On Wednesday, Senator JD Vance of Ohio accused Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota of quitting the Army National Guard two decades ago to avoid being deployed to Iraq. It is worth remembering that JD Vance did one enlistment in the Marine Corps and then left the service. On the other hand, Walz served 24 years in the National Guard. He retired in 2005 to run for Congress.
Let’s get things straight up front: This criticism of Tim Walz is utter trash, especially when one looks at the details of both who is making the accusation and what exactly they are saying.
As for the “who,” it comes from a guy, Thomas Behrends, who, by a quick examination of his social media feeds, is a rabid Trump Humper. And as for the what, if one is going to criticize someone for retiring at 24 years of service coincidental with starting a futile and useless war in Mesopotamia, then Tim Walz has a lot of company. I know plenty of folks in all the branches of service who opted to retire once the mistake of Iraq was made. It was their option. And it happens all the time. Plenty of WWII and Korean War NCOs opted to retire from Vietnam when they concluded we were flailing about unproductively.
Furthermore, opportunities to run for elected office happen under unique circumstances, and it is also worth noting that the pay structure of the armed forces incentivizes leaving at the 24-year mark. It’s the last time one gets a significant pay raise, and after that point, one is working for just a small cost of living increase every two years. Not to mention, one is still getting older, and for non-politicians at least, the risks of not getting hired into a civilian job increase dramatically once one turns 50 or older. Time waits for no one, and one has to do what is right for themselves. Welcome to the All-Volunteer Force.
However, there is a deeper issue that is not getting attention here. Namely, unless one went to Iraq or Afghanistan during the “War on Terror,” then one’s service is somehow diminished. The late Donald Rumsfeld played a significant role in starting this idea when he used a program called Individual Augmentation upon the Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard during the height of the Iraq War. In essence, the program was a personnel “tax” placed upon these services to fill various positions in Iraq, to ease the burden on Army personnel. These deployments came on top of whatever regular deployments one may have made in their own service.
In 2011, Rumsfeld said everything with the program was great. The truth is that it was anything but. It was just one of many lies Rumsfeld told about the war in Iraq.
Every single person is there because they want to be. You talk about the reserves and the Guard and individual augmentees. That is not a bad thing. That’s why they’re there, to augment the regular force. Second, I have great respect for the Air Force and the Navy and what they’ve done. They have looked at the tasks assigned to the ground forces — the Marines and the Army. They have competencies not directly related to the tasks performed by the Marine Corps and the Army but many of the things surrounding what they do. Instead of saying, “That’s the ground forces’ job,” we’ve had service Secretaries, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and the CNO ask, “What can we do to help augment the Army and the Marines?” Men and women from the Navy and the Air Force are supporting the Army and Marines in enormously effective ways.
Umm, no. Many people were there because they had no choice, and they certainly had no desire to be deployed doing jobs they were not trained to do in Iraq.
Rumsfeld is lying through his teeth in this statement. There was actually opposition from the service chiefs to the IA program and it was a big deal to the average Airman and Sailor who had to fill these billets. Over time, this created a large number of personnel problems. Besides the people who got killed in Iraq on a deployment not related to their primary occupation in the service — a lot of folks were screwed over later on when it came to promotions and career requirements in their own service.
For those not familiar with how the “system” worked, let me provide one particular example that was repeated several hundred times over as a result of Rumsfeld’smistake. An officer, a Naval Aviator, served on the USS Abraham Lincoln during the period 2002- 2006. During that period, the ship was deployed three times: 1) for almost a year from 2002–2003, 2) then for seven months in 2004, and 3) finally for almost nine months during the period 2005 until early 2006. Now, that retelling does not include the additional time the ship was underway for training work-ups, sea trials after maintenance, and conducting carrier qualifications for the training command. In summary, the ship was away from home 75% of the time during that timeframe.
So imagine his well-earned relief when he was assigned to shore duty in the location he requested, Japan, in 2006. He was looking forward to spending some deserved time with his family and his children. So think about his surprise when the command he had recently reported to offered him up to the personnel gods for a one-year “individual augmentation” tour in Iraq. He went because he had no choice, and he was chosen because he was the “new guy” in the unit with no established constituency to argue otherwise.
His reward for a job well done? He failed to be selected for promotion to Lieutenant Commander after he got back from Iraq. While there were a variety of reasons for this, the effect of his IA cannot be ignored.
This story was repeated many times over, both with active and reserve forces. I sat on a Reserve Selection board in the early 2000s. The board’s precept did not reward the folks in the zone of promotion for extensive service in the combat area.
Rumsfeld knew all this, and certainly so did his reprobate personnel chief, David S.C. Chu. They did not care.
So what does all this have to do with the controversy regarding Tim Walz and JD Vance? It is simple, really. Rumsfeld and many others made a point of denigrating service in other places when, in fact, the US military is a service that operates worldwide. This was particularly true with the Navy, which had a host of commitments that did not go away just because the United States chose to pursue a stupid war of choice in Iraq that accomplished little to advance the national security interests of the country.
The real criticism should not be of Vance’s or Walz’s service in the armed forces. Rather it should be on an utterly flawed personnel policy that did dirt to a lot of people while the United States military — during a period the country pursued a useless foreign policy.
Not to mention, the man at the top of the GOP ticket could not be bothered to serve his country and has disparaged those who do as “suckers and losers.“
This is a conversation that the GOP should not want to have.