From an editorial published in the Fayetteville Observer on Jan. 30:

The broad, intense initiative President Barack Obama unveiled last week is a concerted effort to improve the lives, health and safety of American service members, their families and veterans.

At its core is a simple message the president got from a soldier in Afghanistan last year: "Sir, take care of our families."

The Defense Department has been working harder at doing that in recent years, but improvements have sometimes come slowly. This one could be a big bump up. It's a multi-department effort, involving many Cabinet-level departments, including Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Treasury, Agriculture and Interior.

The program has four key components:

Improving the physical and psychological health and wellbeing of military families.

Giving military children an excellent education.

Improving the career and educational opportunities for military spouses.

Expanding the availability and quality of child care for military families.

The program will target behavioral health, psychological fitness, homelessness among veterans and military families, substance abuse treatment and prevention and education assistance.

Other initiatives will open up career opportunities for military spouses, protect legal rights and find ways to make the local court systems more responsive to the needs of veterans and their families.

All of Obama's Cabinet secretaries have agreed to form inter-department teams to make this happen, bringing far-ranging experience to the program.

One point that cuts to the heart of this area's biggest need: "Ensure excellence in military children's education and their development." Counties around Fort Bragg aren't ready for the influx of new students that will arrive as the post expands over the next year or two. Many schools around the post are already overcrowded.

As it stands now, many of those new students will go to class in temporary huts set up on school parking lots. They will experience the precise opposite of what the Obama plan envisions: "... improving the quality of the educational experience." There's a clear case for federal impact aid here to get some schools built and staffed. The counties can't afford to do it. Perhaps this initiative can. We hope our congressional delegation will point this out to the appropriate task force.