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Military Aims to Cut Back on 'Stop Loss'
WASHINGTON (AP) - In an action branded a backdoor draft by some critics, the military over the past several years has held tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines on the job and in war zones beyond their retirement dates or enlistment length.It is a widely disliked practice that the Pentagon, under new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is trying to figure out how to cut back on. Gates has ordered that the practice - known as "stop loss" - must "be minimized." At the same time, he is looking for ways to decrease the hardship for troops and their families, recruit more people for a larger military and reassess how the active duty and reserves are used. Gates has asked the chief of each service branch for a plan by the end of February on how they would rely less on stop loss. The Defense Department says the main reason for the policy is to keep units whole for deployments, regardless of whether service time is up for some individuals in the unit. "It's based on unit cohesion," former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld once said when a soldier questioned him about the policy during Rumsfeld's visit to the staging area in Kuwait that is used for troops going into Iraq. "The principle is that - in the event there is something that requires a unit to be involved in, and people are in a personal situation where their time was ending - they put a stop-loss on it so cohesion is maintained," Rumsfeld said. Rumsfeld said the policy was "something you prefer not to have to use in a perfect world." He said it was basically a sound principle and well understood among soldiers. A half-dozen lawsuits have unsuccessfully challenged the policy. Courts have agreed that the Pentagon involuntarily can extend deployments if the president believes the practice is essential to national security. Though families dislike the policy and some troops oppose it, others accept it as a fact of life in wartime. Posted by: Steve White 2007-01-29 |
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