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Odierno: 15-month tours likely till late 2008

The No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq said Tuesday that 15-month combat tours are too long for U.S. soldiers but probably cannot be shortened until next fall as troop levels decline.

“The units now that are leaving have all done 15-month tours and I’m very pleased with how they handled it,” Army Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno said in an Associated Press interview by telephone from his headquarters in Baghdad. “What they’ve accomplished is incredible, but I think it is too long.”

Pentagon officials and outside analysts have cited the long tours, coupled with too-short periods between deployments, as a key factor in causing stress on soldiers as well as their families.

Ultimately, Odierno said, tour lengths for soldiers is a decision for the Army leadership at the Pentagon.

Odierno, the commander of Multi-National Corps-Iraq, said there is widespread agreement in the Army that it should return to the 12-month tour length that was the standard until early this year, when it was stretched to 15 months to meet President Bush’s request for an extra five brigades.

Gen. George Casey, who became the Army chief of staff in April after spending more than two years in Iraq as the top overall commander, told a think tank audience in Washington on Tuesday that the Army decided to go to 15-month tours “with the full understanding that it was temporary.”

“We can’t sustain that and have to come off of that,” Casey said. As the Army considers how soon it can return to shorter tours it wants to be “darn sure that we’re not going to have to go back” to 15 months.

“I expect an announcement on that in the next three or four months,” Casey said.

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