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WASHINGTON--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday submitted to Congress a sweeping
proposal for changing the U.S. military that would rewrite
Pentagon retirement and retention rules and abolish practices that have
governed the military for generations.
The 204-page document also would expand the secretary's authority to
eliminate reports to Congress and waive rules that interfere with military
readiness.
The package of changes,
titled the "Defense Transformation for the 21st Century Act," would
raise the retirement age for senior officers, push some military jobs into
the private sector and exempt the Defense Department from environmental laws
the secretary considers an impediment to readiness.
Rumsfeld appeared to be taking advantage of the
success of the Iraq war to push changes that have
been fiercely resisted by Pentagon brass and their allies in Congress.
Rumsfeld has argued for restructuring the U.S. military to make it lighter and
more flexible. He contends the military still is configured for fighting a
major conflict in Europe against the defunct Soviet Union rather than for the more rapid and long-range
kind of warfare the U.S. has been waging in Iraq.
As he said last month at a Defense Department town meeting, "The attacks
of Sept. 11 make transforming the department even more urgent," because
the military is not designed "to fight the shadowy terrorists and
terrorist networks that operate with the support and assistance of terrorist
states."
Rumsfeld submitted his plan at a time when the
Pentagon high command is busy with the Iraq war and Congress is out of town
for a two-week spring recess.
Spokesmen for the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees said there
would be no official response to the document until it had been studied. Rumsfeld asked that the legislative package be adopted as
part of this year's defense authorization bill.
One controversial provision of the proposal would remove the four-year time
limit for generals and admirals serving in top leadership positions,
including chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chief of naval operations,
Army chief of staff, Marine Corps commandant and Air Force chief of staff. It
also would allow less senior officers to remain in command positions for
longer periods of time.
"I think that the United States armed forces make a terrible mistake by
having so many permanent changes of station, by having so many people skip
along at the tops of the waves in a job and serve in it 12, 15, 18, 24 months
and be gone," Rumsfeld told the Reserve
Officers Association in January.
"They spend the first six months saying hello... the next six months
trying to learn the job and the last six months leaving," he said.
There has been deep-seated opposition to that change because of fears in the
officer ranks that it would mean a slower rate of promotion and stagnation in
lesser positions.
As compensation, the proposal would allow some high-ranking officers to
retire early without loss of benefits. It also would eliminate limits on the
number of generals and admirals the services could have at various pay
grades.
Another provision would reorganize the reserves and National Guard into
separate job classifications for assignments that could require long
deployments on active duty and those that would only require reservists to
attend weekend meetings and two weeks' training in the summer.
"The reality is people in the [National] Guard do in fact have jobs and
are not signed up to be full-time," Rumsfeld
said. "They're signed up to be part-time. They're signed up to be
helpful when needed."
More than 200,000 reservists and National Guard troops have been called up
from civilian life to active duty for the Iraq war, and some are facing
deployments exceeding a year.
Rumsfeld's plan would allow reserve and National
Guard generals and admirals to serve until age 68 and allow some designated
by the defense secretary to serve until 72.
It also would permit generals and admirals and senior enlisted ranks to
receive retirement pay greater than 75 percent of their base pay, the current
limit.
According to David Chu, undersecretary of defense
for personnel and readiness, the U.S. armed forces are 31,400 over
authorized strength because a "stop loss" hold was put on members
preparing to retire or otherwise leave the service during the Iraq emergency.
Rumsfeld is proposing to keep uniformed strength at
about 1.5million but turn over as many as 300,000 jobs now performed by
military personnel to outside civilian contractors.
Rumsfeld's plan also would:
- Authorize the secretary of defense to spend $200 million to "assist
foreign nations whose support is critical to counterterrorism efforts";
- Empower the secretary to waive laws that require the use of American-made
products if they interfere with national security;
- Enable the Pentagon to award contracts on the basis of quality as well as
low cost;
- Remove limits on the defense secretary's office staff;
- Streamline the defense secretary's ability to spend money on the missile
defense program;
- End a requirement for the Defense Department to periodically report to
Congress on many issues--the list covers about 100 pages--including the B-1
bomber, which Rumsfeld says has proved itself in
combat.
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