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Watch Ed Asner, Rue McLanahan and teen actor Alex Black star in the world premiere of the Hallmark Channel Original Movie “Generation Gap.”

Asner, a seven-time Emmy winner and five-time Golden Globe winner, stars as Bart Cahill, a retired army colonel who agrees to take in his rebellious grandson (Black, Nickelodeon’s “Ned’s Declassified”) for the summer to set the boy straight. As the summer progresses, each of the stubborn pair begins to learn that you are never too young – or too old – to discover something new about yourself.

Watch the movie premiere on the Hallmark channel on Saturday, October 25 (9pm/8c).

Read more about the movie here.

Read the full press release, or download the electronic version of the handbook.

DoD announced today it has developed a comprehensive handbook describing compensation and other benefits service members and their families would be entitled to upon separation or retirement as a result of serious injury or illness.

“The Compensation and Benefits Handbook is the one source of information that covers everything a seriously ill and injured service member will need during his or her recovery, rehabilitation and reintegration,” said Ronald A. Winter, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs.

The handbook was compiled in cooperation with the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education and the Social Security Administration. Additionally; there are references to assistance provided by other governmental and non-governmental agencies and organizations.

The Soldier Wish Campaign is an initiative that focuses on giving back to the Soldiers, Seamen and Airmen of the United States military that have sacrificed so much for our country. Created by Wishy, Inc., the Campaign allows Americans to easily log onto the Soldierwish.com website and view a list of Wishes that our men and women in uniform have made for themselves and for their families. Citizens can then purchase these wishes easily and securely – all payment information for the purchaser and shipping information for the soldier are kept confidential.

The Soldier Wish Campaign is a real way Americans can say “thank you” to our men and women in uniform for the sacrifice that they and their families make every day for our freedom.

The Department of Defense Education Activity has more than 60 years of experience supporting military students around the world. Today, of the 1.2 million children of military service members, approximately 80,000 (or less than ten percent) attend Department of Defense schools. The rest attend public or private schools or are home schooled.

Force structure changes coupled with transition and deployment have created an ongoing need to enrich and expand partnerships with military-connected communities throughout the nation. Through the Educational Partnership, DoDEA is committed to ensuring that the thousands of students being relocated throughout the nation because of these actions receive the best possible educational opportunities.

On September 30, 2008, The Department of Defense’s Educational Partnership Branch launched a new website http://militaryk12partners.dodea.edu focused on providing information that directly relates to the work of educators and administrators in military-connected school systems. The site provides a wealth of information about resources available for schools located around the country that serve military families. The site will also provide information for school liaison officers which will help point schools in the direction of available resources.

See what they have to offer you! The child it helps could be your own.

Modern weapons systems allow snipers to be more effective, especially in urban settings, but there’s a counter to snipers — the Boomerang — which detects the shock wave and the muzzle blast caused by a fired bullet.

Boomerang uses seven microphones arrayed in a spray pattern attached to a vehicle’s exterior. When it detects a fired bullet, Boomerang alerts servicemembers inside the vehicle by a speaker and a clock display image.

Boomerang’s maker, BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., says incoming fire and the shooter’s position are detected in less than two seconds. Boomerang is accurate for shots made up to a quarter mile away.

“It’s designed to work on the move and has been tested to 65 mph in a noisy-road vehicle environment,” says Mark Sherman, general manager of BBN’s Boomerang Division.

Sherman cites an early success in Iraq when a Boomerang was rushed to a Marine unit at a manual gate outside a hospital compound where a sniper had killed several Marines. Marines installed Boomerang the night they received it and captured the sniper the next day.

In another situation, Sherman says, an Army unit in Baghdad, Iraq, was the target of a sniper shooting through a few rooms from the rear of a building. The sniper escaped out the back of the building, but by using Boomerang, the soldiers were able to catch the Chechnya-trained sniper.

BBN’s $73.8 million contract for 8,131 Boomerangs, spares, and training services is to be completed by June 2009.

BBN also is developing a lightweight, soldier-wearable shooter detection system in partnership with the U.S. Army’s Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center. The system will work in both stand-alone and networked environments.

Sherman says the man-wearable unit gives 360-degree coverage and tracks and locks onto the shooter for up to a minute after the shot, regardless of any evasive action a soldier takes.

“The system will tell the soldier where the shot came from, even at the soldier’s new location,” Sherman says.

About the author: Alan M. Petrillo is a Tucson, Ariz. freelance writer who works in a wide variety of fields, writing for national and regional magazines and newspapers. He also is the author of the historical mystery, Full Moon (JoNa Books, 2005).

The U.S. military should reassess its child care system to look for ways to make it better fit the needs of military families and more effectively meet recruitment, readiness and retention goals, according to a study issued last week by the RAND Corporation.

“The U.S. Department of Defense has done a good job of delivering high quality child care on military bases,” said Gail L. Zellman, the study’s lead author and a senior research psychologist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “However, our research found that it isn’t meeting the child care needs of many service members; it may be time to reexamine the system as a whole for possible improvements.”

The military child care system is the largest employer-sponsored child care provider in the country and is widely recognized for providing high-quality care. Currently, DoD spends $480 million annually to provide care for 175,000 of the nearly 1.3 million children under age 12 who are eligible as dependents of active duty military members and selected reservists.

“Unlike other military benefits that are broadly available to all or many military members, child care benefits are targeted to families with young children,” said Susan M. Gates, RAND senior economist and coauthor of the report.

An estimated 7 percent of all military members use Child Development Centers and another 4 percent use Family Child Care homes. Among military families with children, fewer than half use DoD-sponsored child care.

Care in the Child Development Centers — large centers usually located on military installations that provide care on a fee-for-service basis — is more expensive to provide than care provided by Family Child Care homes. The Family Child Care homes offer child care by trained individuals, usually military spouses, for up to six children in their military quarters.

The Child Development Centers are heavily subsidized and most have waiting lists, particularly for infants and very young children — the group where adequate care is hardest to find, according to researchers. The centers give priority to single-parent service members and dual-military career service members. Because more families are choosing to live off base, the centers are not accessible to many families.

Although Family Child Care homes can provide flexible child care, they also are located on base, provide only limited cost subsidies and have no comprehensive back-up network of child care providers.

The military does not provide subsidies to servicemembers who seek child care outside the military system. Research has found that benefits that allow flexibility generally are more highly valued than more costly benefits that limit choice, Zellman said. Servicemembers might prefer a voucher of a lower value that can be used anywhere to a subsidized slot in a child care center on base, she said.

Although the military provides child care primarily to improve readiness, retention and recruitment, it does not collect information that would enable it to determine whether the system is achieving those goals.

The study suggests several areas DoD should further investigate to better align the childcare system with its goals and servicemember needs:

• Examine the possibility of redistributing resources within the current system to provide military benefits to more families, and better support the types of care that would be more likely to benefit readiness.
• Determine whether child care benefits could be expanded to cover more military families and a broader set of childcare needs.
• Consider investing more resources into collecting information that would provide a more accurate picture of how the current childcare system affects Defense Department goals.

The study was sponsored by the Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation, and conducted within the Forces and Resources Policy Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense intelligence community.

The study, “Options for Improving the Military Child Care System,” is available at www.rand.org.