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Report: Surge will hurt readiness even more

A self-described progressive think tank warned Congress on Tuesday that President Bush’s surge strategy will only result in decreased Army readiness and more casualties.

“Our Army is in bad shape, and the surge will only make it worse for the Army and the country,” Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told reporters during a teleconference Tuesday to discuss “Beyond the Call of Duty: A Comprehensive Review of the Overuse of the Army in the Administration’s War of Choice in Iraq.”

Korb told reporters Tuesday he presented Congress with the report’s findings, which provide a breakdown of the deployment history of the Army’s 44 active combat brigades.

The report states that 20 of those 44 brigades have had two tours to either Iraq or Afghanistan, nine have had three tours and two have had four tours. Twelve brigades have been to Iraq or Afghanistan for at least one tour, the report states. About 650,000 soldiers have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and about 170,000 have been deployed more than once, the report states.

President Bush’s latest plan to send up to 30,000 additional combat troops to Iraq “threatens to inflict serious, long term damage on the force,” the report states.

Compressed time between deployments, training equipment shortages and accelerated deployments have “severely hindered the ability of Army combat units to train effectively,” the report states.

“I think your worst case scenario is you are not prepared to deal with another contingency,” Korb told reporters. “What we are saying is the Congress has got to do something about this.”

The report asks Congress to ensure that deploying units are “combat ready,” National Guard and Reserve mobilizations do not exceed two years and combat deployments don’t exceed 12 months. The report also recommends that Congress revoke President Bush’s authority to use stop-loss to extend soldiers beyond their enlistments.

“The surge is going to make a bad situation worse,” Korb said. “You’re basically going to take more casualties than you should.”