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Goal for Guard: 4-year dwell time

The Army National Guard is steadily marching toward more predictability for its soldiers, looking for measures to relieve the pace for its most heavily deployed forces, even as demand for citizen-soldiers in the war zone doesn’t show signs of waning.

More than 240,000 Guard soldiers have deployed in support of operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom since Sept. 11, 2001, according to Defense Department data. Of that number, more than 30,400 are deployed. In addition, five Guard brigade combat teams are preparing to deploy this fall.

“Right now, we’re averaging between one year mobilized and two to three years at home,” said Lt. Col. Tim Pheil, deputy chief of the Army Guard’s personnel programs, resources and manpower division.

The goal is one year deployed and four years at home, he said.

“We’re not quite at the predictability model, but we’re getting healthier,” he said. “If conditions allow, it’s very likely soldiers that deploy in the near future will be getting very, very close to the four years’ time at home.”

The Guard is working to increase the time soldiers spend at home, in part by building more combat brigade formations — going from 34 brigades to 28 BCTs, 16 maneuver enhancement brigades and six battlefield surveillance brigades by 2011 — to spread out the deployment requirements. The Guard also is re-evaluating which types of units it sends to meet war-zone demands. Planners are considering, for example, whether a maneuver enhancement brigade can be sent in place of a BCT, which, with an average of five units deployed a year, generally has the busiest operations tempo in the Guard.

The Arkansas Guard has been the busiest of the busy, principally because the state is home to the 39th BCT. The 39th deployed to Iraq from April 2004 to April 2005 and is now on its second tour there, with an estimated return date in January. The brigade’s 3,000 soldiers represent almost 40 percent of the Arkansas Guard’s 8,500 soldiers.

Apart from the demand for BCTs, the Guard is filling strong demand for engineers, military police and transportation specialists, officials said. The more that a state’s Guard is composed of busy units, the more members are deployed and the less time they get at home, compared to troops in other specialties and states.

According to the data, 125 percent of the Arkansas force has been mobilized since Sept. 11, 2001. That means some soldiers have been mobilized more than once.

Arkansas is followed by Rhode Island, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and Kansas. Ranked 54th is Delaware; 56 percent of its force has been mobilized in that same period.

“The force is not distributed evenly across the entire nation, so sometimes certain states have a higher number of certain units, like MPs, for example, so they tend to be picked up more than others,” said Col. Ted Martinell, chief of the Army Guard’s plans, readiness and mobilization division.

The Army Guard has an end strength of about 358,000 troops. Guard planners decide which units to deploy and when, based upon the number and kinds of specialties requested by Forces Command.

“We try to go to the units with the most dwell time and the best readiness,” Martinell said. “We’ll work with the states, and once it’s determined that they can do the mission, we will assign them to do that mission. Typically, we try never to take more than 50 percent of the Guard in any one state so that in any state the governor has at a minimum 50 percent of the total Guard force to respond to emergencies.”

Guard planners typically look at units instead of individuals when calculating dwell time, Pheil said.

“If we started counting individuals, about half have not deployed, but we don’t resource on an individual level,” he said.

After relying heavily on volunteers during the first years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Guard is now pushing to deploy whole units under a DoD policy, announced in January 2007, that limits reserve component mobilizations to 12 months at a time. Previously, reserve component troops could be deployed for no more than 24 months. That led to a lot of cross-leveling — borrowing troops from other units to fill the unit tapped for deployment — and a heavy reliance on volunteers who made it possible for leaders to bypass the 24-month limit.

The next large group of units preparing to deploy this fall will have, on average, about three years at home. In fiscal 2010, more than half of the deploying units will have four years at home, Pheil said.

“We’re [rotating] the brigades faster, but we’re still working to give them the amount of time at home that they need,” he said. “We’re worried about the soldier in the unit. The truck doesn’t care if it’s in the desert or parked at home. The guidon doesn’t care if it’s flying in Iraq or at home. We care about the soldiers.”

Getting to the dwell-time goal, Pheil said, will have a dramatic and positive impact:

“The closer we can get to achieving that four-year dwell, … [the] more predictability we can provide to our soldiers, their families and employers.”