U.S. Will Begin Rotation Plan on Iraq Deployment

Tens of thousands of war-weary U.S. soldiers will be sent home beginning next month, Pentagon officials announced Wednesday, under a fragile rotation plan that underscores the strain the Iraq war has placed on the military.

The plan, as approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, sends new waves of troops for yearlong deployments in Iraq to relieve the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and other long-serving units.

But for replacements it relies on foreign troops that have not yet been committed by their governments, on two National Guard combat brigades that have not yet been trained for the mission, on an Army division that just returned home from Iraq, and on two new Army brigades that have not been certified by the Pentagon as combat-ready.

Gen. John Keane, the Army’s acting chief of staff, said he was confident the plan would give ground commanders the force they need to stabilize Iraq. But he acknowledged that he was “concerned” that it stretched the Army to its limits.

Nearly three-quarters of the service’s combat troops are now deployed overseas.

Under the plan, the 3rd Infantry Division will come home in August and September, to be replaced by the 82nd Airborne Division, which returned from Iraq less than three months ago.

That appears to back away from a much-criticized plan announced last week that would have kept most of the 3rd Infantry in Iraq beyond September. The division led the charge into Baghdad and includes some soldiers who have been in Kuwait and then Iraq for 10 months.

Yearlong Stints

The plan calls for troops serving in Iraq to be deployed for a year -- the first time since Vietnam that large numbers of U.S. soldiers have been sent into combat overseas for that long. The exceptions are the National Guard units, which will stay in Iraq for six months because they will first need six months of training, and the 82nd Airborne, which also is slated for a six-month tour.

The intent is to keep the number of U.S. forces in Iraq steady at about 144,000 at least through March, by which time, Pentagon planners hope, the country will be considerably more secure.

Before and during the war, Army officials planned for no more than 50,000 soldiers to be in Iraq by now. But the continued attacks against coalition forces have prevented such a scaling back.

The rotation plan comes as the U.S.-declared war on terrorism and other overseas commitments are straining the military, and the Army in particular, for the first time since overall troop levels were reduced more than a decade ago in the wake of the Cold War.

About 369,000 of the Army’s 1.04 million active-duty and reserve troops are deployed away from home in 120 countries. About 138,000 of those deployed overseas are reservists, many in certain specialties that are being called up again and again. An additional 67,000 reservists from other branches of the military also are deployed.

In Iraq alone, 133,000 Army soldiers are deployed, out of a total of 144,000 U.S. and 12,500 coalition personnel. There are 34,000 troops in Kuwait.

The vast majority of the Air Force and Navy units that fought in the war left the area weeks ago.

“The rotation plan revealed today by the Army demonstrates the fact that we’ve got a small Army, because these guys are bouncing back between Afghanistan and Iraq,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, commanding general of the 1st Armored Division in the 1990s. “This just uses up everybody, and the reliance on the National Guard to fulfill these combat duties is indicative of that.”

Other Commitments

The Army also has major commitments in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia-Montenegro’s Kosovo province, as well as long-standing deployments in South Korea, Japan, Germany and the Sinai peninsula. The largest of the armed services, the Army has portions of every major active-duty combat unit committed to either Iraq or Afghanistan, with the exception of the 2nd Infantry Division, which is in South Korea.

“The steady state that we have put up there, we can sustain,” Keane told reporters at the Pentagon, pointing to a chart depicting the Army’s rotation plan. But he warned, “If the coalition divisions did not materialize and we had to go back to Army divisions, then clearly that would stress this force.”

Keane also said that although he had yet to decide whether to ask Rumsfeld to expand the size of the active-duty Army, he believes that it has critical shortages in some areas.

“We need more infantry, we need more military police, we need more civil affairs” specialists, he said. “Those are facts.”

The rotation plan also calls for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force to leave Iraq in September, to be replaced by a Polish-led multinational division.

The 101st Airborne Division will leave in February and March if another multinational division is ready to replace it, and the 4th Infantry Division is to be replaced by the 1st Infantry Division and a National Guard infantry brigade in April. A second Guard combat brigade would replace two Army divisions about the same time.

Keane said Army officials had not yet decided which National Guard brigades to deploy. Army officials said a decision was likely by Friday. It will be the first time large numbers of National Guard combat troops have been deployed to Iraq. Most now there serve in support capacities.

A brigade has between 5,000 and 8,000 soldiers. A division has between 15,000 and 20,000.

New Brigades

The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment would be replaced beginning in October with one of two newly formed Army brigades built around a high-tech armored vehicle called the Stryker. A second Stryker brigade would replace multinational forces late next year.

Keane said he was confident that the Stryker brigades, which use wheeled vehicles instead of tanks and are intended to be a model for future Army combat forces, were prepared for action in Iraq even though they had yet to be formally certified as operationally ready. The brigades are based at Ft. Lewis, Wash.

“We have put them through their paces, and they are ready to go,” Keane said.