Army adding at least 22K soldiers for 3 years - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Army adding at least 22K soldiers for 3 years

It starts now: More troops are on the way, at least for the next three years. After weeks of maneuvering in Washington to help ease the Army’s strain from deployments, the Senate voted 93-1 on July 21 to allow the Army to add up to 30,000 soldiers. The growth will begin Oct. 1.

The 30,000-person increase is intended to be temporary, expiring on Sept. 30, 2012.

A version of the defense authorization act passed by the House authorizes the same number of troops, but would start the growth in 2011 and would be limited to two years.

Lawmakers still have to hash out the details before it is sent to the White House for the president’s signature. In the meantime, Army Recruiting Command has already increased its fiscal 2009 mission by 5,000 to 70,000, and the fiscal 2010 mission is expected to go up again.

The increase is intended to ease the burden of deployments by fully manning the Army’s brigades.

New soldiers should begin arriving at deploying formations by spring.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced July 20 the Army would increase by 22,000 troops, to 569,000. He said the extra troops will help fill the manning gaps in deploying formations to make up for nondeployable soldiers. That group includes soldiers on medical hold status, and the part of the force that is regularly unavailable because it is in training and educational roles, assigned to training and advisory teams in Iraq and Afghanistan or manning joint staff headquarters.

The temporary increase will help the Army weather the next 18 months, a period over which troop demands in Afghanistan are increasing faster than requirements in Iraq are easing up — all this while the Army continues trying to end implementation of the controversial “stop-loss” involuntary extension program by March 2011.

The amendment to the 2010 defense authorization bill was crafted by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee and has been a longtime advocate of increasing the size of the Army to spread the burden of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Only one lawmaker, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., voted against the increase, arguing that the strain on the Army could be relieved by redeploying from Iraq immediately.

“There is an incredible strain on the force right now, including multiple deployments and insufficient dwell time, due to our failure to promptly and fully redeploy from Iraq,” Feingold said. “Indeed, the Iraqi government has asked us to remove our troops from Iraqi cities and as a result many U.S. service members, including Wisconsin soldiers, are sitting on their bases with no mission.”

Shifting forces

As the missions shift in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 30,000 soldiers have received orders to deploy to Iraq this fall to replace redeploying units and another 7,500 are headed for Afghanistan in a buildup of forces there.

Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey has said a temporary increase would ease the burden on soldiers, while increasing dwell time between deployments. But he has argued against a permanent increase, saying it would require more force structure and add permanent costs to the Army that could handicap efforts to modernize equipment.

Other Army leaders have been cautious about predicting hard dates for increased dwell time.

“If things go as they do, by 2011, we hope we’ll get down to one year deployed, two years home,” outgoing Army Secretary Pete Geren told Army Times. “We’re committed to growing the Army, we’re committed to rebalancing the Army and working with the reserve component so we spread this burden as much as we can. But we’ve projected lowered demand in the past and we’ve underestimated.”

Geren said he supports the increase, but noted the Army has to retain the flexibility to grow and shrink under emerging circumstances, all while keeping the service properly manned and equipped.

“It’s just a fine balancing act to have the right number of soldiers and the right long-term investment and I can’t see any time in the near future where we’d want to shrink, but it’s having that sort of flexibility. Getting it right requires a crystal ball we don’t have,” Geren said.

Question of funding

It remains uncertain how the Pentagon is going to pay for the increase.

The Lieberman amendment does not identify how to pay for the extra people, a cost estimated to surpass $100,000 per person per year when pay, allowances and support costs are included. But the amendment does give options.

For 2010, the extra cost could be covered either by supplemental funding, if the Obama administration requests it, or from reserve funding within the Defense Department. For 2011 and 2012, the amendment assumes that the Defense Department will find a way to pay for the extra soldiers and will include money for the increase in the budget it submits to Congress.

Gates said the increase would begin immediately and that for 2009 and 2010 he would find money from the defense budget without seeking additional funding from Congress.

The legislative branch left it up to the Pentagon to figure how it would pay for the increase and the Army could be faced with bearing the cost in its own budget.

“The immediate challenge on the financial side is where to find the money,” said retired Lt. Gen. Theodore Stroup, former chief of Army personnel and vice president with the Association of the U.S. Army. “The Army is waiting to see if the Defense Department is going to put up the money. Our position is the Army doesn’t have enough money anyway.”

The Army, Stroup said, would have to pull the money out of its fungible accounts, those used for operation and maintenance for reset, modernization or base operations.

“It’s a trade-off. It’s guns or butter. Do you want troops or modernization?” he said.

Stroup, whose organization has advocated heavily for an increase to 700,000 soldiers, and recently retired Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody said they think the latest increase should be permanent.

“We don’t know what fights we’ll have after Iraq,” Cody told Army Times on July 23, adding “when we went to Iraq in 2003 we knew the Army wasn’t big enough, then we stretched the hell out of it.”