Editorial: Help from within

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Editorial: Help from within

Sometime in the next few months, Gen. George Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, will make an announcement on deployment lengths. He’s pushing to cut combat tours from today’s 15 months to 12, or at least to keep soldiers home at least as many months as they deploy.

“We are deploying at unsustainable rates,” he told an audience earlier this month at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

The Army will reduce the number of combat brigades in Iraq from 20 to 15 by the end of summer, and if the security gains achieved during the past year’s surge hold, the Army will be able to cut deployment lengths as a result.

But there are other ways to reduce the burden of repeat deployments that have fallen on some soldiers more than others. One key initiative: Ensuring that the soldiers who are eligible to serve a war tour but have yet to do so — there are at least 37,000 of them — are moved quickly into deploying units. That’s the equivalent of two divisions, and it will go a long way toward providing relief for soldiers who, in some cases, are in the middle of their third war tour.

Getting the non-deployers into the fight is a no-brainer, and the sooner it happens, the better. Many of these soldiers — especially trainers and recruiters — have been itching to get into combat, but haven’t been able to because of the Army’s needs. Others have managed simply to duck war duty one way or another. Either way, the Army cannot afford to have two groups of soldiers — those who bear the burden of the war by deploying and those who stay safe at home.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/community/opinion/army_editorial_casey_071224/