Broken Defense Family Deployment Help Links Need Help

File this one under outrageous. I talked over the weekend with a cousin who is more than a wee bit nervous due to the fact that her son is deployed to a decidedly unfriendly part of Afghanistan, and told her I would send links to Defense Department online resources that could help her cope.

I called up the website for the Deployment Health Clinical Center, whose stated mission is "providing caring assistance and medical advocacy for military personnel and families with deployment-related health concerns."

Wonderful -- this is just what my cousin needs. I then clicked over to the "Family and Friends" section of that site, which says, "We want you to know that we value the service of the men and women in the armed forces and the sacrifices their families make to support that service."

The family and friends page promises to deliver all kinds of helpful resources. ". . . we created an entire section for family members. Below, we provide a list of resources that are available to service members and their families. Many of these services are available online, as well as by phone, with call centers ready to assist you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."

Maybe not. The family and friends page contains 11 links, five of which are either broken or useless in a truly loopy way.

To make sure that my search Sunday wasn't compromised by the fact that it was the weekend and the staff at the Deployment Health Clinical Center were probably off, I repeated the search again today with the same results.

Here's what I found:

Both the Family Readiness Groups and Virtual Family link and the Warrior Care and Transition link steer you to a page that contains the introduction to the 2011 Army Posture Statement, definitely not a handy item for any family member trying to cope with a combat deployment.

The Military Family Programs link leads you to the dreaded "404 Page Not Found" notice on the Defense Personnel and Readiness site. The links for Military Family Support Information and the Army Wounded Warrior Program go nowhere, with a connection attempt timing out after about five minutes.

These broken and useless links indicate some real technical problems with the Deployment Health Clinical Center servers and Internet connections. At the worst, they demonstrate institutional carelessness.

The Deployment Health Clinical Center, by the way, is operated by the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, which in this case gets a failing grade on any attempt at excellence.

I sent a query to the Pentagon about this, and Defense spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said, "We are in the process of reviewing and checking the links you've brought to our attention."

Smith suggested families use the alternate MilitaryOneSource site. Unfortunately, none one of the tabs at the top of this page work.