The Senate was scheduled to resume debate this week on anti-war legislation, including Webb's proposal to require that troops have as much time at their home station as they do deployed to Iraq.
Supporters of Webb's measure say it has at least 57 of the 60 votes needed. It would need 67 votes to override a veto.
This proposal hurts rather than helps our men and women in uniform. All it does is prevent the Department of Defense from sending a cohesive and trained unit to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Units are not static. So even if a unit has not gone overseas in a year, members assigned to the unit may have come back within a year. Thus, to keep each individual member of the unit home a year, those troops would have to be removed and replaced with troops who had not trained with the unit. The unit will be less effective. And the unit that trades personnel with the deploying unit will now have a portion of its personnel undeployable. The problem will cascade throughout the army.
The result will be more than a massive headache for the Pentagon to manage. It will result in dead American soldiers and Marines. This is a guaranteed result, since less effective units will suffer more casualties to achieve their missions.
It may feel good to pretend this helps the troops. But it is false compassion.
