Tuberville’s stubbornness is aiding and abetting America’s enemies

Nearly three months have passed since I wrote about Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) unconscionable hold on all military promotions. At the time of that writing, he had blocked 185 promotions. The number has now risen to more than 300, with no end in sight.

The Republican from Alabama still argues that his hold will continue as long as the Department of Defense does not adhere to his interpretation of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer funds to pay for abortions. He asserts that the amendment would also apply to the Department of Defense (DOD) funding for travel from bases in states that restrict abortions to states that permit them. He also argues that he is not harming national security in the least, since Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) could call for individual votes on each promotion should he choose to do so.

Virtually all of Tuberville’s Senate colleagues recognize that his gambit is becoming increasingly dangerous. The Senate’s calendar to the end of the current fiscal year is down to days, not weeks. Votes on individual promotions would displace all other Senate business including, and especially, appropriations bills, none of which have passed both congressional chambers.

The damage that Tuberville is doing to national security is growing daily and is incalculable. It is no longer a matter of just vacating the military’s leadership, with all four service chiefs and the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs yet to be confirmed, though that continues to pose a serious challenge for military leadership. In addition, there is a not insignificant negative impact on foreign officials who cannot miss the empty frames where the photos of the chiefs normally appear.

With the holdup in promotions, the cycle of upward movement at all military levels is being broken, and those men and women who expected to maintain their seniority will find that it has disappeared. This is especially the case with respect to one-star officers, who normally can expect to move up to the next higher level in a relatively short timeframe. Once the hold is finally lifted, they will find to their disappointment that they are competing against a far larger and younger cohort.

More important, especially for the strength of the military over the longer term, is the effect that the holdup on promotions has had on military families. Families that expected to move to new homes as part of their military member’s projected permanent change of station no longer know when, or if, such a move might take place. High schoolers in military families who were preparing for college at one school would find their entire year disrupted, and the prospects for acceptance to the college of their choice significantly dimmed, if they had to adjust to a new school mid-year. Small children might find the adjustment equally difficult if they suddenly had to drop old friends and find acceptance among new ones at a new school. Families with special-needs children would be particularly hard hit by the uncertainty of where they might next be living.

The likely effect of all of these developments on the personal lives of servicemen and women is obvious: they will choose to leave the military. Perhaps in the past, when leaving the service before reaching the 20-year mark resulted in not being awarded a pension, fewer might have done so. Since Congress enacted the Blended Retirement System in its Fiscal Year 2016 Authorization, military members can receive 401(k) retirement funds prior to the 20-year mark. And they will collect their pensions and leave the service.

The Pentagon has ramped up the pressure on Tuberville to relent. And it is right to do so. He is undermining the nation’s defenses and acting as an unwitting accomplice to Vladimir Putin’s depredations in Europe and Xi Jinping’s aggressiveness in Asia. As Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, who was born in Cuba, put it so elegantly, “for someone who was born in a communist country, I would have never imagined that actually one of our own senators would actually be aiding and abetting communists and other autocratic regimes around the world.”

It is far past the time that Tuberville woke up and faced the reality of the great damage he is doing to the national security of the United States.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.