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Editorial: Troops deserve better

“Our troops are our most valuable asset,” military leaders like to say. But as we begin National Military Appreciation Month, it is worth examining how actions and words sometimes don’t match up.

Recent revelations about the squalid barracks to which 82nd Airborne Division soldiers were assigned after 15 months in Afghanistan provide a vivid example.

Little more than a year after the media exposed the moldy and all-but-uninhabitable quarters in which wounded troops were being housed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, these soldiers were delivered into much the same conditions.

How could this happen after the Walter Reed scandal cost the secretary of the Army, the Army surgeon general and the medical center commander their jobs? Wasn’t the public fury and the Army’s embarrassment enough of a signal to the rest of the Army?

Here’s how it happens: Money runs tight. Leaders tell their people to “suck it up.” And troops do what they do best: drive on.

From 2005 to 2007, the Army failed to fund $2.2 billion in “estimated annual facility requirements.” That includes money to make barracks livable.

The fact is, the Army short-changed these troops — and their leaders let it happen.

It is one thing to ask service members to endure Spartan conditions in the war zone. It is quite another to ask them to do so in their own country.

Military Appreciation Month should not be merely a happy slogan. It ought to be a national passion, and that passion ought to start with leaders on every base and post across this nation.