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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review January 19, 2007

Troop increase will affect Pennsylvania

By Brian Bowling

Sending an extra 20,000 troops to Iraq could increase the strain on Western Pennsylvania's National Guard and Reserve units during the next couple of years, two defense analysts said.

The plan President Bush announced last week hasn't immediately changed local units' deployment schedules, and the analysts agree that the Pentagon initially will meet Bush's goal by moving up the planned deployments of active Army and Marine Corps units.

But moving up the active units means military officials will have to find other units to deploy later this year.

John Pike, a national defense analyst who operates GlobalSecurity.org, said it's almost a given that the Pentagon will call up more National Guard and Reserve units.

"This time next year, it seems likely they're going to have to start scrounging around," he said.

Jeff McCausland, director of national security affairs with the Washington, D.C., office of the Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney law firm, said the Defense Department had reduced its reliance on Guard and Reserve units for ongoing operations. But unless it can shed some of those operations or increase the size of the active Army, that trend probably will reverse.

"Should that (demand for troops) continue, then the heads of the National Guard and Reserve are going to want greater access to those troops," he said.

A complication is that committing more active units in Iraq means the Pentagon also likely would activate National Guard and Reserve units if troops are required to face a new threat in problem areas such as the Korean Peninsula or Cuba, McCausland said.

The strain on the National Guard and Reserve has grown considerably since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq get the most publicity, but they're only part of the picture.

Immediately after the attack, troops deployed to airports, nuclear power plants and other potential targets as part of Operation Noble Eagle. About 2,000 Pennsylvania National Guard members also deployed for a year overseas as part of Task Force Keystone to ramp up security at military bases in Europe.

Pennsylvania Guard and Reserve units have deployed to ongoing missions in Kosovo and the Horn of Africa, and some National Guard members are helping to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. Guard units also have responded to natural disasters in Pennsylvania and the Gulf Coast.

Jack Gordon, spokesman for the Army Reserve's 99th Regional Readiness Command, said about 80 percent of the 24,000 reserve soldiers in the command's region -- Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia -- have deployed at least once to Afghanistan or Iraq in the past five years.

That level of mobilization goes beyond anything the Army Reserve has seen since World War II, he said.

Col. Chris Cleaver, spokesman for the Pennsylvania National Guard, said about 16,000 of the 19,000 members of state's air and army units have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan at least once since Sept. 11, 2001.

Cleaver said the operational tempo has left most of the state's Guard units with about 50 percent of the weapons and equipment they need to train, much less deploy again. Some of the gear just wore out; the rest was donated to incoming units in Iraq that had shortages, he said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has proposed expanding the active military by 92,000 people during the next five years.

McCausland said that could start reducing the strain on area National Guard and Reserve units in about two years, assuming the Army can recruit and train more soldiers. Recent history suggests that's a shaky assumption, he said.

The Army missed its goal of recruiting 80,000 soldiers in 2005 and only met that goal for 2006 after it increased enlistment bonuses and age limits, lowered minimum aptitude test score requirements and agreed to accept some recruits without a high school or equivalency diploma.