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Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I rise today to talk about a crisis in our military leadership driven by one of my Senate colleague's decision to place a blanket hold on now more than 250 apolitical nominations of senior military officers. The senior Senator from Alabama has done so. These 250 military nominations are soon to be joined by another 400 or so, which would mean that 650 individuals who volunteered to wear the uniform of this country and to defend the country, even at risk of their own lives, are being blocked in their professional advancement by a Senator punishing them for something they had nothing to do with-- nothing to do with.

The Senator is concerned about a policy of the Pentagon's that would allow women servicemembers who cannot obtain reproductive healthcare where they are deployed or assigned to travel to other places to receive that care.

That is currently the way we treat members of the military. If they are assigned at a base in the United States or elsewhere and they need medical care that they cannot obtain where they are assigned, they are able to travel to seek that care. But because the Pentagon, in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, has said that longstanding policy allowing travel would also apply to women troops seeking reproductive healthcare, the Senator from Alabama has taken the drastic, radical, extreme, unusual step of saying he will block confirmation and approval of now hundreds of our military officers.

I am a member of the Armed Services Committee. I have a child who is a U.S. marine. I want to take the floor today to talk about how destructive this policy is and ask the Republican minority in the Senate to drop this opposition, stop punishing people who are patriotically serving this country.

To be clear, my colleague who has placed a hold on these individuals has stated no challenge with their qualifications. And to be clear, my colleague who has placed a hold on these nominations has never suggested that they had anything to do with the policy he disagrees with. He is just using them as targets because he is dissatisfied with the way the Pentagon is operating.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do this. Before I get to the right way to raise the issue, let me talk about what this means when you are a member of the military and you have your career delayed because a Member of this body decides to hold you up so that you cannot be promoted.

Many of the promotions and appointments in the military that we are obligated to vote on in the Senate occur during the summer. The transition times occur during the summer. Why? Because this is the time, when someone gets a promotion and they move, where they can move with their families--sometimes across the country, sometimes across the world--at a time when they can then maybe look for a new place to live or a new school for their children to attend.

When you are held up in a promotion or advancement, you don't know what to do. You might have sold a house, but you don't yet have orders where you can take a new position. Your children might be in a school, but you are not yet sure what you can do to try to find the next school they should go to.

Remember, these senior military officers--many of them have deployed not once or twice or moved three or four times in their careers; they have moved dozens of times--5, 10. We had a military leader before us recently whose family, during the course of his career--who is up for one of these positions, who is being blocked--has moved 20 times. It is not easy on a family to do that.

Blocking them from planning and moving and accepting an appointment is not just keeping them from an advancement that they have merited, that they have earned, but it is also hurting their families. What have they done to deserve it? I mean, they volunteered to wear the uniform of this country. They volunteered to risk their lives for this country. Why do they deserve to be punished? Why do they deserve to be disrespected? Why do they deserve to have their careers blocked?

Let me give you an example of a couple of the people--the positions that are being blocked by this. As of Monday, for the first time in 164 years, the United States of America does not have a confirmed Commandant of the Marine Corps. The proud Marine Corps is lacking a confirmed Commandant for the first time since the 1850s. That interregnum was caused because of the death of a Commandant when there was no successor confirmed. So obviously there was a brief period where there was no confirmed Commandant.

This one, we have seen coming for months. General Berger had an announced retirement date that was Monday. There should have been a Commandant in place. Yet there is not a confirmed Commandant because of this block.

Eric Smith can't take over as Commandant of the Marines. It impacts the Marine Corps' ability to develop and implement long-term plans and policies. It is especially damaging because, as those of us know who have been on the Armed Services Committee and are working with our marines, they are in the midst of a force design transformation that is midstream right now. We don't need a gap in leadership in the Marine Corps.

It goes deeper in the Marine Corps. Forgive me for being a little Marine Corps centric, with a marine in the family, but it goes deeper in the Marine Corps. The hold is also impacting the leadership of the I Marine Expeditionary Force, which is in California, and the III Marine Expeditionary Force, which is based in Okinawa, Japan. The I Expeditionary Force is the Marine Corps' combat power focused on the Indo-Pacific.

We are spending all this time talking about the challenges of the Indo-Pacific, the challenges of China, but the leadership of this critical Marine Expeditionary Force is now not in place because of this hold.

The III Marine Expeditionary Force is our standing force that would be called upon if there were any challenges in the first island chain in the Indo-Pacific.

So these holds are affecting these critical units just in the Marine Corps Commandant and the leadership of key expeditionary forces that the Nation needs for defense and to protect allies.

I have been working on a really exciting initiative of President Biden's, the AUKUS partnership, which would combine the military capacities of the United States, the UK, and Australia to do submarine construction and other work. These are nuclear subs managed by naval reactors.

The appointment for the current Director of Naval Reactor expires next month. The hold that has been used by the Senator from Alabama would block our ability to put someone into this key position, challenging not only the AUKUS advance, but our nuclear submarines are one of the most important capacities that we have to promote security all around the world and protect this country.

I said there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. I am on the Armed Services Committee. I will be honest, there are things in the Pentagon I am not happy with, and every year I have a chance to do something about it.

Just 3 weeks ago, in the committee--and the Senator from Alabama sits on that committee with me--we had an opportunity to mark up the Defense authorizing bill, and any of us could advance any policy change we wanted. If we wanted something in Pentagon policy that wasn't there, we got to make our case. If we wanted to take something out of Pentagon policy that we didn't like, we got to make our case.

I have done this year after year after year. I have a pretty good batting average when I offer an amendment, but I know when I offer one, if I can't convince a majority of my colleagues on the Armed Services Committee, I am not going to win. When I don't win, I am disappointed, but never would it even occur to me to offer an amendment to my committee colleagues, to fail to persuade them, and then take my disappointment and use it as a weapon to block the promotion of hundreds of military officers.

Indeed, the Senator from Alabama had that opportunity, and he exercised that opportunity. In the debate--we had a very full debate-- every Member gets to offer any amendment they want, and there was an amendment specifically drawn and designed to change the Pentagon policy with which he disagrees. He lost the amendment vote. He lost the amendment vote. He couldn't convince a majority of the committee that this was a Pentagon policy that should be changed. That is the right way to go about this. If you don't like a Pentagon policy, convince your colleagues on the Armed Services Committee, convince your colleagues in the U.S. Senate to change the policy. But if you fail, if you fall short, if you are not persuasive enough to convince your colleagues to change the policy, that is on you.

When I lose amendment votes in the committee, I don't take it out on people who have had nothing to do with the policy. I try to work with my colleagues, come up with a better argument, change it, shape it, do something so that, if it matters to me, I might find some success in the future. But it shocks me because it never would have occurred to me--every time I have lost an amendment vote in working on 10 or 11 Defense authorizing bills, it never occurred to me: I know what I am going to do. I did not get my way on the committee, and so what I am going to do is I am going to punish hundreds of people who have volunteered to serve this country and risk their lives in doing so. That is what I am going to do.

I will conclude and just say that we are facing recruiting challenges in the military right now and particularly in the Army.

We had the hearing this morning for General George, who is the nominee to be the new Secretary of the Army. He is the Vice Chief right now--not Secretary; he would be the Service Chief for the Army. He is Vice Chief right now.

We have been talking about some of the recruiting challenges that the Army is facing. In the last fiscal year, they had a goal of trying to get about 60,000 people in, and they fell 20,000 short--40,000. The good news is, they have upped their goal to 65, and they will probably come in at about 53 this year. They are still not getting what they need, but they are kind of closing that gap.

But we talked about, well, what is it that makes recruiting into the military hard? And the Army, to their credit, has done a really good job of kind of surveying what it is that makes it hard to recruit people into the military, and I was surprised at this. I would have guessed that the No. 1 obstacle would have been people thinking: It is dangerous. I might risk my life. I might see something bad happen to somebody I care about.

But, you know, that wasn't the top reason. People coming into the military are patriotic, and they are willing to be patriotic even to the point of risking their lives. The No. 1 reason that was cited by people for being reluctant to join our volunteer military, which just celebrated 50 years of being an All-Volunteer Force, is their belief that if they do so, they will have to put a lot of their lives on hold, that others who don't join the military will move ahead while they might find themselves limited or put on hold by conditions beyond their control.

What message does it send to someone who is thinking about going into an ROTC Program and being an officer, going to a service academy; what message does it send to someone who might be a young officer who is thinking ``Do I make this a career or do I leave and go somewhere else?'' when a single Member of this body has decided to take it upon himself to punish hundreds of officers and block their professional advancement because of something they had nothing to do with?

We should be sending a message to these officers that we are proud of them. We should be sending a message to them that we are thankful to them for the sacrifices they and their families have made. We should not be sending a loud message that we are going to hold their careers hostage, disrespect them, delay or postpone their appointments.

I would urge my colleague from Alabama, but what I really want to urge is I want to urge the Republican minority in this because I don't want to see Members of this body enable this kind of behavior because where do we stop? All the hundred Members of this body could find things in the Pentagon they are not happy about. It might be the travel policy for Senator Tuberville. It might be cluster munitions for someone else. It might be whether the military is doing enough to battle sexual harassment for somebody else. We can all find things in the Pentagon that we are not wild about, and to the extent that we do, we should be trying to persuade our colleagues to make the policies better. But when we make that effort in good faith and fall short, the last thing we should do--the last thing we should do--is take our own disappointment out on and punish people who are serving this country who have had nothing to do with the policy we disagree with.

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