Army wants to take stress off reservists

By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer

The Army's vice chief of staff said yesterday that a restructuring of the service could mean a 24-month break between combat deployments for regular Army forces and a five-year reprieve between tours for members of the National Guard and Reserve.

Cody

Cody, who spoke at a Rotary Club of Honolulu luncheon at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, said that is the balance the Army would like to strike. But it's going to take a while to get there.

With lengthy 12-month combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan adding to the strain for families and recruiting shortfalls, the Army is looking at the longer-term goal of tours of nine or six months.

Progress in training Iraqi security forces also has led to the possibility of U.S. troop reductions there next year.

"I'm very positive about Afghanistan and Iraq," said Cody, who just returned from visits there. "It's remarkable, the change in these countries."

Gen. George W. Casey, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, recently told CNN that "we should be able to take some fairly substantial reductions in the size of our forces," which now stand at about 140,000 troops in Iraq.

The possibility of shorter combat tours and fewer of them are tied up in continued progress in Iraq and efforts to reorganize back home. For some soldiers, the period between deployments is 12 months or even less.

Cody said a stretched-thin Army is going to grow by 30,000 soldiers "by the end of the year."

"Your Army is engaged," Cody told the group. Almost 300,000 soldiers are forward-deployed to 120 countries. Of those 300,000 soldiers, 176,000 are in combat for 12 months.

Before the war on terrorism, the Army had a one-year hardship tour — and that was to South Korea for 32,000 soldiers.

Taking National Guard and Reserve soldiers on active duty, and adding them to the regular component of the Army, "it's taking 650,000 soldiers day in and day out to be able to preserve the freedoms that we all enjoy," Cody said.

"So when people ask me ... 'How stretched is the Army?' That is the stress on our force."

There are seven National Guard brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cody said. That includes more than 2,200 Hawai'i soldiers with the 29th Brigade Combat Team in the Balad and Baghdad areas of Iraq.

"We know one thing — we've demanded and asked an awful lot of our National Guard and Reserve and we're at the point where we've got to give them a break," Cody said.

The four-star general said he thinks the Army will meet its active force recruiting goal of 80,000 this year, but he noted that the National Guard is not meeting its goals "and we're working it very, very hard."

The Hawai'i Army National Guard releases only year-to-year data and does not reveal recruiting goals, said spokesman Maj. Chuck Anthony.

Anthony said for fiscal 2003 the Army Guard had 302 recruits. For fiscal 2004, the total was 283 recruits, a dip of 6 percent. Typically, the Guard has brought in about 75 recruits per quarter.

Cody said efforts are being made to rebalance the National Guard and Reserve with regular Army components. Eighteen military police companies have been built in less than a year, he said. Civil affairs and psychological operations — 95 percent of which were in the National Guard and Reserve — now are being built into active components.

All combat brigades are being recast into more self-contained fighting units that are either medium-weight Stryker brigades, heavy units with tanks, or light infantry.

One soldier attached to the Hawai'i Guard brigade has been killed in Iraq. Cpl. Glenn J. Watkins, 42, a member of the Washington state National Guard, was killed April 5 in Baghdad when a bomb placed on a nearby vehicle blew up beside the Humvee he was riding in.

A soldier with the 100th Battalion, 442nd Infantry Regiment, has been wounded in action, and eight soldiers with a California battalion attached to the Hawai'i brigade have been wounded in action, officials said.

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-5459.