Home » Archives » "Army likes the idea of six-month deployments, but not now"

Army likes the idea of six-month deployments, but not now

Oct-26-2004 » Filed Under: General Military

[Link to Full Article]
By Sean D. Naylor, Times staff writer

Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody says the Army thinks switching to six-month tours in Afghanistan and Iraq is important to maintaining the all-volunteer force, but the service will be unable to do so until the security situation in Iraq improves.

The standard unit deployment schedule in the two combat zones is one year in, one year out, but the Pentagon had directed the Army to examine the possibility of shortening deployments. The reason the tours last a year now is that, with the demand for boots on the ground in Iraq, “if we went to six-to-nine-month rotations, we’d be turning inside ourselves,” Cody said.

If combat tours were set at six months, units would only get six months back at home post before turning around and heading back to war, “again and again and again,” he said during am Oct. 25 press conference at the annual Association of the U.S. Army symposium here.

Shorter combat tours pose particular challenges in a counter-insurgency campaign in which it takes time to develop the local contacts necessary to understand the enemy, he said.

“How do you fight a counter-insurgency … and maintain your low-level source networking, the confidence of the Iraqi people – because that is the center of gravity in a counter-insurgency – how do you work all that [if you only have six months on the ground]?”

Cody said he had raised this question with U.S. Central Command during a recent briefing he gave at CENTCOM headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla. The answer he received was that switching to six-month tours would be impractical until the Iraqi security forces had become more capable and Iraqi infrastructure had been built up. At a certain point, Cody said, assuming those things happen, the Army would be able to go to nine-month deployments, and then to six-month deployments.


Advertisements