By prohibiting soldiers and officers from leaving the service at retirement or the expiration of their contracts, military leaders have breached the Army's manpower limit of 480,000 troops, a ceiling set by Congress. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, disclosed that the number of active-duty soldiers has crept over the congressionally authorized maximum by 20,000 and now registered 500,000 as a result of stop-loss orders. Several lawmakers questioned the legality of exceeding the limit by so much.

An enlistment contract has two parties, yet only the government is allowed to violate the contract; the enlistee is not. Congress approved the authority for what became known as stop-loss orders after the Vietnam War, responding to concerns that the military had been hamstrung by the out-rotations of seasoned combat soldiers in Indochina. But the authority was not used until the buildup to the Persian Gulf War in 1990 when Richard B. Cheney, then the secretary of defense, allowed the military services to bar most retirements and prolong enlistments indefinitely.

One example (and a lawsuit): "On June 11, 2004, petitioner received a call from his platoon sergeant stating that he was not going to be allowed to leave the military because of the Army's 'stop loss policy' and the April 2004 mobilization alert."

The Solomon Amendment is a bill that was passed in 1996 which calls for the Secretary of Defense to deny funding to institutions of higher learning if they prohibit the ROTC or military recruiters on college campuses. Representative Mike Rogers(R-AL) sponsored HR 3966, a bill called the "ROTC Military Recruiter Equal Access to Campus" Act. This bill details the Solomon Amendment further, stating that military recruiters are entitled to the same access to students as other employers. This bill was first approved by the House Armed Services Committee on March 17, 2004. The Solomon Amendment forbids Department of Defense (DOD) funding of schools unless those schools provide military representatives access to their students for recruiting purposes. It is this same law that enables military recruiters to set up shop in high schools across the US and to call students at their homes attempting to entice them into joining the military.

SEE: http://unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=2333

A.If a school does not designate one or more of the three items as "directory information" under FERPA, it still must provide all three items to military recruiters upon request. Also, in that case, the school would have to send a separate notice to parents about the missing "directory information" item(s), noting an opportunity to opt out of disclosure of the information to military recruiters. An easier method, of course, would be for the school to designate all three items - name, address, and telephone listing - as "directory information."