Real Relief Planned for 2011.

One of the strains on the ground forces is the operational tempo of heading overseas to combat zones with not enough time at home to recover. We'd like a ration of 1:2 and while we are now aiming for 1:1, during the surge it was actually under that as Army units faced 15 months in combat and only a year at home.

Even as combat in Iraq has declined dramatically for US forces, the tempo remains. This type of news is the only thing that will significantly reduce operational tempo:

The U.S. military has announced that 12,000 American and 4,000 British troops will leave Iraq by September.

Maj. Gen. David Perkins says that will reduce U.S. combat power from 14 brigades to 12 brigades. He also said Sunday that the U.S. is turning over more facilities to the Iraqi military as part of the drawdown.

Mind you, not facing the same threat of death or injury is a great thing, but the issue of operational tempo is not affected by that factor.

And the drawdown of two brigades from Iraq this year is balanced by the already announced increase of two brigades for Afghanistan (the British, too, have been shifting to Afghanistan for a while now). US forces won't begin further withdrawals of combat brigades from Iraq until after late summer 2010, assuming all goes according to plan.

Yes, we've added a small number of brigades to the total active component, which helps a bit on operational tempo, but we'll never expand the ground forces enough to get to our ideal operational tempo. We added 9 more brigades after invading Iraq by shifting existing slots to civilian contractors (thus freeing up slots for soldiers) and converting units more suited to the Cold War to units in demand for Iraq and Afghansitan. Late in the Bush administration, we added end strength to add a handful of Army brigades and give the Marines additional slots as well.

Going to 1:2 deployed-to-home time ratio, however, will require getting the number of our troops deployed overseas reduced. And since I don't think we could ever (and shouldn't) deploy as many troops to Afghanistan as we have to Iraq because of the supply situation alone, unless we find ourselves in a new ground war, our ground troops will not get real relief from operational tempo stress until sometime in 2011.

Thank goodness the ground forces don't face the stress of losing the war in Iraq. Victory, at least, makes much of the sacrifice worth it--for our military if not for much of the Left, of course.