Bush Picks a Nominee for Secretary of Army

More than a year after the job of secretary of the Army became vacant, President Bush plans to nominate Francis Harvey, a former defense industry executive, to the post, defense officials said Wednesday.

The officials spoke on condition they not be identified.

If confirmed by the Senate, Harvey would become the civilian leader of the nation’s largest service as the Army is struggling to meet its growing troop commitments worldwide and is conducting investigations into abuses of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The post has been vacant since April 2003, when Thomas White was forced to resign.

Harvey, a former executive at Westinghouse Electric Corp., was nominated last year as assistant secretary of Defense for network integration. The Senate has held up his nomination, along with several others, as it investigates a controversial Air Force plan to lease refueling tankers from Boeing Co.

The Senate inquiry into the Boeing deal was the main reason that Air Force Secretary James G. Roche, President Bush’s first nominee to succeed White, withdrew his name from consideration for the Army post in March. His nomination had been stalled since last summer.

In recent months, the Army has had to take extreme measures to bolster its ranks in Iraq. It has extended units’ overseas tours and issued thousands of “stop-loss” orders forcing soldiers to remain in the military, even if their enlistments are up, if their units are heading to or just back from a war zone. Last week, the Army announced that it would have to call up more than 5,600 soldiers from the Individual Ready Reserve, a pool of troops who have left the service but still have unexpired Army commitments.

Some current and former Army officials expressed disappointment that Undersecretary of the Army Les Brownlee, who has been acting secretary since May 2003, was apparently passed over.

“If it were me, I would have nominated [Brownlee] as soon as I left the post,” said White, reached by telephone to comment on the decision to nominate Harvey. “We never should have had this gap in the first place.”

White, a retired Army brigadier general and a former Enron executive, resigned after repeated clashes with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over Rumsfeld’s plan to transform the service into a smaller, more mobile fighting force.

At the same time, White said Harvey was a good choice. The most important thing, he said, was that the Army would have a permanent leader during a difficult time.