Jim Webb

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. How much time does the Republican side have?

Mr. WEBB. I wish to reserve 2 minutes for our side.

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, first I say I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and misrepresentation that has been made over the past couple of days with respect to this amendment. Before I get into the amendment, I wish also to express, again, my admiration for the Senator from Arizona--we have been friends for many years--and my appreciation for his service. I watched his comments yesterday with respect to the end of the time in Southeast Asia. I think he knows I still adamantly support what we attempted to do in Vietnam and I have written about those days with some frequency and clarity over the years. In my view, this is not about the situation in Southeast Asia. I warned against what I believe is the strategic blundering of going into Iraq in the first place, but I will set that aside today. There was a lot of talk this morning and yesterday, some of it about process--the Senator from New Hampshire mentioning he wanted to see side by side, that he was going to oppose this amendment based on the cloture process itself. The Senator from South Carolina--I want to address some of the things he said. He keeps talking about the political moment here. I don't think there is a political moment in this issue. There may be on other issues. I approach this issue from the perspective, among others, as someone who served 3 years as Assistant Secretary of Defense, where I was responsible for dealing with mobilization issues and was required to learn with a great deal of detail what they used to call war maps. Those are manpower flow issues. I also point out, because of the some of the other comments that were just made, that the Commandant of the Marine Corps, when he took office, mentioned that his ultimate goal was to see a 2:1 rotational cycle with respect to deployment of marines. I point that out because this amendment sets out a bare minimum floor for the use of American troops of 1:1. If you have been gone a year, you should get a year back. If you have been gone 7 months, you should get 7 months back. If we were arguing optimal scenarios, I would understand a little bit more the pushback we are getting from the other side. We are not trying to put optimal historical scenarios on the table here. We are trying to get a bare minimum floor that will protect the well-being of our troops. We have data that has been shown--we don't need to go over it today-- about how this is affecting the retention of high-quality people, how it is affecting emotional difficulties people are having. We need to step forward and act responsibly. Some Republicans have questioned the constitutionality of this amendment. There is no issue here. Article I section 8 says the Congress has the power to make rules for government and regulation of the land and naval forces, and we have done so many times in the past. Some say this is meddling in the President's warmaking authority. To the contrary, the Congress has the power and the duty to place proper restraints on executive authority, particularly when it comes to the well-being of our troops. We did that in Korea in 1951. It was not, as the Senator from South Carolina might allege, meddling in the Korean war. It was a situation where the Department of Defense was sending soldiers overseas before they had been fully trained. We stepped in, the Congress, our predecessors, stepped in. They put a law into place saying you cannot deploy anybody until they have been in the military at least 120 days. This is what we are doing, only on the other end of it. We are saying: After 4 years of a ground occupation in Iraq, we have a responsibility to get some stability into the operational tempo. Yesterday my colleague from Alabama, Senator Sessions, warned that the amendment would, in his words, alter the traditional power of the President as it relates to all future wars, any war now, or series of wars in the future. My friend, I hope, will reread my amendment carefully. He will find that this amendment applies to Iraq, Afghanistan, and certain NATO- sponsored activities. Senator Sessions also stated his concerns, as he put it, that this is another amendment trying to set another strategy written by a group sitting in air-conditioned offices. I would like to emphasize a few points. The first is, this amendment does not represent strategy. It is an amendment that protects the well- being of our troops by setting a bare minimum floor on how they are being used no matter what strategy is in place. Second, the experiences that led some of us to this conclusion did not come from sitting in air-conditioned offices. I would like to point out, as far as I can determine, Senator Chuck Hagel is the only ground combat veteran on the other side of the aisle. He certainly is the only ground combat veteran from Vietnam on the other side of the aisle. He is a lead cosponsor of this amendment. On this side of the aisle, all the ground combat veterans are cosponsors, along with 35 Members of the Senate. I believe, if I may say, we collectively understand a truth acquired the hard way and a truth that transcends politics. We are trying in all good faith to do something about it. Finally, I would like to point out, again, this amendment has the full support of the Military Officers Association of America. This is the largest association of military officers in the country, 368,000 members. And these are officers who are not restrained from speaking their opinions by having to serve inside today's political process. VADM Norbert Ryan wrote a letter--I will quote one paragraph of it--a letter supporting the necessity of this amendment. He pointed out his association is very concerned that steps must be taken to protect our most precious military asset, the All-Volunteer Force, from having to bear such a disproportionate share of national wartime sacrifice. He also said, and I think this is vital to the decision we are making on this amendment: If we are not better stewards of our troops and their families in the future than we have been in the recent past, our organization believes strongly that we will be putting the all-volunteer force at unacceptable risk. These officers, 368,000, are joining us in a very real concern; that under current policy many of our ground forces are actually spending more time in Iraq than they are at home. This is 4 years into an occupation. There is not a strategic justification for this at this point in our commitment in Iraq. And there is no political reason, in my view, to oppose an amendment that places proper restraints on this sort of conduct by the executive branch. This amendment recognizes that the Congress has a duty to exercise leadership when it comes to the well-being of our men and women in uniform. In the words of Admiral Ryan, it is a recognition that we have a responsibility to become better stewards of our troops and their families than we have been in the recent past. I will say to my colleagues, as I did yesterday, the American people are watching us. They are watching us closely with the expectation that we will finally take some sort of positive action that might stabilize the operational environment in which our troops are being sent again and again. They are tired of the posturing that is giving the Congress such a bad reputation. They are tired of the procedural strategies designed to protect politicians from accountability and to protect this administration from accountability. They are looking for concrete action that will protect the well-being of our men and women in uniform. So the question in this amendment is not whether you support this war or whether you don't, it is not whether you want to wait until July or September to see whether one particular set of opinions or benchmarks or summaries might be coming in. The question is, more than 4 years into the ground operations in Iraq, that we owe stability and a reasonable cycle of deployment to the men and women who are carrying our Nation's burden. That is the question. That is the purpose of this amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I would just particularly like to, again, emphasize that there are no constitutional issues here. There is no issue of moving units around or micromanagement in the way that the Senator from South Carolina was alleging. This is a very simple amendment, and I am ready to proceed to a vote. I yield the floor

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I withdraw my amendment and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WEBB. Madam President, I would like to add my support to the Senator's amendment. I would state again my appreciation for his service to our country and for all the tough stands he has been willing to take here over the past few years on these vital issues. Before I speak on this amendment, I would like to state briefly it is my understanding that in a press conference after the vote of this morning, when my earlier amendment failed to receive 60 votes, received 56 votes, there were some comments made by Members of the other party about my mentioning that in my amendment all of the ground combat veterans in the Senate were cosponsors of my amendment. In the emotion of the time, apparently it was turned around into an assertion that I was trying to make a distinction about quality of service, or that people of one type of military background were being pitted against another. I say I regret anyone would think that speaking affirmatively about service, about service of individuals, was somehow speaking negatively about the service of anyone else or about people who have not served. I think that it is interesting to point out that in the amendment I offered, every ground combat veteran who is in the Senate cosponsored it. I am grateful for that. I think that does say something about the experiences that people have had in that environment, nothing more, nothing less. With respect to the amendment from the Senator from Nebraska, this again is an issue that goes directly to the quality of the environment in which people who have stepped forward and served are being offered in the U.S. military today. People who step forward to serve do so because they love their country. They do so because they have family traditions. They do so in many cases because they like to soldier. But they do so looking to us, the national leadership, to place their service in this right context and to address that service with a period of stewardship. I was stunned earlier this year when the policy was announced that those in the Army were going to go to 15-month deployments with only a 12-month dwell time back here after these deployments. This is the Active-Duty people. The normal rotation is 2 for 1 historically. If you are gone for a year, you are supposed to have 2 years back. Now we are down to less than 1 to 1. I called the Chief of the Staff of the Army. I asked him about it. I said: How do you do this? He just came back from Iraq. How do you do this to your own people? His comment to me: We have to feed the strategy. We don't articulate the strategy. I had to empathize with the situation he was in. That is one of the reasons I developed the motivation to try and help the situation by addressing it in the Congress. Senator Hagel has very clearly laid out the facts, the situation we face; that our troops, in many ways, have reached the tipping point, and the final tipping point came when we went below this 1-to-1 ratio, which is an absolute minimal floor. The optimal ratio, as I said on the active side, is 2 to 1. We have a failed manpower policy which has placed the well-being and the availability of our troops in jeopardy. It is time for us to get to the place, after 4 years as an occupying force in Iraq, where the condition and the availability of our troops should drive our operational policies and not the other way around. We are seeing the canary in the coal mine with respect to our military people. They have been giving more and more as these policies, those experimental policies, have gone forward. We are seeing a failing retention of experienced middle-grade officers and noncommissioned officers. We are seeing an increasing attrition rate against Army company-grade officers, the most graphic example of that being the West Point classes of 2000 and 2001. These are the two most recent classes that have finished their 5-year obligation. As of the end of last year, 54 percent of the class of 2000 had left the Army. As of the end of last year, 46 percent of the class of 2001 had already left the Army. This is well above, well above by multiples, attrition rates in the previous Iraq environment. The Marines have also seen an upward trend from the loss of critical midgrade noncommissioned officers. As Senator Hagel pointed out, we are seeing difficulties in recruitment. With respect to the National Guard in Virginia, we have seen, since 2001, nearly 6,000 soldiers of the Virginia National Guard, and more than 2,000 members of the Air Guard, entering Federal service in support of these different operations. We can be justly proud that all of these people have stepped forward to serve. At the same time we need to put a balance into how they are being used. As I mentioned a minute ago, that balance will be found in shaping our operational policies toward the availability of our troops. There is no strategy that should be driving the use of our troops in the way they are being used. For that reason, I support the amendment and urge my colleagues to do so. I yield the floor.

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I am comfortable with the Senator from Arizona beginning the discussion. We are waiting for the chairman to arrive.

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I know the Senator from Arizona wanted to have 2 minutes. Does he want to take it now?

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. First, I would say to the Senator from Illinois just for factual clarification that Senator Hagel and I are the only two ground- combat veterans from Vietnam in the Senate, but I certainly do not want to in any way reduce my respect for the distinguished Senator from Hawaii who won the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War II. The question the Senator poses is correct. What this basically says is that if you have been gone for a year, you deserve to have a minimum of a year back. And a lot of people misunderstand what dwell time is. Dwell time is not downtime. There is a workup cycle for these units before they go back, which is considerable. So even if we are giving them a 1-to-1 ratio here, this is not equal time down as compared to an equal time deployed. That is why the traditional goal is 2 for 1.

Mr. WEBB. I will be glad to yield.

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I first express my thanks to the Senator from Delaware for his service and also for his comments on this amendment. I come to the floor because I heard the other side of the aisle may be deciding to filibuster this amendment. I wish to, first of all, express my surprise that this filibuster might occur which, as the Chair knows, would increase the requirement of 60 votes in order for the amendment to proceed. This is a very simple and very fair amendment. I would like to express my opinions about some of the comments that have been made, as I was outside listening to different people from the media telling me what some of the reservations from the other side have been on this amendment. The comments that have been made are not accurate. There are people who are saying this amendment is unconstitutional in the sense that only the Commander in Chief should be able to make decisions regarding the deployment of troops during a war. First of all, article I, section 8 of our Constitution is very clear on this point. It states that ``The Congress shall have the Power . . . To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces. . . .'' This is well within the Constitution. In fact, there is much precedent when people who are opposed to this amendment discuss that it might be tying the President's hands unnecessarily. We can go back to the dark days of the Korean war, where because of the national emergency that was caused from the invasion of South Korea by the North, we didn't have enough troops available, and the administration at the time started sending soldiers into Korea who had not been fully trained and the Congress acted within its constitutional purview and passed a law that said no individual who is brought into the U.S. military can be sent overseas unless they have been in the military for 120 days. The reason the Congress acted was to protect the well-being of those who served, and that is exactly what we are proposing to do today. We are saying that whatever your beliefs are about this war, whether you want it to end in 5 weeks or whether you want it to go on for the next 10 years, we have to come to some common agreement among the leadership of the United States that we are going to protect the well-being of our troops, the people who step forward to serve in these times. The minimum we can do is to set a floor that basically says: However long you are deployed, you can have that much time back at home. Or if you are in the National Guard or Reserve, if you have been deployed, you deserve to have three times that much time at home. The historical standard is if you have been deployed overseas or if you have been deployed on a deployment, you should have twice as much time at home. The Commandant of the Marine Corps earlier this year, when he undertook the duties of being Commandant, said that his goal was to bring in a 2-to-1 rotational cycle for the Marine Corps. Given the requirements of Iraq, 2 to 1. We are now at 1 to 1, with a good portion of that time back home being spent in workups for these units and for these individuals to go back. The Army, as a result of this surge, now has a policy where they are saying you go to Iraq for 15 months, and we will guarantee you 12 months at home. That is not even 1 to 1. Our amendment establishes a floor. It is reasonable. It doesn't have anything to do with political objectives of the war downstream. That can be sorted out later. We are simply saying, if you have been gone for a year, you deserve to be back for a year. If you have been gone for 7 months, you deserve to be back for 7 months, unless you want to go back. If you want to go back, fine. You can volunteer to go back. Our amendment does not stop that. Or if there is an operational emergency where the President certifies there is a requirement, then the President can waive this amendment. We are trying to set a policy of stability so military families can predict what their cycle is going to be and have enough time to truly become involved with their families again, have some downtime, then refurbish, retrain, and go back. I suggest to the other side that if they believe this is an amendment that is incompatible with military service, they might want to consider a letter I received today from the Military Officers Association of America. This is the largest and most influential association of military officers in the country. It is composed of 360,000 members from every branch of the military. They wrote me today. I will read portions of this letter: On behalf of the 368,000 members of the Military Officers Association, I am writing to express our support for your amendment. The MOAA is very concerned that steps must be taken to protect our most precious military asset--the all- volunteer force--from having to bear such a disproportionate share of national wartime sacrifice. If we are not better stewards of our troops-- This is the president of the MOAA, VADM Norbert Ryan, U.S. Navy retired, saying this-- If we are not better stewards of our troops and their families in the future than we have been in the recent past, we believe strongly that we will be putting the all-volunteer force at unacceptable risk. I submit to the President and this body, this is not the kind of statement that would be made from a group of 368,000 military officers unless they believed in the constitutionality and the propriety of what we are attempting to do. I say to my colleagues, and particularly to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I am very disappointed in the notion that an amendment with this simplicity that goes to the well-being of our troops might even be considered as a filibuster. I say to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that the American people are watching us today, and they are watching closely, with the expectation that we finally can take some sort of positive action that might stabilize the operational environment in which our troops are being sent again and again. The American people are tired of the posturing that is giving the Congress such a bad reputation. They are tired of the procedural strategies designed to protect politicians' accountability and to protect this administration from judgment. They are looking for concrete action that will protect the well-being of our men and women in uniform. The question on this amendment is not whether one supports the war or whether they do not. It is not whether someone wants to wait until mid- July or September to see where one particular set of benchmarks or summary might be taking us. The situation is simply this: More than 4 years into the ground operation in Iraq, we owe stability and a reasonable cycle of deployment to the men and women who are carrying our Nation's burdens. That is the question.

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I would gladly yield the floor, but I don't know to whom I am yielding. Where are we?

Mr. WEBB. By all means.

Mr. WEBB. I would say first to the Senator that I had the privilege of being the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs for 3 years, where we had oversight of the National Guard and Reserve programs during a very critical time when we were transitioning into what we called the total force concept, and the President's use of the Guard and Reserve is certainly something we were not contemplating in the 1980s. But this amendment sets a floor for the Guard and Reserve of a 3-to-1 ratio with a goal--a written goal--in the amendment of a 5-to-1 ratio, which is the traditional standard.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I call up a bipartisan amendment with 29 of my colleagues that is focused squarely on supporting our troops who are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I now send the amendment to the desk.

Mr. WEBB. I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I wish to point out 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 cosponsor, Senator Levin, the chair of our committee, Senators Obama, Clinton, Durbin, Tester, Byrd, McCaskill, Kennedy, Salazar, Kerry, Harkin, Feinstein, Schumer, Brown, Pryor, Sanders, Murray, Klobuchar, Boxer, Mikulski, Cantwell, Stabenow, Akaka, Dodd, Biden, and Landrieu. 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. I offer 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, as one who has had a family member deployed in this war, and also as someone who, for 3 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 how manpower flow issues were predicted to have occurred 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. 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. They are also paying a heavy price. That price became clearer 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 no matter what one's view is of America's involvement in Iraq, the time has come for the Congress to place reasonable restrictions on how America's finest, our military men and women, are being used. Stated simply, after more than 4 years of ground operations in Iraq, we have 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, the proposed timetables and future course of the war, but this is one area where we all, as Democrats and Republicans, should be able to come together. This relates in some measure to what the distinguished senior Senator from Virginia was talking about a few minutes ago--whether there is a report coming out in a week, whether there is an evaluation taking place in September. And no matter what any of us believe about the future conduct of the war or about this timetable or that timetable, we owe it to our troops and to their families to establish a minimum floor for their combat deployments. If we are serious about supporting our troops, there is no better place to start than to correct the current troop rotation policy by requiring a minimum amount of time between deployments. I said this in the Chamber in March: The motivation behind this amendment is simple. It is the same motivation that impelled me more than 30 years ago when I first started working on veterans issues: How do we support the troops? What does that mean? Who speaks for the troops? Like you, I listen to what they are saying. Here is what a constituent in Virginia wrote to me recently. Her husband is an Active- Duty Infantry officer who is presently deployed in Iraq. She wrote: As an Army wife I brace myself for the possibility that he may be extended for a few months based on the recent troop surge, and, of course, he was. This morning on the news I heard that President Bush is extending the Army troops again. Enough is enough. She wrote. I am 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 4 years of combat, we must provide our troops and their families with a predictable operational tempo that has adequate dwell time between deployments. We owe this to our active participants but also 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 falling retentions of experienced midgrade officers and noncommissioned officers. The increasing attrition rate among Army company-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. In 2000 and 2001, the most recent classes that finished their initial 5-year obligations, we are told that their attrition is five times the level that it was before Iraq for such classes. The statistics we have been shown indicate that 54 percent of the West Point class of 2000 left the Army by the end of last year, and 46 percent of the class of 2001 left the Army by the end of last year. Senator Warner mentioned Admiral Mullen who is a longtime friend, a 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. He said, ``The Army.'' And we are not talking about equipment. We are talking about the Army. The Marine Corps is also seeing an upward trend in the loss of critical midgrade noncommissioned officers. We also find new evidence of troop burnout in more numerous mental health issues arising from multiple combat deployments. These are statistically observable. There is a new report by the Department of Defense that documents a higher rate of mental health issues for servicemen deploying multiple times or for more than 6 months. A survey of servicemembers after their deployments found that 38 percent of our soldiers, 31 percent of our marines, and 49 percent 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 family members in both Regular and Reserve components is well documented. This is an example drawn from the pages of our servicemembers' own newspaper, the Stars and Stripes. Last week, the paper described how Army SGT 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 5 months ago from his last deployment to Iraq. He is one of many former members of his old brigade who is slated to deploy 3 to 4 months early because they received 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 are just like a number. The newspaper said it best. Soldiers like Tweed fall through the cracks. Closer to home, the Virginia Army National Guard, roughly 1,400 members of the 116th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, the famous Stonewall Brigade, has 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 fought in that brigade during the Civil War, was wounded at Antietam, and lost his life at Chancellorsville. The brigade presently is in training in Mississippi and will deploy to Iraq in September. Deploying with this brigade are 700 members of the 3rd Battalion who returned only 2 years ago from a deployment in Afghanistan. Forty percent of this battalion will be making its second combat deployment in less than 3 years as members of the National Guard. One colonel, a brigade commander stationed in Iraq, recently described his soldiers this way: They have spent the last 4 years on 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 as widows 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, the strategy driving our troop 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 if a unit or member of a Regular component deploys to Iraq or Afghanistan, they will have the same time at home, dwell time, before they are deployed; for Guard and Reserves, they will have three times the amount of time that they were deployed. This is not a grand scheme to achieve an ideal troop rotation scenario. The ideal rotation scenario is two to one for Active, and five to one for Guard and Reserves, which we put in this amendment as a goal. What we are attempting to do is to put a floor under this and state what would be optimal. I would point out that the Adjutant General of my State of Virginia, MG Robert Newman, told us today that it is 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 the 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 downtime. It entails frequent absences as units retrain, refurbish, reequip, and assimilate new members. After the first month at home, for example, a marine generally spends 48 days in the field away from family, firing on the rifle range, or on weekend duty. This amendment provides for fair and reasonable waivers. It gives the President the waiver authority in the event of an operational emergency that poses a vital threat to our national security. 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 a need to waive the amendment's 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 theaters. 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 returned from a deployment so that you have a date certain for when his dwell time would expire. There was some comment about constitutional authority. The constitutional authority of this amendment is clear. Article I, section 8, of the Constitution empowers the Congress to make rules for the Government and regulations of the land and naval forces. As Acting Secretary of Army Geren stated during his confirmation hearing last month: Article I 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 was in 1961 during the height of the Korean war when Congress intervened to ensure our servicemembers 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 4 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. But the Congress intervened and said: No; 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 we are deploying our troops. I urge my colleagues to recognize this common interest we share in addressing the welfare of our troops and their families. I have been encouraged to hear 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 have 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 measurable progress, and many other questions. The bottom line in all of 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 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 is up to the Congress to establish that balance. As a 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 colleagues to support the amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I express my appreciation to the Senator from Nebraska for his leadership on this issue and his support for this amendment. It is my firm hope that people on the other side of the aisle will understand this amendment for what it is and, no matter what their views of the propriety of the war in Iraq or the direction of the President's strategy, will understand this is a minimum bottom line in terms of how the U.S. military is used around the world. For the record, Senator Hagel and I, to my knowledge, are the only veterans of ground combat in Vietnam in this body. It is a privilege and a pleasure to have him with me on this amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Madam President, it is my distinct pleasure to offer my support--along with my colleague Senator Warner--for the nomination of Magistrate Judge Liam O'Grady to be a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Since graduating from law school, Judge O'Grady's career has been as expansive as it has been distinguished. Judge O'Grady currently serves as magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he has sat since 2003. Prior to taking the bench, Judge O'Grady was a partner at the law firm of Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett, & Dunner, LLP, 1992-2003, an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, 1986-1992, and an assistant Commonwealth Attorney for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Judge O'Grady began his career as a law clerk to an administrative law judge for the Department of Labor and the Department of the Interior, 1976-1979, and was subsequently a sole practitioner, 1979-1982. Judge O'Grady has spent equal time in Federal and State courts and has spent equal time handling criminal and civil matters. Judge O'Grady has tried more than 100 cases before a jury. Moreover, he has authored and published several scholarly articles, and he has devoted countless hours in pro bono work for low-income and indigent clients. Judge O'Grady was unanimously rated ``well- qualified'' by the American Bar Association. Judge O'Grady is married to Grace McPhearson O'Grady and has four children. He resides in McLean, VA. Judge O'Grady received a B.A. from Franklin & Marshall College, 1973, and a J.D. from George Mason University School of Law, 1977. As I have previously noted, the Constitution assigns a pivotal role to the Senate in the advice and consent process related to Federal judges. These judgeships are lifetime appointments, and Virginians expect me to take very seriously my constitutional duties. In my mind, it matters not whether a nominee is a Republican or a Democrat, but rather whether the nominee will be respectful of the Constitution, and impartial, balanced, and fair-minded to those appearing before him. After careful deliberation, including conferring with Senator Warner, I believe that Judge O'Grady meets these high standards. I thank the Chair for the opportunity to make these remarks about Judge O'Grady and for the expeditious way the Senate has moved his nomination through the process during the 110th Congress. Again, it is with pride that I join Senator Warner in recommending Judge O'Grady to each of my colleagues in the Senate.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, yesterday, this body confirmed General Lute of the U.S. Army to be a Deputy National Security Adviser to cover the operations that are ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. I voted against General Lute. I will explain why I voted against General Lute because I believe there is a pretty important principle at stake with respect to civil-military relations that I think has been ignored over the past 20 years or so. I have no problems with General Lute's qualifications. There was a letter from White House counsel on the issue of constitutionality, which indicated there is no constitutional preclusion from a uniformed officer serving as a political adviser to the President. I found that legal opinion incomplete. We should understand that the legal opinion came from the counsel to the President. We could not exactly have expected that he would have said anything otherwise. But I find it incomplete in the sense that it did not address the true dangers if we continue to do this as we have been over the past 20 years. The danger to our system is this: The U.S. military is a decidedly nonpolitical organization. I grew up in the military. At the time I was growing up, my father would not even tell me how he voted because he believed it violated his duty in terms of being a nonpolitical arm of the U.S. Government. The difficulty, when a President brings an Active-Duty military officer inside the room, in an area where they are giving political advice--not military advice but political advice--unavoidably is that this particular individual then becomes a part of a political administration. If they keep the uniform on, when their tour is done and they go back into the military, they are inseparable from the political administration in which they served, particularly in the eyes of other military people. So two things happen: One is you have a political entity inside the U.S. military that, in some ways, threatens open dialog inside the military because now you have a former member of a particular administration inside the uniformed circle. Here is a good parallel. I was Assistant Secretary of Defense and then I was Secretary of the Navy. Let's say we allow military people who become Secretaries of the Navy to go back into uniform and compete for promotion among other uniformed people. It is a very difficult thing in terms of how it affects the neutrality of the American military, and also it creates, in many military people, the notion that they have to become political in order to succeed. We don't want that. I would have voted in opposition to the other individuals who were named by Senator Warner yesterday as people who have served in administrations and then returned to the military, including Colin Powell, whom I respect personally; General Scowcroft, whom I admire greatly; and, quite frankly, the sitting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency today. I believe any uniformed officer who agrees to serve as a policy adviser inside an administration, with political implications to that job, should agree to take the uniform off and not return to the active military. I intend to pursue this over the coming years. This isn't related directly to General Lute. It is a principle that I think we need to establish here in the Congress.

Mr. WEBB

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. WEBB. I thank the Senator.

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. 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.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I would like to address a few things this morning, some in retrospect of what has been for all of us a pretty emotional couple of weeks of debate, and also looking forward to what is going to occur when we return after the July 4 work period. The first thing I would like to point out is my admiration for our majority leader for how he handled the situation on the immigration bill. I think it was an extraordinarily difficult situation for our majority leader to have been in, and he did a great job with a very difficult assignment. I think we should back up and remember the bill that was put before us had not gone through debate. It was put together in a bipartisan way but removed from the committee process. In other words, people from both sides of the aisle, including some pretty strong members of the leadership on both sides of the aisle, got together and put together this extraordinarily complex bill, which the President himself wanted to see passed, and then it fell to our majority leader to attempt to get the provisions of the bill through the Senate. So we had a situation where there were members of the other party involved in putting together the components of the bill, we had a President who was urging that the bill be passed, and then our majority leader was the individual upon whom it fell to try to make this happen, with very little cooperation, quite frankly, from the other side. So I would just like to express my admiration and support for the majority leader for the way he handled himself during this process. Also with respect to the immigration bill, I think there has been a lot of rhetoric that has flown back and forth over the last 24 hours or so about motivations of individuals and what caused people to vote one way or the other. I think some of this is unfortunate. I think some of the people who have made some of the more extreme comments are going to be looking back at them 4 or 5 years from now and perhaps be a little bit embarrassed. This was an enormously complex piece of legislation. There were parts of the legislation which were very good, and hopefully we can find a way to bring them into law at another time. But there were parts in that legislation which needed to be fixed. I, personally, as the Presiding Officer knows, attempted to get an amendment through the Senate that, in my view, would have brought fairness to the issue of legalization and practicality--fairness in the sense that the proposed bill was going to legalize every individual, virtually, who had come to the United States in violation of American laws by the end of last year--and I felt strongly for a good bit of time that those who came during a period of lax immigration laws and who were able to put roots down into the community should be provided a path toward citizenship. I made this case during the campaign last year, and by saying that last year, I was viewed to be sort of on the forward edge of where this debate was going to go. But this bill, by reaching out and including virtually everyone who had been here by the end of last year, inflamed the passions of a lot of people in this country who otherwise would support fair immigration reform. At the same time, the amendment I offered also proposed to eliminate what is called the touchback provision, which would have eliminated-- for those people who had been here for 4 years and had put down roots-- the necessity for them to go back to their home country in order to apply for a green card. I think that approach was fair. I regret that the amendment didn't pass. At the same time, I and a number of other people found it impossible for us to vote for the bill as it was coming up with the provision that was so much broader. The bottom line on immigration now is there are laws on the books. We have seen a lot of talk over the past day or so that immigration reform is dead. These comprehensive immigration reform packages have a way of falling under their own weight because the issue itself is so complex. What we should be doing now, in the next year and a half or so, given that there is an election, is to do everything we can to enforce the laws that are on the books. One idea I like is the $4.4 billion recommendation that was put into title I of this immigration bill that just failed that would go toward border security, and employer certification could well be added to any appropriations bill, where the measure would be relevant and could help existing law. So for those who are attempting to say that all immigration reform has now skidded to a halt because a flawed bill was not passed by this body, I say let's enforce the existing laws. There are a lot of laws on the books. One of the greatest problems we have had is particularly in the area of workers being hired by employers on a large scale who know they are here without papers. In those sorts of areas, there are laws on the books we need to enforce.