Army taxed by long tours, short reserves

When Americans fought in Vietnam, they drew a standard tour of one year, plus one unaccountable month. They would have to volunteer in order to get more time in combat.

Today, when young Americans go off to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, the commitment is virtually open-ended. Three combat tours are becoming the norm. Some U.S. forces are about to embark on their fifth deployment to a war zone since Sept. 11, 2001.

The brutal pace of deployments is eviscerating readiness, depriving reserve units of much of their serviceable equipment and driving up levels of post-traumatic stress disorder and other stress-related ailments.

Even worse, the military is simply running out of troops to send as hundreds of thousands of reserve and National Guard forces become ineligible to go against their will under rules that limit their deployments to 24 months.

Of all the issues that incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates must handle as he starts work at the Pentagon, this is the most urgent.

Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker warns the Army could “break” under the pressure of unrelieved rotations.

Reservists now make up about 16 percent of U.S. forces in Iraq, but planners are about to scrape the bottom of the barrel of deployable part-time troops. Many Guard and reserve troops are serving not with their home units, but plugged into gaps elsewhere, because they volunteered, could be retrained or still had a little deployable time left. Yet even this sparse reserve is disappearing, adding to the strains on active-duty troops who already face a far more brutal combat rotation than during Vietnam.

Marines fight in Iraq or Afghanistan for seven months, then get seven months to one year off. Active-duty Army soldiers are on a one-year-on, one-year-off rotation – and the Army is bearing the brunt of the Iraq war.

Seventy-seven percent of all combat troops in Iraq as of Nov. 1 were Army soldiers, including Guard and reserves.

Yet in recent years, increases in the Pentagon’s weapons budget have tilted away from the Army toward major air and naval combat systems.

Former Pentagon chief Donald “The Army You Have” Rumsfeld kept insisting that Iraq was just a blip and refused to divert substantial money into expanding the Army or its combat equipment. Today, America is running out of options in Iraq because it doesn’t have the troops to send.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., insists the Pentagon is considering adding up to 35,000 more U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq – nearly a 25 percent increase – to corral violence in Baghdad.

Yet in congressional testimony last month, Gen. John Abizaid, who runs both the Afghan and Iraq wars, said he couldn’t sustain such a deployment because of an inability to find enough soldiers and Marines for the next rotation.

An equally disturbing corollary is how the training, recruitment, supply and readiness strains now hobbling the nation’s primary combat forces could impinge on their ability to respond to future crises.

The military has been robbing Peter to pay Paul – requiring units to leave their weapons, uniforms and trucks in Iraq rather than asking Congress for the money to buy more.

Among the nation’s most heavily used units in Iraq and Afghanistan are special operations troops. But one-third of these forces are reservists, many of them running out of deployable days overseas. With eight of every 10 deployed special operations forces now seeing combat, that’s a sure recipe for burnout.

And despite a crash investment in training more special operations troops, the intense pressure to find more soldiers to send to Iraq and Afghanistan is making it impossible to keep up with demand for the nation’s elite combat forces.

Gates needs to ask: Is such a loss of core combat capability the wisest plan for the nation’s future security?