From battlefield to benefits office: A better deal for our warfighters and veterans

Every day, American veterans seek the benefits they earned in service to the nation, and for far too many they get an unacceptable answer from the Department of Veterans Affairs: Wait.

Wait while your files move between agencies that cannot reliably share data. Wait while claims are lost, duplicated, or routed to the wrong desk. Wait while the federal government, the most powerful institution on Earth, struggles to confirm what any veteran can tell you in five minutes: where they served, what they did, and what they are owed.

This is not a failure of will but of infrastructure. And it is part of a larger pattern, one that stretches from the veteran waiting on a claim in Denver to the warfighter waiting on a resupply in South Korea. The same government that cannot reliably track a service member’s records after they hang up the uniform is the same government that cannot reliably track every component in the weapons systems we hand them while they wear it.

We owe both ends of that lifecycle better. And blockchain........

© The Hill