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 SU Continues To Bolster Commitment To Supporting Veterans And Their Families 

 Virginia Values Veterans (V3) has announced that Shenandoah University is now a certified V3 employer, further strengthening Shenandoah’s commitment to providing opportunities for military veterans.

Introduced by the Department of Veterans Services (DVS) in 2012, V3 is a free training and certification program that helps employers of all sizes implement best practices in recruiting, hiring and retaining highly skilled and dependable veterans. 

Shenandoah’s V3 Program certification is an important step in the university’s effort to hire the most talented and qualified employees. Over 700,000 veterans live in Virginia, including 200,000 in Northern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley.

SU already employs more than 30 military-affiliated faculty and staff members.

Shenandoah University does a wonderful job valuing and honoring veterans. As a retired Marine, my experience here is nothing short of amazing. Specifically, the culture and camaraderie here are truly magnificent.”
Rakene Lee, Shenandoah University’s director of human resources

Shenandoah University has a history of supporting veterans and their families. SU is a Military Friendly® School, has received Military Support Recognition from Colleges of Distinction, and is a Yellow Ribbon school. The university, which has over 160 military-affiliated students, has an active student veteran organization – Shenandoah Veterans and Supporters – and operates the Veterans, Military and Families Center (VMFC) on its main campus in Winchester, Virginia.

Shenandoah often partners with Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2123 in Winchester and the Northern Shenandoah Valley Community Veterans Engagement Board, and teamed up with the latter to host the Veterans Community Engagement Forum in June 2022.

Additionally, the university has worked with Veterans Moving Forward, which provides service dogs and canine therapy services to veterans facing physical and/or mental health challenges, and serves as a departure point for Honor Flight-Top of Virginia, which sends veterans on an all-expenses paid trip to see the nation’s memorials in Washington, D.C, as part of the national Honor Flight Network.

Shenandoah University also is renovating the former National Guard armory on its main campus, which will become the Hub for Innovators, Veterans and Entrepreneurs (HIVE). The HIVE will feature an expanded Veterans, Military and Families Center and will be a regional anchor that provides comprehensive support and resources to veterans, their families, caregivers and survivors in a welcoming atmosphere designed to address their unique needs.

 Shenandoah Receives Virginia Values Veterans Certification - Shenandoah University (su.edu) 

The American Legion

JAN 12, 2023

Job-seeking veterans, transitioning servicemembers and military spouses in the Washington, D.C., area are encouraged to save the date for a hiring event scheduled in conjunction with The American Legion’s Washington Conference.

The American Legion and Hiring Our Heroes are presenting the National Capital Region Hiring Fair from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Feb. 28 at the Washington Hilton, 1919 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20009.

The American Legion will conduct a series of career workshops, including:

9 a.m., military to civilian translation resume workshop;

10 a.m., federal resume workshop;

10:45 a.m., financial literacy workshop;

11:30 a.m., networking luncheon with employer panel.

For more details and to register for the workshops, click (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-american-legion-transition-employment-career-workshops-wash-dc-tickets-380562963067.)

Job seekers and employers can register for the job fair, which runs from 1-4 p.m., by clicking (https://events.hiringourheroes.org/event/4e1a4ac1-15c5-409a-be47-90c0a907cb37/summary). Further details on the event will be shared on Legion.org and the Legion’s LinkedIn page in the weeks to come.

Other upcoming career fairs, both virtual and in-person events, can be found at Legion.org/careers/jobfairs. Those events include:

·       The Department of Texas Veterans Career Fair, Jan. 18 at Austin Southpark Hotel. Click (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/american-legion-mid-winter-veterans-career-fair-registration-tickets-483336310917) for more information.

·       Springfield (Va.) Job Fair, March 23 at American Legion Post 176. Click (https://www.jobzoneonline.com/job-fair-details.aspx?eventID=03-23-2023-job-fair-springfield-va) for more information.

   By 

DOUG G. WARE

STARS AND STRIPES • December 14, 2022 

 WASHINGTON — In 1923, Congress decided the federal government needed a new independent agency to recognize fallen American troops from battlefields around the world and take care of the memorials and monuments in foreign lands that honor them.

Now, a century later, the American Battle Monuments Commission still strives toward that goal at nearly 60 burial grounds, memorials, monuments and markers in 17 countries.

“For 100 years, [we] have ensured that the memory of those who fell overseas defending our nation will never fade,” the commission said in a statement. “As one century of this noble mission ends and another begins, ABMC is renewing the nation’s promise to ensure, in the words of General of the Armies John J. Pershing, that ‘time will not dim the glory of their deeds.’ ”

On Wednesday, ABMC kicked off its centennial celebration with the hope it will educate more Americans of its purpose and encourage them to visit any one of its dozens of sites that honor fallen U.S. troops from several conflicts, including World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

ABMC, for example, operates and maintains the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France, where more than 9,300 U.S. troops are buried. Many troops who were killed during the D-Day landings in 1944 are buried there. Same goes for the Ardennes American Cemetery in Belgium, the Santiago Surrender Tree in Cuba and the North Africa American Cemetery in Tunisia — as well as 54 other foreign burial grounds, memorials and markers.

“These sites have become a way to share both our cultural and our historical heritage,” retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, ABMC’s chairman, said Wednesday at the centennial kickoff event. “That’s what has happened in the first century. But now as we’re about to enter the second century, we have an opportunity.”

That opportunity, he said, is introducing new generations to America’s fallen war heroes at ABMC’s 26 burial grounds and 32 memorials and monuments in other countries such as Panama, Luxembourg, Mexico, Tunisia, Cuba, Papua New Guinea and Morocco.

“We plan to expand our message,” Hertling said, noting 2.5 million people visited the sites in 2022. “The majority of visitors to our sites, truthfully, are not American. They are the local nationals who want to understand things better than we even do about what these [troops] fought for and died for.”

Officially, ABMC’s 100th anniversary arrives in March, and officials said they’re planning bigger celebrations at the sites for Memorial Day in May. Virtual tours of the sites online also are coming, the commission said.

 In all, the commission cares for the remains of more than 200,000 fallen American troops in the burial grounds outside the United States. 

“After the fighting ended in WWI, America gave families the option of repatriating the remains of their loved ones or keeping them overseas with their brothers-in-arms, where they fell in battle,” said ABMC Secretary Charles Djou, who served as a congressman from Hawaii from 2010-2011. “Most families opted to keep their loved ones overseas with their fellow service members and hence my agency, the ABMC, was created to care for these fallen soldiers who remained overseas.”

Though most of the commission’s duties and responsibilities lie on foreign soil, it does maintain four sites in the U.S. – the East Coast Memorial (WWII) in New York City, the West Coast Memorial (WWII) in San Francisco, the Honolulu Memorial (WWII) in Hawaii and the World War I Memorial in Pershing Park in downtown Washington near the White House, which opened in 2021.

To help commemorate the centennial and maximize exposure, the commission produced a documentary film about the sites honoring America’s fallen troops. A few minutes of the film were aired at Wednesday’s centennial event.

“While the film shares some very powerful stories from our past 100 years, it also looks forward at our mission into the future,” said Mike Knapp, ABMC’s chief of historical services.

The documentary film will premiere sometime in 2023.

DOUG G. WARE   Doug G. Ware covers the Department of Defense at the Pentagon. He has many years of experience in journalism, digital media and broadcasting and holds a degree from the University of Utah. He is based in Washington, D.C. 

   By Michael Taylor, San Antonio Express News 

 It’s silly season for finance and economics writers — when members of what I call the financial infotainment industrial complex decide that year-end is when they should issue predictions about how markets will perform in 2023. Stock prices, interest rates and oil prices, for example, are things they find incredibly tempting to prognosticate about.

I am regularly asked by well-meaning friends and acquaintances: “What do you think about the markets?” Such a question invites a thoughtful prediction from a finance guy in their life about what is going to happen in the near-to-medium future — presumably, so they can profit or avoid losses.

I try my scrupulous best to say that I really have no idea what will happen one year from now. At the same time, I tell them that I’m generally willing to bet — but not guarantee — that, broadly speaking, stocks 10 years from now will be higher than they are today, with plenty of random movement up and down during that span. This is a pretty annoying answer, admittedly. Only incredibly boring ways to invest can flow from such an answer. Frankly, it’s a conversation ender, which tells you how fun I am at parties.

READ MORE: Taylor: What we can learn from the great crypto meltdown of 2022

Behavioral finance theories explain some reasons we tend to be shockingly bad at making predictions.

One tendency is anchoring bias. When presented with a number, we tend to anchor future number guesses around the first number. In practice, this means that if the stock market went up 10 percent last year, future predictions tend to cluster near “up 10 percent,” even if down 12 or up 18 is just as likely.

Another tendency is recency bias, which suggests that if markets have been mellow in the recent past, we expect mellow. If markets have been volatile, we expect more volatility, even if markets don’t tend to play out that way in real life.

A further tendency plaguing predictions is our insistence on pattern recognition, even when viewing chaotic data. We humans are so good at creating narratives that we can find a story and explanation even when events are totally stochastic. It’s a whole other story, but chart watching as a pseudoscience among market participants is based on this need to find patterns among chaos.

I responded to an emailed Vanguard Brokerage poll this past week, asking me questions about my guesses on the direction of stocks, bonds and U.S. economic growth in the coming year. Because I’m a savvy knower of behavioral finance theory, I suspect that Vanguard does not want this data from clients in order to improve its investing perspective or style. Rather, it wants to measure the breadth and extent of predictive errors that its clients make when envisioning the future. Such predictions are inevitably more revealing of ignorance than they are of prescience.

Vanguard also, depressingly, publishes its “Economic and Market Outlook for 2023: Global Summary” because it knows that its clients don’t understand the depths of their own ignorance.

Interestingly, Bloomberg News, which compiles Wall Street forecasts, notes that 2023 predictions for the stock market are negative for the first time this century.

This feels like a case of anchoring and recency bias among Wall Street analysts, as the S&P 500 stock index dropped roughly 18 percent year-to-date, as of mid-December.

Finance writer Bob Veres described the failure of investment predictions best, when he said market prognosticators “ought to be (in the interests of full disclosure) wearing a wizard’s hat and staring intently into a crystal ball.”

Veres, by the way, is the author of “Finances for My Daughter” a free, online, simple and highly advisable summary of everything parents should pass on to their children, which I’ve written about in the past.

My own rule, which I pass on to you in case you would like to adopt it, is to read or hear every prediction about the future level of markets as the utterance of either a fool or a charlatan, and to picture that fool or charlatan with a full wizard hat and crystal ball.

An additional problem with predictions is that one could be “right” about a one-year call but wrong in all the important ways. For example, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil in January cost about $76, and it’s been at or near that price this month. So a prediction in January of “meh, unchanged WTI 12 months from now” would have been technically correct but wildly inaccurate, as it would not have reflected what a rollercoaster oil prices have ridden this year.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs economists last week issued their national economic forecasts to 2075, predicting growth rates and relative economic strength of 70 countries over the next 53 years. It’s all very smart and reasonably described but, uh, thank you, grand wizards, for your predictions.

The financial infotainment industrial complex has different incentives than you. Its incentive is to be exciting, emotionally engaging or appropriately controversial, all the better to keep you clicking, reading, subscribing, liking and sharing on social media. They don’t need to be accurate to achieve their goals. Predictions about the future serve their incentives, not yours.

I am also a member of the financial infotainment industrial complex and subject to some of the same incentives. But as you’ve probably noticed, I strive to be as mind-numbingly boring as possible. Avoiding future predictions is just one way that I do so.

Michael Taylor is a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, author of “The Financial Rules for New College Graduates” and host of the podcast “No Hill for a Climber.”

michael@michaelthesmartmoney.com| twitter.com/michael_taylor

  By ALEX WILSON - STARS AND STRIPES • November 29, 2022 

 One of the Navy’s first women to qualify for submarine service became the first female executive officer aboard a U.S. submarine this month.

Lt. Cmdr. Amber Cowan, of Colorado Springs, Colo., stepped into her new role Nov. 11 as second-in-command of the Gold Crew aboard the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Kentucky, according to a Nov. 23 news release from Submarine Force Pacific Fleet.

Cowan’s appointment comes more than a decade after then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in 2010 lifted the Navy’s ban on women serving aboard submarines.

Cowan belongs to the first generation of U.S. naval officers to serve aboard submarines starting in 2011. The following year she and two other women became the first to earn their “dolphins,” the submarine warfare insignia, according to the U.S. Naval Undersea Museum.

Cowan, then a junior-grade lieutenant aboard the Ohio-class USS Maine, shared the honor with Lt. j.g. Jennifer Noonan, also of the Maine, and Lt. j.g. Marquette Leveque, of the USS Wyoming.

Cowan’s submariner career began in 2010, when she graduated from the University of Washington and reported to the Navy’s nuclear power school in Goose Creek, S.C. She then served in a variety of roles aboard the Maine, including main propulsion assistant and tactical systems officer, according to the Nov. 23 release.

“I started in the engine room, which is where we build our foundation,” Cowan said in the release. “It teaches officers to trust their enlisted counterparts and also have ownership of and in a watch team.”

She later served as the engineering officer aboard the Virginia-class fast-attack submarine USS Texas. Cowan then went to Submarine Forces Pacific Fleet as the force radiological controls officer before being selected as executive officer for the Kentucky.

Just three months before Cowan’s promotion, Master Chief Angela Koogler was selected as the first female chief of the boat aboard a submarine, according to an Aug. 31 Fleet Forces Command news release.

Koogler, of Kettering, Ohio, reported to her new position aboard the USS Louisiana on Aug. 22, according to the news release. The chief of the boat is the senior enlisted adviser to the vessel’s commander and executive officer.

The Navy plans to have 33 submarine crews with female officers and 14 crews with female enlisted sailors by 2030, according to an October 2021 news release from the chief of naval personnel.

As of November, the Navy has assigned women to 28 operational submarine crews, Submarine Force Pacific Fleet said in its Nov. 23 release.

Submarine Forces Pacific Fleet did not respond by Tuesday to a request for further information on Cowan and women’s service aboard submarines.

 Alex Wilson covers the U.S. Navy and other services from Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. Originally from Knoxville, Tenn., he holds a journalism degree from the University of North Florida. He previously covered crime and the military in Key West, Fla., and business in Jacksonville, Fla.