Under Secretary Rumsfeld’s administration, the Defense department saw quite a bit of stop-loss personnel actions. Many have characterized stop-loss as “disguised draft.”

The Associated Press is reporting this morning that Secretary Gates intends to strictly limit this sort of action, which should be a morale booster for the troops.

WASHINGTON - 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.

[Secretary] 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 use

And not a moment too soon. Many GIs have enlisted for reasons of their own and decided not to re-enlist. It’s entirely possible that the revolving door of repeated Iraq deployments could well have influenced their decisions. To enlist, serve your country, deploy one or more times to a war zone that is being managed on the cheap, and as a result of your experiences decide not to re-enlist is understandable. But, to be stop-lossed and retained in country past your DEROS, or involuntarily redeployed is tantamount to a slap in the face.

[Secretary] 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 authority has been used off and on for years and was revived by all services to some extent after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

As an example, the Army revived it in early 2002 to keep people with some skills or specialties deemed critical to the fight against terrorism and later used it to retain whole units, according to an Army chronology of the policy.

Pentagon officials provided no figures on how many people the policy has affected. Yet just in the Army, it is in the tens of thousands.

The Army Times newspaper reported in September [2006] that 10,000 soldiers were being held in the service at the time. That compared with 25,000 at one point in 2003, according to the account. [emph added]

The Navy stopped a few hundred sailors from leaving in the year after the terrorist attacks and used the policy again after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Marine Corps used it from January through August of 2003 and at the high point had some 3,400 active duty troops and 440 reservists held in service under the authority, said 1st Lt. Blanca E. Binstock, a spokeswoman.

The Air Force did not have statistics immediately available.

The Army has been meeting its announced recruitment goals through Enron accounting for over a year now. Between adjusted goals and a dangerous broadening of standards, some say the Army has been seriously weakened as a fighting force.

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.

Another method of filling ranks has been a prodigious use of the Individual Ready Reserve. A Daily Kos diarist wrote about this yesterday:

The Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) is where they put people awaiting their 8 year obligation to finish. For officers, you remain in the IRR indefinately unless you proactively resign your commission, regardless of any obligation you may have due to school, West Point etc. Once people leave the military and go into the IRR, they conduct no training or any sort of military operational work and are kind of a "just in case" force sitting around. The talk always had been, "They won't call the IRR back unless it is World War III". … George Bush and his cronies changed all that when in the summer of 2004, they recalled about 5,400 IRR soldiers to not backfill active army but to actually deploy to the war zone for a period of 1 year and to train for 1/2 a year for a total recall time of 545 days. This was ridiculous. Many recalled had been out of the Army for over 10 years and a lot were over 40 years old. Many had financial obligations and family obligations which had been built but the Army did not care. They had 30 days to report. An article in the USA Today about how the IRR Recall put Lives in Disarray explains how poorly this recall was carried out. This blog reports on a 43 year old mother who had been out for over 20 years being recalled.

The poor logic of trying to run a war on the cheap is destroying our services, especially the Army. While it is true that the “needs of the service” will always prevail, it appears that Secretary Gates intends to restore some degree of sanity and humanity to the Defense Department’s personnel policies. One can only hope so, before we truly have an “Army of One.”