Revenge of the Reserves

The ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday says the percentage of Americans who approve of the job President Bush is doing has fallen to 39 percent, the lowest approval rating of his career. In a not-unrelated story, six more U.S. soldiers were killed by roadside bombs in Iraq Monday as the number of U.S. deaths continued its grim climb past the two thousand mark.

The president is trying hard to shore up the country's waning support for the military engagement in Iraq. In his Saturday radio address, he said, "The best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission and win the war on terror."

But "terror" will never put on a dress uniform and surrender aboard the USS Missouri. This is a war with no end. And the way the president has chosen to fight it is now beginning to look like a cure that is worse than the disease.

President Bush is about to learn what Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon learned, or maybe didn't -- the American people have a very limited tolerance for involuntary military service.

Back on September 29, 2003, USA TODAY published a story with the headline "Army Reserve fears troop exodus." The paper reported that its editorial board met with Lt. Gen. James Helmly, chief of the 205,000-member Army Reserve:

Helmly described the war on terrorism as an unprecedented test of the 30-year-old all-volunteer military. Historically, he said, the National Guard and Reserve were designed to mobilize for big wars and then bring soldiers home quickly.

Today, he said, they have "entered a brave new world" where large numbers of troops will have to be deployed for long periods.

Counting training time and yearlong tours in Iraq, some Army Reserve soldiers could be mobilized for 15 months or more.

That was two years ago, and there's no end in sight.

Like a New Orleans levee, the Army Reserve is collapsing under the force of a storm it wasn't built to withstand. On December 20, 2004, Lt. Gen. Helmly wrote a memo to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, reported by the Associated Press on January 5, 2005:

"The purpose of this memorandum is to inform you of the Army Reserve's inability under current policies, procedures and practices ... to meet mission requirements associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom," Helmly wrote, using the military's names for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

"The Army Reserve is additionally in grave danger of being unable to meet other operational requirements," including those in classified contingency plans for other potential wars or national emergencies, "and is rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force," Helmly wrote.

The crisis isn't limited to the Reserves. The AP further reported:

Under an order known as "stop loss," soldiers on active duty are prohibited from leaving the service until their tours end.

It's not an all-volunteer Army if you won't let soldiers leave when their enlistments are up. The president should count himself lucky that the FTC doesn't regulate recruitment ads.

People who signed up for the National Guard and Reserves prior to the invasion of Iraq did not expect that they would be deployed repeatedly for a year or more in an overseas war. Neither did their families. Neither did their employers.

Perhaps those expectations were unrealistic or contradicted by the fine print of the contract, but that's not going to help the president in the polls.

For every reservist who is deployed in Iraq, subjected daily to life-threatening dangers, there is a good-sized group of people back home who are pretty upset about it, and a bigger group of friends and acquaintances who are worried too.

It's possible that this exponential effect is accelerating the president's meltdown in the polls. If he hadn't plucked so many people out of their regular lives and away from their jobs and families, he might have gotten away with the usurpation of Congress' constitutional power to decide when the country goes to war and when it doesn't.

The framers were very specific: the role of commander-in-chief does not include the power to take the country to war.

In 1793, just a few years after the Constitution was ratified, James Madison wrote, "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department." Madison wrote:

Every just view that can be taken of this subject, admonishes the public of the necessity of a rigid adherence to the simple, the received, and the fundamental doctrine of the constitution, that the power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature; that the executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war; that the right of convening and informing congress, whenever such a question seems to call for a decision, is all the right which the constitution has deemed requisite or proper.

Now he tells us.


Copyright 2005

Source notes:

Associated Press, "Chief of Army Reserve criticizes policies" by Robert Burns, January 5, 2005

James Madison, Letters of Helvidius, in Writings, ed. G. Hunt (New York, Putnam, 1900-1910) vol. 6, p. 174, quoted in Raoul Berger, Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth (Harvard Press, 1974) p. 65, 68-9.

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