It is no great surprise that Congress, in the end, decided to move with some caution on Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's ambitious plan for overhauling management of general and flag officers, delaying action probably until next year.
The surprise was discovering which lawmaker finally would influence House members to act more deliberately on the package despite pressure from the Bush administration for swift approval. That lawmaker was Representative John Kline of Minnesota, a Republican freshman who had spent only four months in Congress at the time.
Drawing on his 25 years of experience as a Marine Corps officer, Kline concluded that Rumsfeld's officer management reform package actually "would do several bad things" to the officer corps, including age it unnecessarily, lower morale among younger officers, and "politicize" senior officer appointments to the point that Defense Secretaries could surround themselves with "like-minded" officers—shutting out those with equally informed but dissenting viewpoints.
"Bright young officers with their own ideas, their own initiatives, will be deterred from pursuing those," Kline said. "This will have the effect . . . of squashing dissent. . . . That's the opposite of what the secretary wanted to do."
Kline made the remarks on 13 May, as the House Armed Services Committee debated an amendment from Representative Ellen Tauscher(D-CA) to pull the general and flag officer management provisions from the 2004 defense bill.
The provisions would have given Rumsfeld and future Defense secretaries new and expansive authority over star-rank officer rotations, tour lengths, and age limits. It looked as though the full committee would split its vote along party lines, as it had at the subcommittee level, giving the Bush administration a victory—at least in the House. The Senate Armed Services Committee, finding no need for the changes and worried about losing oversight authority over renomination of top officers, declined to include the package in its defense bill.
The provisions would have allowed up to 40-year careers; raised retired pay, accordingly, to a new maximum of 100% of basic pay; ended time-in-service ceilings on general and flag officers; raised age ceilings by several years; allowed additional age deferments, up to 72, by the secretary of Defense; and relaxed the three-year, in-grade requirement that senior officers must meet to retire at their top ranks.
Kline attacked the logic of the proposed changes and suggested Congress would be abandoning its responsibility to protect the officer corps if it rushed to enact the package. Fellow Republicans Jo Ann Davis of Virginia and Jim Gibbons of Nevada quietly joined with Kline and committee Democrats to kill the package.
The freshman Republican risked a disloyalty rap from the administration. Secretary Rumsfeld and staff had hoped that a swift victory in Iraq would lead to speedy enactment of personnel management reforms in a Republican-led Congress.
Representative John McHugh (R-NY), chairman of the Total Force Subcommittee, had urged approval, arguing that the proposals were backed by a study from RAND, the respected defense think tank. Only during full committee debate was it revealed that McHugh alone had seen the RAND report, which actually was a six-page issue paper. No other member or committee staffer had read it, yet most Republicans voted for the officer management initiatives. Kline said he relied on his own poll, an informal survey of "every colonel and general I know, active and retired." Every one of them opposed the administration's provisions, he said.
A Vietnam veteran who served as military aide to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Kline said he did not fall lockstep behind the administration on this "because of my experience in the military. If I can't bring that to bear, why am I here?"
Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA), committee chairman, did back the administration but thanked Kline for his views, noting they came from a "guy who carried the nuclear football [a briefcase of launch codes] for two presidents and has a deep concern about this issue."
Committee Democrats criticized Republicans for rubber-stamping the Defense Department recommendations after a single, poorly attended hearing with only defense officials as witnesses. Democrats urged that the provisions be stricken and placed in a separate bill to allow time for more extensive review and debate. Enactment this year, said Kline, is unlikely.