July 9, 2007 — “Thank you, Mr. President. I-d like to point out that as of this point there are 29 cosponsors on this amendment. They include our Majority Leader as well as Senator Hagel as the lead Republican co’sponsor, Senator Levin, the Chair of our Committee, Senators Obama, Clinton, Durbin, Tester, Byrd, McCaskill, Kennedy, Kerry, Salazar, Harkin, Feinstein, Schumer, Brown, Lincoln, Pryor, Sanders, Murray, Klobuchar, Boxer, Mikulski, Cantwell, Stabenow, Akaka, Dodd, Biden, and Landrieu.

[For an updated co'sponsor list, please go to: http://webb.senate.gov/pdf/live.html]

“This is an amendment that is focused squarely on supporting our troops who are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. It speaks directly to their welfare and to the needs of their families by establishing minimum periods between deployments for both our regular and reserve components.

“Mr. President, I would say that I have offered this amendment having grown up as a military family member, having watched a father deployed. As one who has served as a Marine and been deployed and as one who has had a family member deployed in this war. Also, as someone who for three years was privileged to oversee our National Guard and Reserve programs, as Assistant Secretary of Defense during which time I also spent a good bit of energy looking at mobilization issues including if we went to war.

“The manpower policies that are feeding the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan presently are unprecedented in our history. This not only involves the repeated use of a small pool of active Army and Marine Corps forces. It also regards the use of the National Guard and Reserves at a tempo that we never could have anticipated when we were designing the total force concept. And it also involves the use of contractors doing so-called security work, performing missions that historically have been the responsibility of American military men and women.

“Now in the fifth year of ground operations in Iraq, this deck of cards has come crashing down on the backs of our soldiers and Marines who have been deployed again and again while the rest of the country sits back and debates Iraq as an intellectual or emotional exercise. These men and women are doing a wonderful job and they are also paying a heavy price. That price became clear in a wide variety of statistics, which I will address momentarily, as well as in the personal stories that we who have positions of authority are hearing on a daily basis.

“I and other supporters of this amendment believe that no matter what one’s view of America’s involvement in Iraq, the time has come for the Congress to place reasonable restrictions on how America’s finest military men and women are being used.

“Stated simply, after more than four years of ground operations in Iraq, we-ve reached the point where we can no longer allow the ever changing nature of this Administration’s operational policies to drive the way our troops are being deployed. In fact, the reverse is true. The availability of our troops should be the main determinant of how ground operations should be conducted. Other amendments will be debated during the days ahead relating to the withdrawal of our forces from Iraq, proposed timetables, and the future course of the war, but there is one area where we all, as Democrats and Republicans, should be able to come together and this relates in some measure to what the distinguished senior Senator from Virginia was talking about a few minutes ago.

“Whether or not there’s a report coming out in a week, whether or not there’s an evaluation taking place in September, and no matter what any or us believe about the future conduct of the war or about that timetable or that timetable, we owe it to our troops and their families to establish a minimum floor for their combat deployments.

“If we-re serious about supporting our troops, there’s no better place to start than to correct the current troop-rotation policy by requiring a minimum time between deployments.

“I said in this chamber in March the motivation behind this amendment is simple; it’s the same motivation that impelled me more than 30 years ago when I first started working on veterans- issues. How do we support our troops? What does that mean? Who speaks for the troops?

“Like you, I listen to what they are saying, Mr. President. Here’s what a constituent in Virginia wrote to me recently, her husband is an active-duty infantry officer who is presently deployed in Iraq. The wife of an Army active-duty infantry captain, she wrote:

“-As an Army wife, I braced myself with the possibility that he may be extended for a few months based on the recent A-troop surge,- and of course, he was. This morning, on the news, I heard that President Bush is considering extending the Army troops again. Enough is enough,- she wrote. A-I-m a patriotic American and an Army wife, but even we have our limits. My husband has lost numerous soldiers, we have dozens of amputees at Walter Reed and elsewhere, and morale is dropping. These men need to come home. Please, speak out against another extension. Please bring our overextended soldiers home.-

“After four years of combat, we must provide our troops and their families with a predictable operational tempo that has adequate dwell time between deployments, and we owe this to our active participants, but also we owe this to the participants in the National Guard and Reserves.

“Why is this bipartisan amendment so important? We all know the reason well enough. A small group of people is answering the call time and again. The result is that our ground forces, in particular, are being burnt out. The evidence is everywhere. We see it in following retention of experienced mid-grade officers and noncommissioned officers. The increasing attrition rate among Army accompaniment grade officers is serious enough that our committee, the Senate Committee on Armed Services, included a reporting requirement on the Army’s retention programs and incentives in the authorization bill that is now before us.

“We see it in the West Point classes, 2000 and 2001, the most recent classes that finished their initial five-year obligations. We-re told that their attrition is five times the levels that it was before Iraq for such classes. The statistics that we have been shown indicate that 54% of the West Point class of 2000 left the Army by the end of last year, and that 46% of the class of 2001 left the Army by the end of last year.

“Senator Warner mentioned Admiral Mullin, who is a long time friend and Naval Academy classmate, now waiting for confirmation as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was recently asked what was the thing about which he was most concerned, and he said the Army, and we-re not talking about equipment, we-re talking about the Army.

“The Marine Corps is also seeing an upward trend in the loss of critical mid-grade noncommissioned officers. We also find new evidence of troop burnout in numerous mental health issues arising from multiple combat deployments. These are statistically observable. There’s a new report by the Department of Defense that documents a higher rate of mental health issues for service members deploying multiple times or for more than six months. A survey of service members after their deployment found that 38% of our soldiers, 31% of our marines, and 49% of the National Guard report psychological problems following their combat deployments.

“The failure of current rotation policies to protect the welfare of our troops and their families in both regular and reserve components is well documented. This is an example, Mr. President, drawn from the pages of our service members- own newspaper, “The Stars and Stripes.” Last week, the paper described how Army Sergeant Troy Tweed, newly assigned to the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, is slated to deploy to Iraq before a full year of dwell time at home. Sergeant Tweed returned home five months ago from his last deployment to Iraq. He’s one of many former members of his old brigade who are slated to deploy three to four months early because they got a new assignment. This will be Sergeant Tweed’s fifth deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. He says to “The Stars and Stripes,” it feels like the individual situation of soldiers isn-t taken into account. You-re just like a number and the newspaper said it best, “soldiers like Tweed fall through the cracks.”

“Closer to home with the Virginia Army National Guard, roughly 1,400 members of the 115th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, this is the famous Stonewall Brigade, have been mobilized. I would point out as an aside that this is a brigade with a long history that dates back to the Civil War, and in fact, one of my ancestors, Mr. President, fought in that brigade during the Civil War, was wounded in Antietam and lost his life at Chancellorsville. The brigade is presently training in Mississippi and will deploy to Iraq in September. Deploying with this Brigade are 700 members of the Third Battalion which returned only two years ago from a deployment in Afghanistan. 40% of this battalion will be making its second combat deployment in less than three years as members of the National Guard.

“One Colonel, a brigade commander stationed in Iraq, recently described his soldiers this way, “they-ve spent the last four years in a continuous cycle of fighting, training, deploying, and fighting, and they see no end in sight. They have seen their closest friends killed and maimed, leaving young spouses and children, and single-parent kids. They want time for themselves and time to raise families for a while. When they look forward to a 15-month deployment with 12 months in between, they see their home station time as being compressed with intensified training which means more time away from families and personal pursuits. I know my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have heard similar stories. I would just like to point out that this cycle of the strategy driving our troops- rotation must be reversed.

“The bipartisan amendment I introduced this afternoon takes a modest step to reverse this practice by establishing a floor for minimum periods between deployments for both units and members. It says that if a unit or a member of a regular component deploys to Iraq or Afghanistan, they-ll have the same time at home, dwell time, before they-re deployed. And for Guard and Reserves, they will have three times the amounts of time that they were deployed. This isn-t a grand scheme to achieve an ideal troop rotation scenario.

The ideal rotation scenarios are two-to-one for active and five-to-one for the Guard and Reserve, which we put into this amendment as a goal. But what we-re attempting to do is to put a floor under this and state what would be optimal.

“I would like to point out, Mr. President, that the Adjutant General of my state of Virginia, Major General Robert Newman, told us today that it’s important to consider alternatives like this, like a minimum dwell time that will provide this sort of predictability. Active Army units now deploy for 15 months with a 12-month period between deployments. Many active Marine Corps units are also below this one-to-one rotation cycle. Individual soldiers and marines who have recently returned from deployment are also reassigned as backfills to new units marked for deployment.

“Dwell time is not down time. It entails frequent absences as units retain, refurbish, reequip and assimilate new members. After the first month at home, a Marine generally spends 48 days in the field away from family, training, on rifle range or on weekend duty.

“This amendment provides for fair and reasonable waivers. It gives the President waiver authority in the event of an operational emergency that poses a vital threat to our national security interests. This is a low threshold. It will allow the President to respond to any emergency operational requirement, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan, by certifying the need to waive the amendments on limitations. It provides military departments the authority to waive individual volunteers; in other words, if you want to go back sooner, you can.

“Contrary to some critics, the amendment does not micromanage the President in his role as Commander in Chief, nor does it tie the hands of our operational commanders in theater. A more predictable dwell time will be transparent to our forward-deployed commanders. Military departments have long experienced managing people as individuals. We fought the Vietnam War on an individual rotational policy before the widespread use of today’s information technology systems that make it far easier for us to monitor when an individual returns from deployment so that you have a date certain or when his dwell time would expire.

“There was some comment on Constitutional authority. The Constitutional authority of this amendment is clear. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution empowers the Congress to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces. As acting Secretary of the Army Geren stated during his confirmation hearing last month, Article 1 of the Constitution makes Congress and the Army full partners.

“There are precedents for this action. Congress has acted in a similar way in the past. The best recent example is in 1951, during the height of the Korean War when Congress intervened to ensure our service members were not sent to war before they were properly trained. The Selective Service Act was amended to provide that every person inducted into the armed forces would receive full and adequate training for a period not less than four months. The law also stipulated that no personnel during this 120-day period would be assigned for duty outside the United States. It could have been argued in the Korean War that we had manpower requirements that should have allowed the Department of Defense or the operational commanders or the President, as Commander in Chief, to send military people outside of the country before they had 120 days of training. 120 days is essential for the well-being of our troops, just as this amendment today says that dwell time, time back home is essential for the well-being of our troops.

“This Chamber has a clear duty to assert our authority to prevent further damage to our military. The current strategy, the current operational policy does not justify the way that we are deploying our troops. And I would urge my colleagues to recognize this common interest and the interests that we share in addressing the welfare of our troops and their families. I have been encouraged to hear the sentiments echoed recently by some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who are equally interested in forging a new road to the future, including Senators Lugar, Domenici, Voinovich, Collins and even my senior colleague from Virginia, Senator Warner. They-ve studied the course of the war in Iraq. They ask the same questions that trouble us all. How can we continue to ask our troops to sacrifice indefinitely while the Iraqi government is not making progress? Many, many other questions.

“But the bottom line in all this is that, as we move forward responsibly to relocate our military from Iraq over a period of time, we cannot continue to do what we are doing to the troops that we are sending over and over again. We seek a conclusion at the end of this engagement that will enable us to withdraw our combat forces from Iraq, that will lead to progressively greater regional stability, that will allow us to fight international terrorism more effectively, and that will enable us to more fully address our broader strategic visions around the world.”

The American people expect us to do that to move our country forward in a collaborative way, but they also expect us to use our troops in a way that addresses their welfare and uses them in a way that is more properly related to the tasks at hand in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we can no longer continue to place such a disproportionately large burden on the shoulders of so few people. We need a balance. It’s up to the Congress to establish that balance, and as the young army wife wrote to me recently, enough is enough. I thank my colleagues who have signed on as original cosponsors, and I urge all of my colleagues to support this amendment.

Source: Jim Webb