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Reserve Tours Are Extended

Army Orders 1-Year Stay In Iraq, Nearby Nations

By Vernon Loeb and Steve Vogel

Washington Post Staff Writers

Tuesday, September 9, 2003; Page A01

With U.S. forces stretched thin in Iraq and the Bush administration still searching for additional international peacekeepers, the Army has ordered thousands of National Guard and Army Reserve forces in Iraq to extend their tours in the country to a year, months longer than many of the troops had anticipated, Army officials said yesterday.

While defense officials have had authority since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to activate Guard and reserve troops for two years, most to date have been called up for only a year of total service, which has included weeks or months for training in the United States before heading to Iraq as well as debriefings once they returned home.

The new order, requiring 12-month tours on the ground in Iraq or surrounding countries, means that many Guard and Army Reserve troops could have their original year-long mobilizations extended for anywhere from one to six months, Army officials said.

The order comes after months of concern inside and outside the Army that an over-reliance on Guard and Reserve forces by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism could adversely affect retention and recruiting. Some officials have expressed concern that this could break the Guard and Reserve system, which augments the active-duty force with critical engineering, military police, civil affairs and psychological operations specialists.

The new deployment policy, which is still being disseminated to Guard and Army Reserve units, is already prompting concerns by troops and their advocates, who said uncertainty about the length of deployments can have a highly negative impact on morale. The Army issued the new policy late Friday night, but made no formal announcement of the change.

There are 122,000 Army personnel in Iraq, including 3,000 National Guard soldiers and 5,000 reservists, Army officials said. Another 5,000 Guard soldiers and 7,000 reservists are serving in Kuwait, they said.

Overall, there are 350,000 troops in the Army National Guard and 205,000 in the Army Reserve. As of last week, a total of 128,919 Army Guard and Reserve members were mobilized in support of operations overseas and in the United States. Although the total is lower than during the peak of the Iraq war, it is more than 10 times greater than the average annual Guard and Reserve call-up during the 1990s, which typically was fewer than 10,000 troops a year.

Army officials defended the new deployment order, saying the scarcity of active-duty forces and security concerns in Iraq made it necessary to keep a large number of Guard and Reserve troops in the country for as long as possible. Many of the specialties most required in postwar Iraq are almost entirely provided by Guard and Army Reserve units.

“Because of the dynamic situation in theater, we had to take a look at our overseas forces to make sure we were maximizing their deployment opportunity,” one Army official said, asking that he not be identified by name.

Steve Stromvall, a spokesman for the Army Reserve at Fort McPherson, Ga., said many Guard and Reserve forces in Iraq and Kuwait will not be “pleasantly surprised” by the new policy requiring 12-month tours in the region. But he said the new policy “is going to help us give some predictability and therefore some stability to Army Reserve soldiers.”

The new policy only applies to those now serving in Iraq and will not affect Guard and Reserve troops deploying in the future, including two National Guard brigades scheduled to deploy on six-month tours in the coming months.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, called the new policy “a manifestation of the challenges the Army is facing meeting its troop obligations throughout the world, and particularly in Iraq.”

“What it means is that for the troops who are there now, they are going to have to serve longer than they expected, and be surprised about that, because of the time necessary to organize and prepare the replacement cycles that will come following them,” Nash said. Nash said the 12-month tours will most likely have a negative impact on recruiting and retention in the National Guard and Reserve, both of which are populated by what are commonly referred to as “citizen soldiers” — men and women who have regular jobs and in peacetime typically contribute weekend service.

Army officials said they have to date seen no adverse impact on recruiting and retention in the Guard and Reserve despite the large numbers of troops deployed overseas.

But the war in Iraq has placed enormous strains on regular Army forces, with about half the combat power of the country’s largest military service still deployed in Iraq five months after the fall of Baghdad. By early next year, eight of the Army’s 10 active-duty divisions, in addition to large numbers of Guard and Reserve troops, will have seen duty in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Soldiers with the D.C. Army National Guard’s 547th Transportation Company, which deployed to Iraq last winter, have been hoping for a return in November, a spokesman said. “They’ll be disappointed if that’s not the case, but they feel they have a job to do,” said Capt. Sheldon Smith.

A soldier from the unit killed in action last month was buried yesterday at Arlington National Cemetery. More than 100 soldiers from the unit are still in Iraq.

“Those of us with loved ones there want them home same as everyone else, and we’ll continue to hope and pray for their safe return as soon as possible,” said Smith, who has a brother serving in Iraq with the California National Guard.

The Maryland National Guard has more than 300 soldiers serving in Iraq. Soldiers from the units have orders for a one-year mobilization, with possibility of extension to two years. The assumption has been that the one-year mobilization included time in the United States preparing to deploy, training and later demobilizing, said Maj. Charles Kohler, a spokesman for the Maryland Guard.

“It would be the time away from work,” Kohler said.

The Maryland Guard’s 115th Military Police Battalion, based in Salisbury and Parkville, Md., has been called up three times in the past two years — to guard the Pentagon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to process al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to Iraq since last spring.

Soldiers in the unit have been hoping to return to Maryland in late December, Kohler said. “I’m sure they would be” disappointed by an extension, he added.

A rotation plan announced by the Army in July for sustaining more than 120,000 troops in Iraq through the end of next year relies not only on two National Guard brigades but also a third division of multinational peacekeeping forces. They would be in addition to a British-led multinational division in southern Iraq and a recently deployed Polish-led division south of Baghdad.

But troops for a third division of multinational troops have been hard to assemble, with India, Pakistan and Turkey indicating that they wanted U.N. authorization for peacekeepers.

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