Army
Soldiers from headquarters company of 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) practice boating techniques Aug. 2 in open water on Eglin Air Force Base. Soldiers participated in the
small boat operators course where they gained familiarization with zodiacs and practiced capsizing drills in Choctawhatchee Bay.
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Friday, August 10, 2012 | THE RED 7 | Page Crestview girl competes for Miss Northern Florida Junior Teen
By TRACY CONNER
Contributing Writer
Even by beauty pageant
standards, it’s a dramatic
dress.
“You know that big yellow dress that Belle wears
in ‘Beauty and the Beast?’
It’s like that,” Hailey Prather
said of the ball gown she will
wear while competing Sunday and Monday to be this
year’s Miss Northern Florida
Junior Teen.
Prather is a 15-year-old
rising 10th-grader at Crestview High School whose dad,
1st Sgt. Shawn M. Prather, is
the acting detachment ser-
geant major of the U.S. Army
EOD Training Detachment at
Eglin Air Force Base.
He has been in the military
for almost 20 years. Hailey’s
pageant hobby is relatively
new, but it’s a family affair —
her parents and her siblings
will all be with her in Jacksonville, cheering her on.
“When she gets on stage,
she’s fine,” said her mother,
Ellen. “Unlike me. I get nervous, very nervous. I’m sick
as a dog when she goes up
there.”
The upcoming pageant is
a step along the way to the
National American Miss title.
Organizers said they empha-
size poise, self-confidence and
communication skills over
looks.
“Hailey is gorgeous, but
she’s one of those girls who
has it all,” Ellen said. “She’s
my scientist. She loves to
mess with things outside, with
animals, with nature. She can
shoot. She hunts — she’s shot
two deer. And yet she still likes
to be in pageants.”
To win the Junior Teen
title, Hailey will have to ace
an interview, give a speech,
make a personal introduction,
pose in her evening gown and
report on her community service. She is used to the performing-in-public part; as a
member of CHS’s Destiny
Show Choir, she sings and
dances.
“Still,” she admited, “I’m
nervous. I’m nervous but I’m
excited. I think I’m more excited than nervous.”
Her mother said getting
through the qualifying rounds
already has drawn Hailey out
of her shell.
“I think it has helped her.
It’s opened her up a lot,” Ellen said.
Indeed, Hailey said she
enjoys the social aspect of
pageants better than the onstage part.
“I like meeting new
people,” she said.
“I’m nervous ... but I’m excited. I think I’m more
excited than nervous. ... I like meeting new
people.”
— Hailey Prather
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Page | THE RED 7 | Friday, August 10, 2012
Defense pitch to hike TRICARE fees hit by cost slowdown
The Defense Department’s push to phase in
substantial TRICARE
fee increases for military
retirees came under fresh
attack from Congress and
military associations this
week after officials conceded an unexpected “downward spike” in TRICARE
cost growth tied to private
sector health care.
Robert Hale, the DOD
comptroller, held a news
conference Thursday
morning to defend the
credibility of department
claims that soaring health
costs make the TRICARE
benefit “unsustainable”
unless retirees pay more.
Defense officials had
based their TRICARE budget request for fiscal 2012
on projections that the cost
of care delivered through
private-sector providers
would jump by 12.9 percent
for active duty and by
8.9 percent for all other
beneficiaries, including
military retirees.
Instead, in the first six
months of the fiscal year,
private sector health costs
grew at “historically low
rates,” according to budget
documents. The rate was
only 0.6 percent for active
duty. More surprising, pri-
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2 percent miss on health
cost projections for fiscal
2012 is unrelated to their
call to raise TRICARE fees
on retirees. They maintain
that growth in military
health costs will continue to
outpace defense spending
generally, straining other
programs.
The House already has
refused to back the DOD
plan to raise TRICARE
fees on military retirees
in fiscal 2013. The Senate
Armed Services Committee
also has rejected those proposals to phase in higher
enrollment fees for
TRICARE Prime, the managed care benefit; to establish a first-ever enrollment
fee for TRICARE Standard,
the fee-for-service insurance plan option, and for
TRICARE Extra, the preferred provider network
option; and to establish
a first-ever enrollment
fee for the elderly under
TRICARE for Life, the military’s insurance supplement to Medicare.
But those ideas will be
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vate-sector care costs for
retirees, their families and
survivors actually fell
2.7 percent.
As a result, the health
program has a $708 million
surplus, which the department wants to “reprogram”
into other accounts to cover
higher than expected fuel
prices, the unscheduled
deployment of a second aircraft carrier to the Middle
East, and higher transportation costs tied to Pakistan’s closure of the main
land route for U.S. supplies
into Afghanistan.
But the health budget
surplus has angered critics
on Capitol Hill and advocates for military retirees.
They say it suggests senior
defense officials knowingly
have exaggerated the trajectory of health budgets to
try to persuade Congress to
approve higher TRICARE
fees for retirees.
Hale and Dr. Jonathan Woodson, assistant
secretary of defense for
health affairs, said the
issue of a “reasonable”
raised again as DOD officials continue to argue
that, unless fees increase,
additional force cuts will be
needed. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.,
chairman of the House
armed services’ subcommittee on military personnel, said he also learned
recently that this is the
second year of health
budget surpluses. In fiscal
2011, DOD had $500 million
in excess TRICARE funds
reprogrammed to other accounts. Hale said Thursday
he could not confirm that
information.
“I was surprised because the information we
had been provided is that
the reason for increasing
the TRICARE premiums,
up to 365 percent … is
ever-increasing health
care costs,” Wilson said in
a phone interview. “As it
turns out, there really is a
downward spike in health
care costs.”
Wilson said his first
reaction to this year’s surplus was to try to roll back
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$
modest TRICARE Prime
fee increases imposed on
working-age retirees and
to return those dollars to
beneficiaries. He’s been
told it can’t be done, Wilson said. But “at the very
least” higher fees sought in
defense plans beyond 2012
“should be withdrawn and
premiums should be frozen,” he said.
Wilson and 23 House
colleagues, including a few
Democrats on the armed
services committee, sent a
letter of “concern” July 24
to Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta suggesting the
reprogramming request
raises doubts about department arguments that
health care costs are out of
control.
“We do not understand
how DOD can justify a
request to raise fees on
a class of people whose
costs to the department are
actually decreasing,” said
the letter, which requested
more briefings on the issue.
Lawmakers also
pressed Panetta to explain
why his department doesn’t
use “excess” health dollars to find more effective
treatments for signature
wounds of the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars such as
traumatic brain injury and
post-traumatic stress, or
to address rising suicides
in the force that, so far this
year, are averaging out to
one suicide every day.
Hale responded to Wilson and his colleagues in
a July 30 letter, explaining
that the surplus was due to
“uncertainty about medical
inflation and health care
use, and the impact of
continual benefit changes
and efficiency initiatives.”
Budget documents also
referred to a shift in beneficiary population, but
neither Hale nor Woodson
could explain that.
Hale told Wilson that in
PLEASE SEE tricare | page 7
Friday, August 10, 2012 | THE RED 7 | Page from Page 6
years past money had to
be shifted into TRICARE
accounts because spending
was higher than projected.
In any case, the need for
TRICARE fee increases is
unrelated, Hale wrote.
“We requested higher
fees for TRICARE to control our rapidly growing
health care costs while
moving the cost-sharing ratio (for beneficiaries) back
toward the levels originally
mandated by Congress. As
you know, these fees have
not been increased significantly for about 15 years,”
Hale wrote.
He noted total military
health costs rose from $19
billion in fiscal 2001 to more
than $52 billion last year, a
climb of 174 percent.
“These sharply rising
costs threaten to leave our
military budget unbalanced
— with too much funding
for military compensation
and too little for training
and equipping our forces,”
Hale wrote.
That DOD has found
a surplus of TRICARE
dollars two years running
should spur Congress to
be skeptical of claims that
beneficiaries need to pay
more, said Steve Strobridge, director of government relations for Military
Officers Association of
America.
Tom Philpott is a syndicated
columnist. You may write to him
at Military Update, P.O. Box
231111, Centreville, VA 201201111; or at [email protected].
10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) celebrates 60 years as ‘The Originals’
By LT. COL. STEVE
OSTERHOLZER
1Oth SFG(A) PAO
FO R T
C A R S ON ,
Colo.(USASOC News Service)
— Soldiers, family members,
retirees and distinguished
visitors honored the history of
the 10th Special Forces Group
(Airborne) as the unit celebrated its 60th Anniversary
as the original Special Forces
unit throughout the month of
June 2012, with a multi-day
event that included a kick-off
ceremony, golf tournament,
compound tours, weapons
familiarization for family and
friends, Commander’s Motorcycle Ride, picnic and the
highlight of the military ball
at a five-star hotel.
“Incumbent with wearing
the flash of the 10th Group is
a responsibility to uphold the
lineage, tradition and honor of
the U.S. Army Special Forces.
We are ‘The Originals’ and
we are ‘The Best’ ” said Col.
John Deedrick, commander
of 10th SFG (A) Group. “We
wanted to recognize the tremendous history of the 10th
Special Forces Group with a
celebration befitting the unit’s
E
FRE ING
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PA
Concealed
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Sat/ Sun 11am or 2pm
distinguished accomplishments and to honor its warriors both past and present.
The celebration of the Army’s first Special Forces unit
was tremendous both in scale
and the importance of attendees which boasted five original members of the 10th SFG
(A), seven active duty and retired general officers, a Medal
of Honor and Distinguished
Service Cross recipient, five
former Group Commanders,
three former Group Command Chiefs, three former
Group Command Sergeants
Majors and four Gold Star
families traveled from all over
the globe to take part in this
historic event.
Lt. Gen. Charles T. Cleveland, commander of the U.S.
Army Special Operations
Command, was the guest
speaker for the military ball.
The celebration was
opened in a formal ceremony
that included the induction of
50 current group Soldiers into
the unit’s Century Jumper
Club. Members of this organization achieved the rare feat
of having made more than
100 airborne jumps and are
a certified Jumpmaster. The
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ceremony was highlighted by
a patriotic parachute demonstration from the Black
Daggers, the United States
Army Special Operations
Command’s official military
freefall demonstration team.
The sharp report of weapons being fired and golf balls
being whacked sounded as
family members and visitors
fired a variety of weapons employed by the group’s Soldiers
and to enjoy the camaraderie
of friends both old and new.
About 250 civilians, retirees
and friends got a taste of a
Special Forces Soldier’s life
by firing numerous weapons
utilizing live ammunition
while nearly 150 golfers enjoyed a golf tournament at the
Cheyenne Mountain Resort.
The sight and roar of about
250 motorcycles filled the
roadway as the Commander’s
Motorcycle Ride headed out
of Fort Carson on their way
to MacCandless Veteran’s
U.S. Army
Participants in the Group’s 60th Anniversary Commander’s Ride visit with veterans at the MacCandless
Veteran’s Home.
Home, led by Cleveland. There
the riders interacted with and
showed their appreciation to
veterans at the home, whose
pride in their service touched
many of the bikers who rode
in the largest Commander’s
Ride in the Group’s history.
August
11th & 12th
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Page | THE RED 7 | Friday, August 10, 2012
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