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.
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