Military.com May 18, 2006
Army Looks to Reduce Deployment Tempo
By David Axe
Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey said he wants to reduce the length and frequency of deployments to Iraq, perhaps even moving to six-month tours a la the Marine Corps. But he stressed that changes to the Army's "Force Generation Model" hinge on the ability of Iraqi security forces to take over from U.S. units.
Harvey made his comments while answering soldiers' questions during a visit to Iraq last week.
“The baseline that we are trying to get to for the active regular army is one year deployed for every three years in service,” Harvey said at Forward Operating Base Honor on May 11.
In recent years, U.S. combat brigades have spent as few as 18 months in the States between deployments to Iraq. That is beginning to change as force levels in Iraq slowly drop, according to Pentagon Army spokesman Lt. Col. Carl Ey. "Now we're getting close to 24 months."
There are around 130,000 U.S. troops in Kuwait and Iraq, down from 150,000 a few months ago.
Ey explains that, ideally, active-duty brigades spend a year in each of three pools that represent the deployment cycle: the reset and training pool, the readiness pool and the available forces pool from which units are drawn for deployments. There are typically 18 brigades in each pool at any given time. The available forces pool might include as many as four reserve-component brigades.
Ey points out that while National Guard and Reserve brigades deploy alongside active brigades, they spend more time in the reset and training pool due to a federal law that limits reserve units to just one year deployed out of six.
The deployment cycle is flexible, Ey says. In emergencies, the 18 brigades in the readiness pool can be bumped up to the available forces pool early. And when deployment requirements relax, units can spend more time in the non-deploying pools.
Despite Harvey's statements and shrinking troop numbers in Iraq, the Army isn't rushing to move brigades out of the available forces pool. When the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division's deployment to Iraq was put on hold in early May, the unit remained in Germany at a high state of readiness. The Army wanted to make sure the brigade was available to regional commanders on short notice, Ey says.
As for six-month deployments, Ey stresses that the Army is just beginning to study the issue.
Yearlong deployments are better for the Army because they give soldiers plenty of time to become familiar with their areas of operations and proficient in their daily tasks, according to anonymous Pentagon sources. The sources say that Army studies have shown a spike in casualties at the beginnings and ends of deployments, meaning it's in the Army's interest to keep deployments as long as possible.
Besides, transitions to and from Iraq take the same amount of time regardless of how long a unit remains deployed, making longer deployments more efficient. "The problem [with six-month tours] is that you wind up spending a greater fraction of your time transiting to and from Iraq and less time patrolling a part of Iraq with which you have many months of familiarity," says defense expert John Pike from the think-tank Globalsecurity.org.
As a result, the six-month idea "would seem to create a slight decrement in available forces," Pike asserts.
Training of Iraqi Security Forces has become the focus of U.S. efforts in Iraq and is the key to both large-scale troop reductions and changes to the Force Generation Model. Firm numbers are elusive, but the roster of competent, self-sufficient Iraqi battalions seems to be growing. That said, increasing sectarianism within the Iraqi Army has resulted in firefights between units and the effective blockading of Kurdish units stationed in Sunni and Shi'ite areas.
© Copyright 2006, David Axe
