Stryker Brigade News

Q: You mentioned earlier that the leadership was working as hard as possible, I got the impression to try to as quickly as possible shift to shorter tours, shorter deployments, six to nine months. I was wondering if you could flesh that out in any more detail. Is there a decision point coming up? How do you balance the human benefit of that to the soldier, hey you get to go home faster, see his family and so forth, and with the operational requirement to not have every six months the newbys coming on board and not know what’s going on.

A: That’s a great question, so we have to think through all of that. What we’re into here is not a sprint but a marathon.

What we need to do is think in terms of the longevity and the overall health of the force and our ability to sustain this level of operation. If we continue to be successful and we raise more Iraqi security forces, we can decrease our load over there that the Army is contributing. You have to remember that we are reenlisting a lot of people and an increasing number of our people now have a lot of experience over there. I would say the learning curve is going to be considerably shorter as we look at it. But I’m interested in finding the proper balance, and it may not apply across the whole force. We may have a construct where certain aspects of the force provide the continuity. A headquarters, for instance, may end up providing more continuity as we take a look at what kind of force we can rotate at what frequency and while we maintain the continuity of operations.

I’m making no promises because we don’t know what we don’t know, yet we go ahead. But I do want to communicate that this is on our mind and that we’re working hard to look at the possibilities and what we might be able to do. We want to do it in a way that doesn’t create short term gain for long term pain or disadvantage. We are actively looking at that, and we realize it because, ideally, when we get our force put together, we’d like our reserve component forces in cycle, a five to six years term, so that we get a deployment in five or six years. And what we’d like to do with our full time force, our active force, is to have them in about a three year term, with a deployment, and a three year term, and have a predictable amount available to us.

Not that we would always deploy them when they became available, but we’ll know what was available, and we’ll have them ready. The soldiers will have some predictability in terms of what they’re doing. That’s what we’re moving toward.

But it all has to do with our ability to rapidly generate additional brigades and support units of action, and to get ourselves into a position to have cycles that allows us more predictability.

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