Veterans Affairs officials told lawmakers Tuesday that the special call center VA established following the May 3 theft of information on some 26.5 million veterans and another 2.2 million active and reserve personnel is costing about $200,000 a day to operate. The tally so far is around $7 million. And, the letters the VA has sent out to some 17.5 million veterans has cost about $7 million—$1 million for printing and $6 million for postage. So, the VA has spent, so far, some $14 million out of the $25 million that Congress authorized it to reprogram to help cover this fiasco. Now, the VA is working to get a contract to provide a year’s worth of free credit monitoring for all its victims. VA officials told Stars & Stripes that the contracting effort would take through July.
The Air Force awarded a $13.08 billion contract to the Sierra Nevada Corporation on April 26 for its Survivable Airborne Operations Center aircraft, the successor to the service’s E-4B “Doomsday” plane. Like the E-4B, officially called the National Airborne Operations Center, the SAOC will be meant to withstand a nuclear attack and keep…