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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.

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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.

The Acting President pro tempore: The senior Senator from Florida is recognized.

Mr. Nelson (FL): 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 (FL): 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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Mr. Reid: Madam President, this Sunday is the halfway mark of the year 2007. It is also the 2-month mark since President Bush vetoed the supplemental appropriations bill we sent to him which would have set a responsible path to reduce our combat operations, save lives, and finally change course in Iraq. President Bush called our bill a "recipe for chaos."

Now that 2 months have passed, here is what has happened under the President's escalation plan. It is clearly chaos: 126 brave Americans died in May alone, and more than 100 in June. This quarter has been the deadliest in the entire war. Sectarian killings have not declined. Yesterday, more than 20 Iraqis were beheaded. There is little evidence the Iraqi Government will meet any of the political benchmarks they have set for themselves. The surge was supposed to create the space for Iraq's political leaders to make the difficult decisions to unite their country. That has not occurred.

I have said from the beginning that as long as President Bush remains obstinate and the Republicans in Congress continue to toe his line, this tragic war will continue. There is no sign of President Bush awakening to the devastating reality of this intractable war. But this week, there is new reason for optimism in that my Republican colleagues in the Senate are finally willing to join in calling for a new direction.

A couple of days ago, on Tuesday, I congratulated the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Richard Lugar, for courageously breaking ranks with President Bush and calling for the war to end. Senator Lugar said, among other things:

Persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term.

I agree with those words.

The day after Senator Lugar's comments, another distinguished Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, George Voinovich, wrote a letter to the President. In the letter, Senator Voinovich urged the President to wake up to the truth that so many of us already know: that the war cannot be won militarily.

It can only be won politically. Yet another distinguished member of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Warner, then said he expects the number of Republican defections with the President to rise.

I am encouraged by what we are hearing now from Republican Senators, even though it is only a handful. But when you join these three Senators with Senators Smith and Hagel, we are up to five. We still have 44 to go.

I said earlier this week that this could and should be a turning point. After the recess, we will turn to the Department of Defense authorization bill, which is our next chance to force the President to change course.

But we are still a long way from reaching our goal. More Republicans are saying the right things, but now we badly need for them to put their words into action by voting the right way also.

The current handful of Republicans isn't enough. We would not be able to get any legislation passed without 60 votes, but we are getting closer. We are not where we need to be yet.

In May, as I said, the President called our plan a "recipe for chaos." Each day that goes by we sink further and further into the President's escalation, and it becomes even clearer that the best way to ensure chaos, death, devastation, and destruction is to stick with the President's failed policy. Let's go with our plan, which is not chaos but stability and the saving of people's lives.

As we leave for the celebration of our Nation's birthday, the Fourth of July, I ask my colleagues to listen to the call of the American people. Choose the path that honors our troops, makes our country safer at home, and stronger abroad.

When we return next week, let's get to work on a responsible new direction that Americans demand and deserve and, in fact, is long overdue.

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