Former Armed Services chairman served 17 terms

WASHINGTON — Former U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton, a 17-term Democrat from Missouri who capped his career as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has died. He was 81.

Skelton died Monday at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va., with his wife Patricia and his sons at his side, said Skelton’s longtime colleague and staff member Russell Orban.

“He was beloved and respected by his colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Ike was a devoted advocate for our men and women in uniform,” President Barack Obama said in a statement.

Vice President Joe Biden said in a Twitter message Skelton had“absolute, total, thorough integrity.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Skelton fought to bridge what he called “a chasm between those who protect our freedoms and those who are being protected.”

Prodded into politics by Harry Truman, Skelton represented his largely rural, conservative district in Missouri for 34 years before being defeated in November 2010.

With a district that was home to Fort Leonard Wood, WhitemanAirForce Base and the Missouri National Guard Training Center, Skelton became chairman of the Armed Services Committee in 2007 after being the panel’s senior Democrat since 1999.

While he voted for the resolution backing the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, he criticized the George W. Bush administration for stretching the military too thin and for not having a clear plan to end Former Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., died Monday. He led the House Armed Services Committee from 2007 to 2011.

“Ike was a devoted advocate for our men and women in uniform.”

the war.

After a trip to Iraq in 2006 he cited the administration’s lack of planning to deal with sectarian violence, failure to deploy enough troops and other policy shortcomings, and concluded, “We are now, I think, strategically lost.”

In May 2007, he sponsored a provision in the defense spending bill requiring U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq by April 2008 that passed the House but died in the Senate.

He also complained that the Bush administration was not paying enough attention to the war in Afghanistan.

Skelton was born in Lexington, Mo., on Dec. 20, 1931. Hecamefroma family steeped in the military, although a bout of polio when he was a teenager made him ineligible for military service.

He attended a military academy, earned a bachelor’s degree and law degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia, and was a prosecuting attorney and a Missouri state senator.

His father was a friend of former President Harry Truman, who was born in the southern end of what became Skelton’s district.

In 1962, Truman urged Skelton to run for Congress, but he kept practicing law with his father. Skelton ran for the Missouri Senate in 1970 and for Congress in 1976.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who frequently testified before Skelton’s committee, paid tribute to the congressman just after he left office in 2011 as “one of the great champions of our military.”

“Chairman Skelton’s questions were tough, they were pointed — but they were always fair,” Gates said at the time.

Gates added that Skelton was also “one of the architects of our national security apparatus” because of his work in drafting the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 that ushered in a sweeping reorganization of the Department of Defense.

Skelton had three sons with his late wife, Susan. He married Patricia Martin in 2009.