Army Directive Prohibits Retaliation for Reporting a Crime
The Secretary of the Army last week issued a directive specifying that retaliating against someone for reporting a crime is itself a crime.
“No Soldier may retaliate against a victim, an alleged victim or another member of the Armed Forces based on that individual’s report of a criminal offense,” the new Directive states. See Prohibition of Retaliation Against Soldiers for Reporting a Criminal Offense, Army Directive 2014-20, June 19, 2014.
Prohibited forms of retaliation include adverse personnel actions and ostracism, as well as “acts of cruelty, oppression or maltreatment.”
The directive implements a requirement that was enacted by Congress in the 2014 defense authorization act (section 1709) as part of a legislative response to instances of sexual assault in the military.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.