[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 107 (Friday, June 29, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8734-S8735]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             TROOP ROTATION

  Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, the third point I wish to make, looking 
forward, is that when we return, we are going to be looking at the 
Defense authorization bill. I am going to be introducing an amendment 
when this bill comes up that, in my view, speaks directly to the 
welfare of our troops and their families. After more than 4 years of 
combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, we still have not developed 
the type of operational policy that looks to the welfare of the people 
who are having to serve again and again. We have allowed the strategy, 
such as it is--which is all over the place--to define the use of our 
troops, and we have reached the point, as we work to resolve our 
situation in Iraq and dramatically reduce our presence--I hope--where 
we are burning out our troops.
  The evidence is everywhere. We have a small group of people who have 
been carrying the load for this country. They have been going again and 
again. We are violating the normal rotation policies that we took great 
care to put in place over long years of experience. Traditionally, in 
the U.S. military, on the active side, there is a 2-for-1 ratio. If you 
are gone for a year, you are back for 2 years. If you deploy at sea for 
6 months, you are back for a year. That is not downtime; that is well 
time. When I say it is not downtime, that means they are not sitting 
around doing nothing when they are back. When people return from 
deployment, they have to reacquaint themselves with their families and 
take care of those sorts of things. They have to gear units back up, 
get the equipment, train, lock on, and go to different training areas. 
So the 2 for 1 generally is split: a third gone, a third recuperating 
and getting ready, and a third getting ready to go.

  What we have today in the ground forces of the active military is not 
even a 1 for 1. People are returning and immediately getting ready to 
go back. We are seeing the wear and tear of this on our Armed Forces. 
The West Point classes of 2000 and 2001 are the most recent ``canaries 
in the coal mine,'' if you want to look at what is happening to the 
Active Duty military because of these continuous deployments. The time 
has not been made available to do other things when they return. The 
West Point classes have a 5-year obligation before an individual can 
leave the military. The West Point classes of 2000 and 2001--the two 
most recent classes--have an attrition rate that is five times as high 
as the attrition rates before the Iraq war. The West Point class of 
2000 had lost 54 percent of its members from active duty by the end of 
last year. I don't know the number for today. The class of 2001, with 
an active obligation which ended as of last June--only last June--by 
the end of last year, within 6 months, had lost 46 percent of its 
class. You are seeing the same thing in the staff NCO ranks. We are 
starting to see it in a way that I cannot recall since probably the 
late 1970s, when the bottom fell out particularly of the U.S. Navy.
  In the Guard and Reserve, the normal rotational cycle is 5 to 1. What 
we are seeing now in many units is less than 3 to 1. So I am going to 
introduce a bill that will basically say that on the active side, 
however long an individual has been deployed, they have to be allowed 
to stay home at least that long before you send them back. If you are 
Guard and Reserve, however long you have been deployed, you have to 
have been at home at least three times that length before you are sent 
back because of the nature of the Guard and Reserve.
  In my view, this amendment is an absolute floor; it is our absolute 
duty as fiduciaries of the well-being of the people who serve that we 
don't let it go beyond that. As a point of reference again, in the Army 
right now, they have gone on 15-month tours with only 12 months at 
home. Historically, if you were gone 15 months, you should have 30 
months at home. This needs to be fixed. I hope the Senate will 
overwhelmingly support us.
  There are two questions about this policy that have come up in my 
discussions on the Armed Services Committee. The first question from 
some is, is it within the Constitution for the Congress to tell the 
Commander in Chief what the rotation cycle should look like? My answer 
is that it is clearly within the Constitution. Congress has the power 
to set these sorts of regulations. In fact, there is precedent. If you 
look at the situation of the Korean War, where because of the emergency 
of the attack from North Korea, we were sending soldiers into Korea who 
were not trained--they never fired a weapon before--because they had to 
fill the bill of going over there. The Congress stepped in and said you 
cannot send any military person overseas until they have been in the 
military for 120 days. That was the Congress properly exercising its 
constitutional prerogative in order to protect our troops. This is what 
we are going to do.
  The second issue that has come up is whether this is micromanagement. 
Quite frankly, when the leadership of the U.S. military is not stepping 
up and defending their own people, we have a duty to slow this thing 
down. This war has been going on for more than 4 years. We have a lot 
of issues we are going to be discussing in this authorization bill that 
are designed to get a better policy that will reduce our footprint, 
that will enable us to fight international terrorism around the world, 
that will increase the stability of the region with proper diplomatic 
efforts and will allow us to address our strategic interests elsewhere.

[[Page S8735]]

  But until that happens, we have to take care of the troops. This is 
the bottom line, the floor. This isn't some grand scheme of trying to 
push an ideal troop rotation scenario. This is the bottom line we owe 
to the people who have been sent into harm's way.
  I may be one of the few people in this body who has had a father 
deploy, who has deployed, and who has had a son deployed. I think there 
are a lot of people in the country who are that way, who right now are 
looking at their level of being sent into harm's way. They are looking 
for somebody to put some logic into how their levels are being used. It 
is on us, Mr. President.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The senior Senator from Florida is 
recognized.
  Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, while the junior Senator from 
Virginia is here, I wish to commend him. I wish to say, first of all, 
he is an exceptionally passionate and knowledgeable source of valuable 
information to us on the Armed Services Committee. The proposal he has 
outlined, which will be in the form of an amendment to the Department 
of Defense authorization bill, has exceptional common sense attached to 
it--that you don't deploy troops unless they are trained and unless 
they have enough time to reevaluate, reequip, rearm, and retrain.
  I thank the Senator for his contribution. I am certainly inclined to 
support his amendment. This Senator from Florida will have an amendment 
that we have been trying for 7 years to pass to take care of the widows 
and orphans. Even President Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, 
said that one of the greatest obligations in war is to take care of the 
widow and the orphan. The U.S. Government ought to plan as an expense 
of the cost of a war taking care not only of the veterans but of their 
widows, widowers, and orphans.
  What we have done in law is, where we provide for a survivor's 
benefit plan that the military member pays for out of their check, that 
plan, in fact, is offset by the disability compensation that family 
member gets from the Veterans' Administration. This Senator is going to 
continue this quest until we finally prevail to get that offset 
removed.
  Of course, the objection to it is it costs $9 billion over 10 years. 
But is it an obligation of the Government to take care of the widow and 
the orphan as a result of war? This Senator passionately and firmly 
feels it is.
  I wanted to lay that out as a marker, along with my congratulatory 
comments to the Senator from Virginia for his wonderful service in the 
Senate, his insightful service as a member of the Senate Armed Services 
Committee, and his very commonsense approach to this DOD authorization 
bill and the amendment he will be offering.
  I will yield to the Senator if he wishes to make any followup 
comments. I wish to share with the Senate something that occurred in 
the Appropriations Committee yesterday that is quite disturbing.
  Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I thank the Senator, if he will yield for 2 
minutes. I very much appreciate my good friend's comments in support. 
It means a lot to me that he has that kind of confidence in the 
approach I will be trying to take here.
  Also, I am pretty familiar with how the survivor benefit program has 
been misused. My mother was a benefit of the survivor benefit program. 
I don't think there is a strong recognition up here that is a private 
insurance program that is paid into and is separate from other 
benefits. My father paid into that program more than $200 a month from 
1969 until his death in 1997. Then when my mother got the benefit, they 
offset it at that time, I believe, from a Social Security payment that 
he also paid into.
  There are inequities in how that program has been administered and 
how it interacts with other areas of Federal law. I will be happy to 
explore that with the Senator and see if we can't come up with some 
kind of solution.
  Mr. NELSON of Florida. I say to the Senator, Mr. President, that the 
young corporals and privates who are not returning home from Iraq and 
Afghanistan, who leave widows and children who are paying today out of 
their own paycheck into that survivor's benefit plan, of which in that 
insurance program their survivors are entitled, that, in fact, because 
of the current law of the offset, they don't get that which has already 
been paid for by the active-duty military member because of the 
eligibility of the widow and the children under the indemnity 
compensation through the Veterans' Administration. The current law 
offsets one against another.
  What is so sad is that the survivors, the widows and children of 
these young corporals and privates, are finding it very difficult to 
make financial ends meet as a result of that offset.
  This Senator is going to give the Senate an opportunity to change 
that in 2 weeks when we are on the DOD bill. If the Senate responds as 
we did last year and the year before in passing it, then we are going 
to have to insist when it gets down to a conference committee with the 
House it doesn't get stripped out like the House leadership last year 
and the year before did in stripping out what the Senate has passed.
  I share that with my friend from Virginia.
  Mr. WEBB. I thank the Senator.

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