Showing posts with label President Barack Obama. Show all posts
Marines Join Chorus Urging Caution on Gay Ban
In testimony before a House committee, Gen. James Conway said he supports a Pentagon assessment to determine how to lift the ban. But he also suggested that civil rights ultimately would have to take a back seat if it meant tampering with the military's ability to protect the country.
"That's what they have been built to do under the current construct and I would argue that we've done a pretty good job bringing that to pass," he told the House Armed Services Committee.
"My concern would be that somehow that central purpose or focus were to become secondary to the discussion," he said.
Conway is seen as the most resistant among the service chiefs to efforts under way in Congress and the Pentagon to repeal the 1993 "don't ask, don't tell" law. But his testimony indicates that he won't stand in the way as Defense Secretary Robert Gates undertakes a comprehensive study on how to lift the ban without hurting the force.
President Barack Obama has pledged to change the policy, saying it unfairly punishes patriots who want to serve their country. Congress would have to agree, and it's unclear whether Democrats would have enough votes to pass the legislation.
The opinion of the service chiefs, and Conway's in particular, is expected to factor heavily into the debate.
It's Conway's job to ensure that young recruits are prepared to deploy to dangerous and remote regions of the world. Because Marines frequently represent the military's first line of attack and are dropped behind enemy lines, unit cohesion and morale are considered vital to their ability to succeed.
In 1993, opponents of President Bill Clinton's proposal to lift the ban on gays argued successfully that it might hurt military effectiveness. Facing resistance in Congress, Clinton settled for "don't ask, don't tell," which allowed gays to serve so long as they kept their sexual orientation a secret.
Conway's concerns have been echoed by other service chiefs.
On Tuesday, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said they had serious concerns about lifting the ban with two wars raging.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told House lawmakers on Wednesday that he, too, wants the study to be complete before any changes are made.
"That needs to be done because only with that information can we discuss the force that we have, (and) not someone else's," Roughead said.
Britain, Canada, Australia and Israel allow gays to serve openly. Other nations already allow women to serve on submarines; the Navy lifted its ban this month.
Both Conway and Roughead said they would oppose an immediate freeze on firings under "don't ask, don't tell" until Congress can consider broader legislation repealing the 1993 law.
Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has proposed a freeze as a way of allowing gay troops to fight without worrying that they could lose their job.
"Half measures, I think, would only be confusing in the end," Conway said.
Christopher Preble, head of foreign studies at the Cato Institute think tank, said that the service chiefs recognize that change is inevitable, but that the military shouldn't wait too long to determine its next move.
"The military as an institution should not find itself so out of step with the public at large that it cannot relate to the society it's defending," he said.
Coast Guard Selects New Three Star Admirals
The commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Adm. Thad Allen, announced the selection of new three star admirals who will serve under Vice Adm. Robert J. Papp, when he becomes the U.S Coast Guard's 24th commandant May 25, upon Senate confirmation.
Secretary of Homeland Security Napolitano and President Obama approved the nominations of Rear Adm. Sally Brice-O’Hara for promotion to vice admiral and assignment as Vice Commandant; Rear Adm. Manson K. Brown for promotion to vice admiral and assignment as commander of the Coast Guard's Pacific Area and Rear Adm. Robert C. Parker for promotion to vice admiral and assignment as commander of the Coast Guard's Atlantic Area. Vice Adm. John P. Currier will continue to serve as the chief of staff. Appointment to these billets and promotion as appropriate will occur following confirmation by the Senate.
Brice-O'Hara, a native of Annapolis, Md., currently serves as the deputy commandant for operations in Coast Guard Headquarters, Washington, where she is responsible for the strategic integration of operational missions. In her new role as the service's second in command, Brice-O'Hara will be in charge of executing the Commandant's strategic intent, managing internal organizational governance and also serving as the Coast Guard's acquisition executive.
Brown, a native of the District of Columbia, serves as commander for the Fourteenth Coast Guard District in Honolulu, where he is responsible for the safety and security of nearly 12.2 million square miles of the Central Pacific Ocean, an area more than two and a half times larger than the Continental United States. Brown will be the Coast Guard's first African American three star admiral. At Pacific Area, Brown will command all Coast Guard missions in a 74 million square mile area ranging from South America, north to the Arctic Circle and west to the Far East.
Parker, a native of Portland, Ore., serves as the U.S. Southern Command's first director of security and intelligence in Miami, where he directs U.S. military operations and intelligence efforts, and coordinates interagency operations in Southern Command's area of responsibility. He is the first Coast Guard officer to serve as a director in a Department of Defense command. In his new position at Atlantic Area, Parker will command an area of responsibility that ranges from the Rocky Mountains to the Arabian Gulf and includes five Coast Guard Districts, 42 states and over 14 million square miles.
Survivors Fight to End 'Widows Tax'
They are always warmly received, but that's where the hospitality ends. Despite pledges of help from scores of federal officials - including President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - their long quest remains unfulfilled.
Every year since 2005, the Senate has voted to eliminate the policy that denies widows the ability to collect both a military survivor's benefit and the full annuity bought when their military husbands were alive. But in each of those years, the fix was dropped when House and Senate negotiators wrote the final bill in private.
"What we always hear is that there is just no funding for us. 'Sorry, this is not your year,'" said Vivianne Wersel, chairwoman of the Government Relations Committee at Gold Star Wives of America. Her husband died of a heart attack in 2005, days after returning from his second tour in Iraq. "What happens behind closed doors, we get thrown under the bus."
The widows' tax is a law that won't allow surviving spouses to receive the retirement pay due them when their spouse died from a cause related to military service, and at the same time collect the full annuity - essentially an insurance policy most of their spouses opted to buy. They paid an average of 6.5 percent of their retirement pay in premiums, often $100 or more a month.
Because one benefit is subtracted from the other, affected surviving spouses lose about $1,000 a month on average. There are about 54,000 survivors who are affected by the policy, whose spouses served in conflicts from World War II to Afghanistan, and that number could grow.
The widows say politicians have promised time and time again to help them, but they don't.
Part of the problem is the cost. Eliminating the offset in benefits is expensive, said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who has been the widows' longtime ally. Making good on the promise would cost $6.7 billion over a decade.
But knowing the cost hasn't stopped politicians from promising to help.
Pelosi, as House minority leader in 2005, took up the widows' cause as part of the Democrats' GI Bill of Rights, before her party gained control of Congress.
Two years later, Obama, then a senator, co-sponsored legislation to eliminate the offset just before he spoke at a Gold Star Wives reception on Capitol Hill. In his budget proposal to the Congress last week, he didn't include it.
Kimberly Hazelgrove, 36, of Lorton, Va., whose husband died in Iraq in 2004, said she recalls Obama coming to the reception and promising to help them. The 36-year-old mother of two said she's now left wondering what happened to the promise.
"I have yet to see it, after a year in office, that really being a priority for them," said Hazelgrove, who has lobbied on Capitol Hill with her kids, ages 6 and 9, in tow.
Last June, four military widows showed up before 8 a.m. for a House Armed Services Committee session where their issue was on the agenda. Several hours into the hearing, an aide told them the discussion had been pushed back because of its sensitive nature.
At 10:30 p.m., the matter finally came to a vote. By then, Sandra Drew of Herndon, Va., was the only widow still there. Drew, whose husband was killed in Bosnia in 1995, said she was dumbfounded when Democrats who had co-sponsored the legislation in past years voted against it, while Republicans who had once opposed it were supporting it.
She said some committee members sheepishly looked at her as they voted down the provision, "visibly uncomfortable that I was in the room. It went right down party lines, and it shouldn't be a partisan issue."
Steve Strobridge, a retired Air Force colonel who is director of government relations at the Military Officers Association of America, said something could be done for the widows if the political will existed.
"It requires a vote of the entire Congress or a big emphasis of leadership to say we're going to elevate this priority, and as terrible as it seems, taking care of the widows whose military sponsor was killed by service has not been given a high enough priority," he said.
Congress did take the step of recognizing the widows' plight and gave affected survivors $50 more per month starting in 2008.
"We've had a partial victory and eventually we will continue to pound away and get it done," Nelson said.
Wersel said her group is pleased that so far this year they have enlisted more than 300 co-sponsors for their legislation in the House and more than 50 in the Senate, but they are still not confident that means Congress will pass it.
"The whole process has become rhetoric," she said.
Defense Chiefs to Discuss Ending Gay Ban
Gates and top military officer Adm. Mike Mullen "are and frankly have been working on an implementation plan" to carry out President Obama's goal of scrapping the ban, press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters on Thursday.
"And they will have more to say about ... their proposed way forward with 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' early next week," Morrell said.
The law introduced in 1993 requires gays to keep quiet about their sexual orientation or face expulsion from the military.
Taking on a politically charged issue, Obama renewed his vow to end the ban in his State of the Union address on Wednesday, saying he would work "this year" with Congress to change the law.
As a candidate, Obama promised to end the policy, but activists have criticized him for moving cautiously on the issue since taking office.
A defense official said Gates and Mullen would describe "a plan on how to proceed with the president's vision."
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said "the secretary has been intimately involved in conversations with the president leading up to the State of the Union on this issue and is still working on it."
Gates has said previously any change in policy needed to be handled "very, very carefully" as the military was under strain from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The defense secretary was expected to describe possible steps that would need to be taken to prepare the way before the law was changed, the official said.
Another defense official said military leaders were still at a preliminary stage and were not ready to publicly lay out a firm plan for implementing a repeal.
In June, Gates said he asked Pentagon lawyers to consider possible ways to interpret the rule in a more flexible, "humane" manner as an interim step until the law is changed.
Gates would address that option as well at a hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Mullen and the joint chiefs of staff "understand perfectly the president's intent to see the law repealed," said Mullen's spokesman, Capt. John Kirby.
"They also take seriously their obligation to provide the president with the best advice about the impact of the repeal of the law and how best the change in policy can be implemented across the force," he told AFP.
Mullen was "prepared to speak to legislators about how that best advice can be developed," he said.
In his speech Wednesday, Obama devoted one sentence to the issue and set no deadline for securing a change to the law.
"This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are," the president said.
About 13,000 U.S. service members have been discharged under the policy since it was adopted in 1993. The ban through 2003 has resulted in an estimated $95.4 million in recruiting costs and $95.1 million in training replacements, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Polls show most Americans support allowing openly gay men and lesbians to serve in the U.S. military.
Opponents of changing the rule have warned it could threaten "unit cohesion" in the all-volunteer force and damage morale among troops in a military under strain from years of war.
Former president Bill Clinton agreed to the compromise rule after meeting stiff resistance from commanders and some lawmakers when he proposed allowing gays to serve openly in uniform.
White House officials are anxious to avoid Clinton's experience, when he ended up bogged down in a damaging battle over the issue, sapping his influence early in his first term.
The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, a Democrat who supports ending the ban, said he believes opinion in and outside the military has progressed since 1993.
"I think there's a generational shift that's taken place," said Levin, who stressed the importance of hearing the views of military officers and enlisted personnel before making moves to end the policy.
US Marines End Role in Iraq
In Baghdad, meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden held talks with Iraqi leaders amid growing tensions over plans to ban election candidates because of suspected links to Saddam Hussein's regime.
The White House worries the bans could raise questions over the fairness of the March 7 parliamentary elections, which are seen as an important step in the American pullout timetable.
The Marines formally handed over control of Sunni-dominated Anbar, Iraq's largest province, to the Army during a ceremony at a base in Ramadi - where some of the fiercest fighting of the war took place.
If all goes as planned, the last remaining Marines will be followed out by tens of thousands of soldiers in the coming months. President Barack Obama has ordered all but 50,000 troops out of the country by Aug. 31, 2010, with most to depart after the March 7 parliamentary election.
The remaining troops will leave by the end of 2011 under a U.S.-Iraqi security pact.
But concerns about the success of the election - and perhaps the loss of hard won security gains that the Marines helped cement - are on the rise because of a growing political dispute that could see more than 500 candidates blacklisted because of suspected ties to previous regime.
The changeover at Ramadi, west of Baghdad, leaves the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division with responsibility over both Baghdad and Anbar, the vast desert province that stretches from western Baghdad to the borders of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
The province was once the heart of the deadly Sunni insurgency that erupted after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. In the battles for control of the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, the Marines saw some of the most brutal and deadliest fighting of the war.
Violence began dropping off in the province in late 2006 when Sunni fighters - known as Awakening Councils - turned against al-Qaida and sided with the Marines to fight the insurgency.
As many as 25,000 Marines were in Iraq at the peak, mostly in Anbar province. The few thousand who remain - except for U.S. Embassy guards and advisers in Baghdad - are expected to ship out in a matter of weeks.
The upcoming parliamentary election is also considered an important step toward speeding the U.S. troop pullout. But plans to ban hundreds of candidates have raised deep concerns in Washington that the voting could widen rifts between the majority Shiites who gained power after Saddam's fall and Sunnis who are struggling to regain influence.
Biden, who arrived late Friday, had a full agenda of meetings with Iraqi leaders including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has strongly supported the blacklist.
Some Sunni leaders have accused the Shiite-led government of using the ban as a political tool. But al-Maliki insists that Iraq must purge all ties to Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime. A vetting panel has put 512 names on the blacklist and more are expected.
McHugh Prioritizes Support, Outreach
McHugh, who took office Sept. 21, spoke to more than 400 members of the Army staff and secretariat in the Pentagon auditorium at an Army Leader Forum.
He expressed his admiration for those who serve, stating, "The most important thing we do is take care of our Soldiers and take care of our families." There is a "critical interdependence" between Soldiers and families in relation to readiness, he said, especially with an all-volunteer force.
Continuing to improve the availability and excellence of quality-of-life programs is essential after almost nine years of war, even as funding may decrease in coming years, he said, adding this imperative must be balanced with vital efforts to modernize the force.
Facing persistent conflict, he said the Army must transform the way it develops its leaders to prepare them for "hybrid threats" and ambiguous situations. He said the Army must train its leaders to be comfortable in dealing with uncertainty by teaching them "how to think" as well as a doctrinal baseline of "what to think."
"Technology does not in and of itself lift the fog of war," McHugh said. He said leaders need to be comfortable with greater decentralized authority from the troop level to the institutional level in order to encourage bottom-up solutions. Of course, he said the Army must also ensure that robust service-wide standards are in place.
"In too many instances, the so-called traditional acquisition process has not been as agile, flexible and efficient as the force it's charged to support," McHugh said.
He lauded initiatives such as the Rapid Equipping Force and Experimental Task Force, saying the Army must continue efforts to get emerging technologies into the hands of Soldiers quickly. "It's a work in progress," he said, but there's more to be done.
"We have to re-tool our entire existing acquisition processes and develop a more agile acquisition strategy that directly supports the warfighter on the battlefield today, next year and beyond," McHugh said. "And do it in a way that meets the expectations of our overseers on Capitol Hill."
In addition, the Army needs a more robust and effective partnership with Congress, McHugh said. He praised the Congressional Fellowship Program, saying the program is larger now than ever with 26 fellows from the Army on Capitol Hill, and added that the program should continue to grow.
McHugh challenged every Army general officer in the National Capitol Region to take a "direct, personal role" in fostering a relationship with Congress by making "a concerted effort to specifically partner with a member in office on Capitol Hill."
From his perspective of having served 17 years in the House of Representatives, he said the Army must do a better job of explaining needs and reporting achievements because this relationship with Congress is crucial to success in obtaining needed resources.
The secretary concluded his formal comments by thanking the staff and secretariat. He cited his trip last month to Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that warfighters there know they are making a difference.
"You're doing vital work, supporting our troops and making a difference in the lives of millions of people, who like you wake up but who have a different dream - a dream that someday maybe they can enjoy the freedoms, the liberties that this United States Army has given to hundreds of millions across the planet since its inception."
McHugh took questions from audience members, including one who asked whether the number of civilian employees working for the Army would grow beyond the current force in light of President Obama's initiative to replace contractors with government employees when appropriate. The secretary said outsourcing would be examined on a case-by-case basis, and where there was not an essential government responsibility to keep a function in-house, who could do the job most efficiently would be weighed.
"I think our first responsibility has to be to the taxpayer dollar," he said, adding that a "robust interaction" between the public and private sectors will not only stimulate the economy, but provide an Army outreach into communities.
Obama Taps Winnefeld to Head Northcom, NORAD
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23, 2009 – President Barack Obama has nominated Navy Vice Adm. James A. “Sandy” Winnefeld Jr. to be the next commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American
If approved by the Senate, Winnefeld would receive his fourth star. He currently is director of strategic plans and policy at the Joint Staff and senior member of the U.S. delegation to the United
Winnefeld would be the second sailor to command NORAD, the U.S.-Canadian command charged with the missions of aerospace warning and aerospace control for North America. He would succeed Air Force Gen. Victor E. “Gene” Renuart Jr. in both jobs.
Both commands are based in Colorado Springs, Colo.
U.S. Northern
Winnefeld is an ROTC graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and has served as a naval aviator. He served with two fighter squadrons and as an instructor at the Navy Fighter Weapons School.
He commanded Fighter Squadron 211, the USS Cleveland and the USS Enterprise. He commanded the “Big E” during Sept. 11, 2001, and launched aircraft in support of Operation Enduring Freedom against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
He commanded Carrier Strike Group 2/Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Before taking his current job, he served as the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet,
Renuart has commanded Northcom and NORAD since Oct. 1, 2007. He was commissioned in the Air Force in 1971, and served in the United States, Europe, Southwest Asia and the Pacific. Renuart served as the director of operations for U.S. Central Command during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was responsible for helping to plan and execute all joint and allied combat operations.
Renuart also served as the director of strategic plans and policy before serving as senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
President Obama Signs 2010 Defense Budget Into Law
WASHINGTON, Dec. 22, 2009 – Defense officials are hailing passage of the fiscal 2010 budget that funds military programs and wartime operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and provides a military pay raise.
President Barack Obama signed the 2010 Department of
The $636.3 billion legislation provides $128.3 billion for operations in Iraq and
The law also extends various authorities and other non-defense fiscal 2010 appropriations, White House officials announced. Most of those provisions involved temporary extensions of emergency unemployment and health-care benefits that had been set to expire.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M.
“We strongly urge Senate passage of the Defense Appropriations Bill today, prior to expiration of the current continuing resolution,” the statement said. “Passage today will provide important support for our foreign policy and national security priorities and ensure continuity of funding for our troops in combat and for all of the Department of Defense.”
The House passed the legislation Dec. 16.
