House passes bill on deployment limits - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

House passes bill on deployment limits

A White House veto threat did not deter the House of Representatives from passing a bill that would require the services to guarantee troops as much time at home as they spend deployed.

The awkwardly named Ensuring Military Readiness Through Stability and Predictability Deployment Act passed the House Thursday by a 229-194 vote.

Sponsored by Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., the bill, HR 3159, is similar to legislation that caused a Senate deadlock on the 2008 defense authorization bill. It would impose, in law, specific deployment lengths and time at home between deployments. Active-duty members would have to spend at least as much time at their home station as deployed before they could be deployed again to a war zone. National Guard and reserve members would be promised they would not be deployed until they had been home at least three times the length of time of their previous deployment. The legislation allows those standards to be waived in an emergency.

“Our troops and their families are tired. They are being stressed by the continued and extended deployments. It is time for Congress to take a stand on behalf of our families and say in a clear, unequivocal voice that it is time that service members have a minimum dwell time between deployments,” said Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the House Armed Services Committee chairman.

“The Bush administration’s current strategy of multiple back-to-back deployments has stretched our military and is breaking our all-volunteer force,” said Tauscher, a senior member of the committee. “If we fail to act, we do so at the expense of our military readiness. We need a posture that allows units adequate dwell time to recover, train and equip before their next assignment.”

A White House policy statement, issued by the Office of Management and Budget, says the bill would “infringe on the president’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief to manage the readiness and availability of the armed forces” and would “substitute the mandates of Congress for the considered judgment of our military commanders.”

“If this legislation were presented to the president, he would veto the bill,” the White House statement says. That is a little stronger than the typical veto threat hanging over defense-related legislation. Usually, policy statements say that the president’s advisers would recommend a veto. In this case, there does not appear to be any room for doubt that a veto would come.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the former House Armed Services Committee chairman and now the committee’s senior Republican, said the deployment limits, which would apply only for Iraq deployments, would hurt the military more than help it.

“I believe it would actually degrade readiness, not provide service members and families any additional predictability, and would increase risk for forces actually deployed,” Hunter said. For example, Marine Corps officials have warned that maintaining the 1-for-1 home and deployment schedule would force units to remain longer and make it hard to set up a rotation schedule, Hunter said.

Hunter also said the bill gives a “false promise of predictability to service members and their families” because it applies only to Iraq deployments. Some frequently deployed units, like the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, might not deploy frequently to Iraq, but often deploy to Afghanistan or other hot spots, Hunter said.

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The deployment limits bill