It took a joint letter from Senate Veterans Committee Chairman Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) and ranking member Larry Craig (R-Idaho) to get DOD bureaucrats to renew Veterans Affairs physician access to a key military patient database, according to a Feb. 16 statement from Akaka and Craig. The Pentagon set up joint access last September for the Joint Patient Tracking Application, and then suspended access several weeks ago as DOD and VA haggled over further sharing of patient information. Craig called the affair “a bureaucratic legal snafu.”
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…