More Marines to Afghanistan Possible

Marines deployed to Afghanistan this spring will, in part, hold the cards on determining whether more are sent in after them, according to the Corps' top officer.

More than 3,000 Marines from the Camp Lejeune, N.C.-based 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and the Twentynine Palms, Calif.-based 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines recently deployed to Afghanistan, where they are expected to pick up operations in the volatile southern region.
 
And if even more Marines find themselves heading to Afghanistan, it's too soon to tell whether that will translate into a simultaneous draw down of leathernecks in Iraq, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway told Miltary.com in a recent interview in his Pentagon office.

"We're going to have that question posed to us when we take that first regiment and its support capabilities, both logistics and aviation, out of Iraq," Conway said. "Do we bring them home and start creating a better deployment-to-dwell? Or do we put them into Afghanistan so that we win that fight too and then create our own dwell time as a result of that?"

Critical to the decision is just how much progress is made in Afghanistan; right now, said Conway, “the trend lines … aren’t necessarily as good as we would like,” and he wants to see them reversed.

"That's what 3,500 Marines are intended to do there this spring. Whether or not they and the additional troops that NATO might be on the verge of providing make that difference will be a factor in determining whether or not troops that either come out of Iraq or more likely, don't go into Iraq because of the standing down of some of our capability there, wind up in Afghanistan."

In order to send more Marines into Afghanistan, however, the Corps would need to start bringing home its roughly 25,000 troops from Iraq. In February, Conway admitted that the service could not endure a long-term presence on both fronts.

Marines currently spend about seven months at home for every seven months deployed, a result of the 2007 surge in Iraq that added a MEU and two infantry battalions to the fight but tightened up the dwell-to-deployment time. Before the surge, Marines spent about nine months at home, Conway said. Conway has made improving that dwell-to-deployment ratio a top priority, and wants Marines to be able to spend twice as much time at home between combat tours.

"[W]e cannot sustain this one-to-one forever, and our Corps is not big enough to do both," Conway told Washington reporters in February. "We can't have one foot in Afghanistan and one foot in Iraq.  I believe that would be -- an analogy would be you'd be having one foot in the canoe and one foot on the bank. You can't be there long."

Conway has noted in the past that the 2007 surge in Iraq that added a MEU and two infantry battalions further reduced the time Marines are able to spend at home between combat deployments. Under the surge plan, Marines were spending about seven months at home, compared to about nine months prior to the troop build-up in Iraq, he said.

“It’s too soon to say how soon we could see Marines coming out of Anbar," Conway told Military.com.

"There's a formula out there with regard to percentage Marine and percentage of Army” troops deployed to Iraq, he explained. “And when we reach those benchmarks, those percentages, and it's our turn, if you will, to withdraw we'll certainly want to do that in order to be able to take some pressure off our young Marines and start to do something about our deployment dwell."

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