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Army expected to keep ‘stop-loss’ policy in effect despite concerns |
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By Roxana Tiron
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Posted: 10/10/07 07:17 PM [ET] |
The Army will likely continue employing a controversial “stop-loss” policy intended to keep soldiers in war zones beyond their original commitments due to demands placed on the troops, according to Secretary of the Army Peter Geren.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a directive earlier this year to minimize and eventually eliminate the use of stop-loss. But the Army cannot easily predict when it can do away with the controversial practice, which is keeping 8,000 soldiers in the service beyond the end of their enlistment, according to Geren.
“With the demand on the force that we have today, we are unable to not use stop-loss, in order to make sure that we are able to deploy fully manned and trained and properly prepared brigades to the theater,” Geren said Monday during a press conference at the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army. “With the increase in the length of deployments, it increases the number of soldiers on stop-loss.”
Geren stressed that the trend of employing stop loss has gone down over the last couple of years. The policy allows the Pentagon to keep soldiers on — even when their enlistment is due to expire — if it needs to maintain troop strength and unit integrity. The practice has garnered widespread congressional criticism and brought several lawsuits from members of the military.
“We certainly share Dr. Gates’s goal of eliminating stop-loss, and continuing to work toward that end,” Geren said. “Without being able to predict the future, with certainty, [there is] no way to predict when we would be able to do away with using that as a tool for force management.”
The Army’s elimination of stop-loss depends on a number of factors, including the rate the Army can expand its ranks and the demands from war zones, Geren explained. Earlier this year, the Bush administration announced a plan to increase the Army and its three components — active, National Guard and Reserve — by 74,000 soldiers.
Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, said at a congressional hearing last month that the Army will “gradually wean” itself off of stop-loss once the Army starts recruiting new soldiers, and the size of the force increases while the demand on the battlefield comes down.
“But I would expect it will stay on for a while longer,” Casey said. “We don’t like the stop-loss policy, frankly, any better than anyone else.”
Casey predicted that the number of troops in Iraq is expected to go down to 15 brigades by the end of next summer, at which point the Army could start scaling back the practice.
Last month, President Bush announced plans to reduce the number of U.S. combat brigades in Iraq from 20 to 15 by July. That could bring U.S. force levels from 165,000 to between 130,000 and 140,000.
“It’ll be a gradual process. We won’t just stop it,” Casey said during the September congressional hearing.
Gates’s directive to reduce the use of stop-loss is part of a wider initiative to change deployment policies for active and reserve forces and the use of the so-called total force, which encompasses both active and reserve units.
To meet the demands on the battlefield, the Army had to extend combat tours of units in Iraq to 15 months. Under Gates’s plan, the active-duty forces will deploy for one year at a time and spend two years at their home bases.
At the AUSA annual meeting Monday, Casey called the 15-month deployment temporary and said the Army is analyzing how to reduce the time as well as the impact of reducing that time.
Casey said it would take the Army three to four years to gain the additional troops and train and equip them for combat.
Meanwhile, Gates’s plan calls for the members of the reserve forces to have an involuntary deployment time for one year, followed by five years on their home bases. The National Guard is not close to achieving that goal without a significant troop growth, the head of the National Guard Bureau, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, told The Hill last month.
Efforts in the Senate to codify in law the deployments and dwell times of both active troops and members of the reserve components failed during the debate over the 2008 defense authorization bill. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), prompted a veto threat from the White House.
Even though the Webb bill resembles Gates’s plan, the secretary of defense said that he would have recommended a veto had it passed, arguing that it would hamper the Pentagon’s force management and indirectly open a way to draw down forces in Iraq.
The House passed a stand-alone bill, sponsored by Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), which mandates that active-duty soldiers receive twice as much time at home as they do when deployed. It also mandates that members of the reserve components cannot be mobilized for more than a year and should spend five years at home between deployments. |
