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Washington » At the urging of a Salt Lake City company, Sen. Bob Bennett has secured $5 million to produce slick DVDs that combine video, pictures and documents to tell the story of individual National Guard units.
Supporters say these "records of service" are a meaningful way to show gratitude to those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and will likely boost morale and retention rates. But critics argue Bennett is taking money away from training, equipping and even feeding U.S. troops to help a Utah company produce nice, but unnecessary, digital scrapbooks.
"Which would you rather have -- scrapbooks or fully trained military personnel? If you had better trained personnel you would have more people to hand scrapbooks to when they came home," said Winslow Wheeler, a critic of defense earmarks who works for the Center for Defense Information.
His analogy may sound harsh, but Bennett funds his earmark by taking $5 million from the Defense Department's operations and maintenance account, which covers all kinds of routine items necessary for military readiness.
Last year, the Navy's operations budget ran dry, forcing commanders to curtail training until Congress could approve more money
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a longtime earmark opponent, cited this example as the justification for an amendment that would prohibit Congress from taking money out of the operations fund for earmarks.
But Coburn's amendment went nowhere and the Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved -- 93 to 7 -- the defense bill, including more than 50 earmarks that take a combined $171 million out of the operations fund.
The only one of those disputed earmarks that would benefit a Utah company is the $5 million Bennett requested for Salt Lake City-based Storyrock. The senator defends the earmark and its funding source, which members of Congress have used regularly in years past.
"You are going to have to fund it from some place," the Utah Republican said. "The percentage of the overall operating budget that this represents is very, very small."
To be precise, it is .003 percent of the $154 billion operations fund, which also covers recruitment and morale building efforts.
Pentagon leaders try to avoid any direct confrontation with a senator on an individual project, but have repeatedly denounced earmarks such as these.
"Every dollar that we are forced to spend on things which we do not need requires us to take money from things which we do need," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. "And the people who lose in that trade-off are our troops and the taxpayers."
He said the operations fund is what the Defense Department uses to make sure the troops are ready to do their jobs.
"Given all that is being asked of the military these days, it is more important than ever," he said.
Bennett argues the historical DVD-ROMs will be a moneymaker for the Defense Department, resulting in more re-enlistments and therefore less spending on recruiting new guardsmen and training them.
This is the same argument Storyrock makes, relying on a small survey of 125 Utah National Guardsmen conducted by the company in 2007. Storyrock said 63 percent of the guardsmen were more likely to re-enlist after viewing the discs and 72 percent said their families would be more supportive of their re-enlistment after viewing them.
Bennett says it is time to take this "pilot program" nationwide.
"Some sort of permanent record can be very, very important to a veteran looking back on his service," he said.
Storyrock started out as a company that sold software to make digital yearbooks and scrapbooks, but in the past five years has developed a division devoted to making the unit-based DVD-ROMs for the military. Storyrock officials bristle when people call them scrapbooks, preferring historical records or "records of service."
It all started with the now defunct 96th Regional Readiness Command that was based at Salt Lake's Fort Douglas. Since then, the company has created similar discs for the Utah National Guard and a special one for the southern Utah-based 222 Field Artillery after it returned from Iraq in 2005. The company is now working on a record of service for those stationed at Hill Air Force Base.
Utah National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Hank McIntire sees the discs as a way to collect and preserve military history; something that he says has fallen by the wayside in recent years.
"They are filling a need we currently can't fill within the organization, because of budget constraints," he said. "Without them we would be scrambling to put that history together."
McIntire, who helped collect the information for the Guard projects, said it wouldn't be his place to comment on the funding debate in Washington, but did say he appreciated the contributions from private companies that funded their DVD-ROMs.
"Waiting for the government to provide something can sometimes take years," he said. "But going to the private sector certainly speeds up the process and builds up that good will between corporate America and the military."
Sharlene Hawkes leads Storyrock's Remember My Service division, and she is the one who found those corporate sponsors -- the first being Merit Medical, which gave $15,000 to fund the project for the 222 Field Artillery.
"I wish I had something like that to show my family," said Fred Lampropoulos, CEO of Merit Medical and a former Green Beret. "Having a visual record would be terrific."
Every member of the "Triple Deuce" received the disc that included video messages, field reports and at least a one-page history on every member of the unit.
"It was really nice to have an additional resource to kind of pass down to our kids," said Capt. Cody Workman, of Richfield.
He called the Storyrock product "an invaluable thing to show families," though he doesn't particularly like the idea of paying for the project out of the operations fund.
"You have to put everything you can into the soldiers who are there," he said. "You have to have the best equipment and resources."Hawkes said she will continue to hunt for private companies willing to foot the bill, but said it has taken years to find corporate sponsors for past projects.
"That is a very hard model in this economy," she said.
So Hawkes, a former Miss America, turned to Utah's members of Congress. She learned the congressional process over the past few years on numerous lobbying trips that have resulted in Bennett's interest and the subsequent earmark.
Each disc costs on average $26, so Hawkes estimates that if the full Congress approves the $5 million earmark, she can give almost half of all national guardsmen a personalized history. But her long-term goal is to produce a disc annually for every unit in the nation, something that will take a more steady funding source. Until then, she intends to return to Bennett and Utah's federal lawmakers for support.
Storyrock's earmark application says the company plans to seek $5 million every year for at least three more years.
This is a corrected version of a story first published online Tuesday. The original version contained a mathematical error regarding the percentage of the military operations budget represented by Sen. Bob Bennett's $5 million earmark for DVD histories of national guardsmen.
Sen. Bob Bennett says that historical DVDs for National Guard units will be moneymakers for the Defense Department and will result in more re-enlistments. Critics say the project will take money from training.
