Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey has said a temporary increase beyond the current force level of 547,000 would ease the burden on soldiers, increasing dwell time between deployments. But Casey has argued against a permanent increase, which would require more force structure and add permanent costs to the Army that could handicap efforts to modernize equipment.
The Army has been consistently worried about having troops added only to have funding for them cut, which could lead to a hollow force that uses smaller amounts of money to pay and house more soldiers who lack modern equipment and adequate training.
In a few years, with deployments in Iraq subsiding and deployments to Afghanistan not matching our needs for Iraq, we won't need those extra troops to help with repeat deployments with too little dwell time.
