Serving in Iraq info page 34

Combat Tours May Be Cut In Half

Fearing a sharp decline in recruiting and troop retention, the U.S. Army is considering cutting the length of its 12-month combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior army officials say.

The senior official U.S. Army personnel officers, as well as high-ranking people in the Army Reserve and National Guard say the army's ability to recruit and retain soldiers will erode steadily unless combat tours are shortened to between six and nine months, roughly equivalent to the seven-month tours that are the norm in the U.S. Marine Corps.

But other army officials responsible for combat operations and war planning have significant concerns that the army at its current size and configuration cannot meet projected requirements for Iraq and Afghanistan unless active-duty and reserve troops spend 12 months in those combat zones.

Officials say it is too early to predict if or when a new deployment policy may take effect or how it will be carried out. But the proposal to shorten combat tours collides with the immediate need to maintain current troop strength in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army planners say they must prepare for the possibility that it will be necessary to keep troops at the current levels in Iraq 138,000 through 2007, even though no political decision has been made in this regard.

"All the army leadership agrees that 12 months is too long," said Lieutenant General Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, which oversees 460,000 members of the Air and Army National Guard. "We need to move to a shorter rotational base," Blum said in an interview last week.

The prospect of lengthy combat tours appears to be affecting recruitment. For example, the National Guard had set a goal of 56,000 recruits for the fiscal year ending Thursday, but is likely to end up with about 51,000, he said. It would be the first time since 1994 that the National Guard had missed its sign-up goal.

"Twelve months is an awfully long time to be in a hostile environment," said Blum, adding that he and other senior commanders hear a growing number of complaints from soldiers, their families and employers.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army has largely deployed its forces in overseas combat situations in six-month tours of duty. The major exception has been in South Korea, where soldiers serve for one year. The 12-month deployment was introduced last year after the end of major combat operations in Iraq, when a vigorous insurgency convinced the military that it would need to maintain large numbers of troops in the country. The army decided then that only 12-month tours would meet its needs.

Officials said a major force driving the consideration of shorter combat tours was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who sent queries to the U.S. Army and Marine Corps a month ago.

According to two army officials and a Pentagon adviser to Rumsfeld, these memos demanded a clear justification for why the two armed services that supply American ground forces have different tour lengths in Iraq.

From: http://www.military.com/NewsContent
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