By MOAA Staff

From securing servicemember access to high-quality health care to fighting for combat-injured retirees to supporting a veteran from transition through a lifetime of VA care, one part of MOAA’s mission remains constant – the people-first focus.

But a platform to share ideas and solutions across these various DoD, VA, and other stovepipes hasn’t been available, MOAA President and CEO Lt. Gen. Brian T. Kelly, USAF (Ret), said during a recent television interview – until this fall.

“How do you get a full conversation, how all those things fit together?” Kelly said during an interview with Defense News Weekly. “How do we bring the government, DoD and VA, how do we bring experts from industry, how do we bring experts from academia, other organizations together, to talk about these issues that are relevant to people and their families?

“Let’s talk about the thing that really powers defense – let’s talk about people.”

MOAA’s TotalForce+ will bring thousands of attendees and dozens of speakers together to cover a range of people-focused topics in a way designed to move the issues forward, Kelly said. 

“We don’t want to have the echo chamber-complaint conversations,” he told program host Leo Shane III. “We don’t need somebody to get up there and say, ‘We’re short on child care,’ or we don’t have enough funds to take care of whatever it is on the people side. We want to talk solutions.”

Multiple Priorities

The conference approaches as Congress nears its return from summer recess, bringing with it a series of opportunities for MOAA to move its legislative priorities forward. Kelly outlined some of the key focus areas, to include:

• Ending the pay offset faced by combat-injured veterans. Persistent challenges of “cost and precedence” have led to lengthy delays in moving the Major Richard Star Act forward and ensuring tens of thousands of retirees can access both DoD-issued retirement pay and VA-provided disability compensation, Kelly said. He pointed to momentum and plans for a Senate amendment including the Star Act in the FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, saying it’s critical for the nation to realize “the most important people, at the front of the line, ought to be the folks who are injured in combat. … We as a nation want to make sure we take care of those folks.”
  
  
• Continuing progress in servicemember quality of life. Kelly pointed to improvements in recent years thanks to legislative efforts in both chambers and ongoing work to allow wider health care access for military families, but noted concerns with PCS problems and child care shortages. Progress should continue, Kelly said, because lawmakers “know that quality of life issues that are worked on return their benefit for the DoD in terms of readiness.”
  
  
• Supporting servicemembers in the event of a funding lapse. MOAA will work to ensure all of those in uniform continue to receive their pay if the government moves toward a full or partial shutdown, Kelly said.
  
  
• Improving the veteran experience. MOAA’s work covers the full range of a veteran’s post-service needs, Kelly said. That includes everything from a fight to improve tracking of toxic exposures while in uniform (via an NDAA provision to enhance the Individual Longitudinal Exposure Record) to another NDAA provision geared toward giving veterans’ groups more access to the transition process to a major leap forward in the benefits offered to veteran caregivers.

[TAKE ACTION: Ask Your Lawmakers to Support the Veteran Caregiver Reeducation, Reemployment, and Retirement Act]

Stronger Together

TotalForce+ will bring many stakeholders on these issues and others together, Kelly said, joining forces to ensure they receive the attention, and the funding, they deserve.

“You can’t take the cheap way on the people side of the business,” he said. “If you have an all-volunteer force and you’re trying to sustain that, I think everybody realizes that you have to make sure that it’s resourced properly.”

The conference moves the discussion to “those issues that are relevant to people and their families,” he added. “Not a conversation about equipment.”

“To have it totally focused on people for two days … is going to be a first-of-its kind sort of thing. And we’re excited for it.”