Yesterday, during a speech in Independence, Mo., Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., promised, if elected, to add 40,000 active-duty troops to the U.S. Army.
In response, the Bush campaign organized a conference call in which campaign manager Ken Mehlman and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., pointed out that the Bush administration had already approved an increase of 30,000 troops.
Perhaps anticipating this response, Kerry charged in his speech that the Bush administration had surreptitiously increased troops by 30,000 via “a back door draft,” made possible by a stop-loss order earlier this week that has delayed discharges for active army personnel.
And so the exchange played out in this morning’s newspapers as a classic example of “he-said/she-said” journalism. By simply reporting the charges and counter-charges of each campaign, reporters robbed the reader of a key fact — the Kerry campaign has no idea whether the stop-loss order will result in a boost of 30,000 troops to the active-duty total.
According to Gen. William L. Nash, who commanded an armored brigade in Operation Desert Storm and led U.S. troops in Bosnia after the Dayton Accords, the recent troop debate can be understood in context of “spaces and faces.”
Current congressional legislation allows for 482,000 “spaces” in the United States Army.
In late January Donald Rumsfeld, acting under emergency powers, authorized the Army to add 30,000 spaces to its allotted ranks for the next four years. (This special power allows Rumsfeld to bypass consent from Congress. However, a bill has passed in the House, and one is under consideration in the Senate, that would increase the number of slots.)
However, Nash explained, faces are not always included with spaces. Faces must be purchased separately.
At the time of the Rumsfeld announcement in late January, the army’s size had already increased by 11,000 faces, due to “stop-loss” orders.
Earlier this week the military once again announced that it would issue “stop-loss” orders for all active-duty and reserve units that are bound for Iraq or Afghanistan within the next 90 days or that have returned within the past 90 days. That means soldiers in those units may not retire or leave the military until released, no matter what their previous retirement or end-of-service-obligation dates were.
Kerry seized upon this announcement and incorporated it into his speech yesterday, helping fuel the “he-said/she-said” journalism in both the Associated Press and The New York Times:
The administration’s answer has been to put band-aids on the problem. They have effectively used a stop-loss policy as a back door draft. They have extended tours of duty, delayed retirements, and prevented enlisted personnel from leaving the service. Just yesterday, the Army announced this would affect even more soldiers whose units are headed to Iraq and Afghanistan. By employing these expedients, they’ve increased the forces by 30,000 troops.
This is almost certainly a distortion of the facts. Kerry’s words make it appear as if the military used the “stop-loss” order to provide faces for the 30,000 supplemental spaces allotted by the Rumsfeld order. That’s not necessarily true. The exact number of troops (faces) affected by this recent order has not been released, but no one we spoke to thought it likely that the total would approach anything like 30,000.
Many news organizations, including the Associated Press and The New York Times, paraphrased Kerry’s comments without pointing out that just because there are “spaces” doesn’t mean the latest stop-loss order will supply the “faces” necessary to fill those slots.
Granted, it requires a little trenchwork to get to the bottom of this — but that’s just what readers should expect of major news outlets like The Times and AP.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.