Reed: Tuberville blockade of military promotions hurts families, makes us vulnerable

“Put me in, Coach!”

Those words echo from sidelines all over America as football players ask to get in the game to show what they can do.

On a much more important playing field, those words are now echoing from some 300 senior military officers, whose promotions and new duty assignments have been blocked by Tommy Tuberville, the senator from Alabama whose claim to fame is his career as a football coach. He is now inexplicably keeping his best players on the sidelines in a misguided attempt to challenge Pentagon abortion policies.

I recently had a long conversation about this with Sen. Jack Reed, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is leading the fight to get these leaders back on the playing field. From our conversation, I could tell he was pretty fired up. He called Tuberville’s hold “an absurd, dishonest political stunt.”

As a close-to-home example, Rear Adm. Shoshana Chatfield was serving as the president of the Naval War College in Newport. Last February, President Joe Biden recommended her for promotion to vice admiral and assignment to the NATO Military Committee in Brussels, the senior military authority within NATO. It is a crucial position, essential to coordinating allied efforts in support of Ukraine.

Chatfield was one of those caught up in Tuberville’s net; it is now September, and she is still awaiting confirmation.

He has held up these promotions since February in opposition to a new Pentagon policy that reimburses travel expenses of active-duty service members who must travel to other states to receive health care services, including abortions, because they’re not legal in the state where they’re stationed.

At first, Tuberville just placed a general hold on all senior promotions. More recently, however, he has begun to attack individual officers for being too “woke,” as he puts it.

Tuberville zeroed in on Chatfield. Her crime? Speaking out in support of women’s issues.

Abortion issue is a red herring

As anyone who has served in the military knows, you go where they tell you. I would think the DOD has some responsibility when they assign a woman to, let’s say, Alabama, where she cannot get an abortion if she wants or needs one. It’s not her fault, or even her decision, to be in Alabama. So it’s reasonable to help her get to another state where she can get the medical treatments she needs.

Coach Tuberville disagrees. In a March Newsweek interview, he ”informed Secretary Austin that if he tried to turn the DOD into an abortion travel agency, I would place a hold on all civilian, flag and general officer nominees.”

To make his position even less understandable, the policy does not fund the procedures themselves. By law, the military can only provide an abortion in cases of rape and incest, or to save the life of the mother.

As Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters recently, “A service member in Alabama deserves to have the same access to health care as a service member in California, as a service member stationed in Korea.”

Conservative Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt published a scathing piece on July 19 titled “Enough, Sen. Tuberville. It isn’t ‘pro-life’ to damage military lives.”

He wrote, “If Tuberville thinks that he’s bolstering support with the Republican base by claiming he’s just acting on his pro-life convictions, he’s mistaken. It is inexcusable to use a pro-life stance to upend the lives of countless Americans who volunteered to protect their fellow citizens.”

Effect on security and readiness

On the PBS News Hour of Aug. 22, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said, “This sweeping hold is undermining America's military readiness. It's hindering our ability to retain our very best officers.”

“We're in a difficult situation. Our adversaries love this,” Reed said. He worries that they don’t need to do anything to paralyze our military. “We are doing it to ourselves, and they are getting great satisfaction out of it.”

Recruiting and retention

Reed and others fear that Tuberville’s hold will create an exodus from the military of some of our best and brightest.

“A lot of very talented young brigadier generals and colonels are looking at this and saying, ‘Why should I get into this system where I'm a political pawn?’’’ Reed continued. “Most of them are so talented they can walk out the door and command a significant salary in the corporate world.”

In the Sept. 13 New York Times, Helene Cooper agreed. “The officers most affected … are top performers who could easily find more lucrative jobs in the private sector.”

Tuberville’s background and bona fides

Parlaying name recognition from his football success into the political arena, Tuberville was elected to the Senate in 2020. He had never served in the military, although on his website he claims that he “was inspired to serve in Congress by his father, a World War II veteran and recipient of five Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.”

According to a Washington Post analysis on July 26, he misrepresented his father's World War II military record. (For one thing, his father was not awarded a single Bronze Star medal, never mind five. What he did earn were service stars, indicating participation in specific campaigns.) The website has not been corrected.

While coaching football, he founded the Tommy Tuberville Foundation. Its website said its top purpose was “assisting our military and our veterans.”

In 2020, the Associated Press called the Tuberville Foundation "a questionable charity that raises money but gives very little away."

Shortly thereafter, the foundation “paused operations” due to audits. Recent statements from his office indicate the foundation has been reorganized and will be active again soon.

As Reed points out, “They've made no significant contributions to veterans. At one point, he said he would give his salary to the veterans – and that hasn’t happened either.”

That pledge was made by Tuberville in a March 2020 campaign video posted on Facebook, in which he said, “I stand with our veterans and I’m going to donate every dime I make when I’m in Washington, D.C., to the veterans of the state of Alabama. Folks, they deserve it. They deserve it a lot more than most of us.”

According to The Washington Post, “There is no evidence that Tuberville has kept a key pledge he made when he ran for Senate three years ago – that he would “donate every dime” he made in Washington to Alabama veterans. “Six years of a senatorial salary would mean Tuberville would be on the hook for more than $1 million in donations.”

Republican reaction to the hold

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said on more than one occasion that he disagreed with Tuberville’s maneuver, but he has apparently done nothing to try to stop it.

Mike McCaul, a Texas Republican, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sept. 10 that the senator’s hold is “paralyzing” and a “national security problem.”

Latest update

As I was wrapping this column up, news broke that the Democrats had decided they could wait no longer to fill the most senior positions, so they brought them to the floor one at a time for a vote.

They removed the nominations for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Marine Corps commandant and the Army chief of staff from Tuberville’s block of holds. (Tuberville cannot stop promotions that are presented one at a time.)

The vote for the chairman was 89-8 in favor, and the other two nominations were approved by similarly overwhelming majorities.

Earlier this summer, Reed asked the Congressional Research Service to estimate how long it would take to get the entire list approved one person at a time.

They estimated that if the senators worked daily around the clock, it would take 30 days and 17 hours to process the list (273 nominations at that point), assuming they addressed no other business.

Alternatively, if the Senate processed these nominations during eight-hour sessions, it would take approximately 89 days.

But the Senate is usually in session just three days per week, so they would have to work until March 2024 to get through the entire list. (And since then, another 50 or so nominees were added to the backlog.)

That also assumes no other work would be taken up, including the annual defense authorization bill and the federal budget for next fiscal year.

“It would consume the Senate floor and paralyze the body from being able to take up almost any other action,” CNN reported last Thursday.

What’s the solution?

There are only two groups with enough clout to force Tuberville to back down. The first is the voters back home in Alabama, and the second is his own Republican caucus.

Reed concluded our discussion by saying, “Republicans, some of whom have served on active duty, and understand the consequences, have to step up and say, ‘No, this is not the right way.’ There are other ways to pursue this.”

To report the outcome of a previous activity, or to add a future event to our calendar, please email the details (including a contact name and phone number/email address) to veteranscolumn@providencejournal.com.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Veterans Voice: Sen. Jack Reed says military promotions need to happen