Letters to the Editor: Is Rick Caruso’s ‘short-term’ homelessness plan what L.A. needs?
I am a retired U.S. Army colonel, a private in the Air Force, a retired U.S. Navy nuclear submarine commander and a retired U.S. Army colonel who worked on the ground and aboard the ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet before becoming a successful entrepreneur and serving on the boards of several large corporations.
I am a veteran, and I have always believed that in the future the U.S. Navy will be manned by people with the capabilities and the knowledge of the Navy, and not by bureaucrats, who are often not trained to command and they do not understand our mission.
At this point — as I look back over my military career — I do believe that we have trained and educated the best of our Navy personnel, but too often Navy families are left to fend for themselves with taxpayer money.
The problems we had in Vietnam came from the political decisions on how to operate in that type of war and they are still with us. The military is a business, and a business has to be profitable. If it’s not, the business will not be there in 10 years time.
That is why we are not spending taxpayer money on our naval bases — for the most part. We are spending it on the next generation of Navy personnel, and the generation after that is going to have to be paid from the future budgets of those bases.
This may be viewed in several ways. I hope it will be viewed as a short-term plan to get people off the streets and housed in a reasonable manner; but it is also a long-range plan to bring the Navy and the nation together for the future.
L.A. has gone through many changes in the past 30 or 40 years. It is a different city today than it was 15 or 20 years ago.
I believe we have come a long way. I believe no one could have seen the future of L.A. in the early 1970s, and yet, everyone has.
That is a big difference from the 1960s, where we were really fighting racism and the civil rights issue, and we were fighting the Vietnam War. Now, we are working together for