Starting this fall, all active-duty Army units will have two full years at home between deployments, and National Guard and reserve units will get four years between deployments, the service’s chief of staff said Wednesday.
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Gen. George Casey said Army officials are also hopeful that they can reach their goal of three years home between deployments in the near future, if drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan take place as scheduled.
“You’ve heard me testify in the past that that Army is out of balance,” he told lawmakers. “But we’ve made great progress. ... As an Army, we’re starting to breathe again.”
The dwell time issue for our troops has been a major issue as troops found themselves going back to war theaters with a year (or less, during the surge) at home stations. This stressed our troops a great deal. The Army especially faced this with one-year tours going to 15 months in Iraq during the surge. But the Army did not break. Accomplishing their mission and winning I'm sure played a great role in that endurance. You really want to break an army? Lose a war.
The other aspect of getting dwell time is the "balance" issue. This isn't a stress issue on the soldiers. This means that as units cycled out of and back into Iraq and Afghanistan, units (and hence their soldiers) focused on counter-insurgency at the expense of training and organizing for high intensity conventional operations. Our Army got "out of balance" by being a good COIN force but lacking proficiency in high intensity combat against other formed units. This affected not just infantry-based units, but tank and artillery units, for example, who reorganized as infantry for security operations and lost their skills at their primary missions of mobile warfare and fire support.
We had to unbalance the Army to win the war, but we have to balance the Army so it can handle the full spectrum of warfare now that we can afford to do so. We took a risk doing this to win the war in Iraq, but the alternative was to lose the war in the mistaken notion that we couldn't afford to break the conventional Army by adapting to COIN. Had we done that, we would have lost the war and broken the Army.
