WASHINGTON – In an action branded a backdoor draft by some critics, the military over the past several years has held tens of thousands of troops 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.
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 used.
“It’s long overdue,” said Jules Lobel, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and lawyer for some in the military who have challenged the policy in court.
“It has created terrible problems of morale,” Lobel said last week. “It has in some cases made soldiers feel that they were duped or deceived in how they were recruited.”
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.
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 Navy stopped a few hundred sailors from leaving in the year after the 2001 terrorist attacks and used the policy again after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
A half-dozen lawsuits have unsuccessfully challenged the policy. Courts have agreed that the Pentagon involuntarily can extend deployments if the president believes the practice is essential to national security.
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