WASHINGTON
- If required to send additional combat forces to Iraq
this spring or summer, as seems increasingly likely, the
Pentagon and the Army would have several options - none
good.
It's not yet certain that U.S.
commanders in Iraq will ask for more troops beyond the
135,000 there now, but if they do, the Army would have
to resort to extreme measures to answer the call.
Of the service's 10 active-duty
divisions, all or parts of nine are either already in
Iraq to serve 12-month tours of duty, or have just
returned home in recent weeks after a year's duty.
If more troops are needed, soldiers
may get less time at home before going back, one top
general says. The Army might also have to consider
sending troops who help defend South Korea against North
Korea. National Guard and Reserve combat forces would
simply take too long to train.
"It's getting thin," said Pat Towell,
a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments.
It would even be difficult to keep the
force at the current level beyond June or so, when
20,000 soldiers whose yearlong Iraq tours were extended
by three months are due to go home. The Army has not
said which units it would call upon if it needs to
replace those soldiers this summer.
The only Army division not now in Iraq
or just returned is the 3rd Infantry Division. That unit
is not expecting to get the Iraq call again until about
January 2005, since it already has done one grueling
tour there. Its soldiers spent months training in the
Kuwait desert before spearheading the Iraq invasion in
March 2003 and capturing Baghdad, along with the 1st
Marine Division, in April. The 3rd Infantry returned to
its bases in Georgia late last summer and is in the
midst of a top-to-bottom reorganization and refit.
Lt. Gen. Richard Cody, the Army deputy
chief of staff for operations, said recently that the
3rd Infantry is scheduled to finish reorganizing by
midsummer and could deploy after that if necessary.
Cody said if extra troops are needed,
the Army would have to abandon its goal of allowing
soldiers at least one full year at their home station
before returning to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Although Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld has said the Iraq commitment does not prevent
the military from defending U.S. interests elsewhere in
the world, a substantial portion of U.S.-based troops
who are earmarked as reinforcements for a conflict in
Korea or elsewhere in Asia are tied down in Iraq.
Looked at another way, the Army has 33
active-duty brigades within the 10-division structure.
Of those brigades, 27 are either in Iraq or Afghanistan
or just returned home. Of the six others, three are in
the 3rd Infantry, and two are on duty in South Korea.
The only other brigade not otherwise
occupied is the 172nd Infantry Brigade, based at Fort
Richardson and Fort Wainwright in Alaska. It is "waist
deep" into a fundamental reorganization, spokesman Lt.
Col. Ben Danner said, and has yet to receive its new
Stryker vehicles, which travel on wheels rather than
steel tracks and make the Army more agile.
That leaves several other
possibilities, none of which the Army thought it would
be facing at this point, almost a year since President
Bush declared major combat over last May 1.
Among the options:
- Send the 3rd Infantry back to Iraq
ahead of schedule. Even while the division has been
reconfiguring, it has kept one brigade ready for a
short-notice deployment in a crisis.
- Early deployment of the 1st Brigade
of the 25th Infantry Division, which just completed
training in its new configuration with Strykers. A
brigade spokesman, Capt. Tim Beninato, said the unit has
received no deployment order but is ready to go. The
Army had planned to dispatch the 1st Brigade next fall,
but could accelerate that.
-Send more elements of the Fort Drum,
N.Y.-based 10th Mountain Division, which has been tapped
extensively for Afghanistan and currently has some
soldiers in Iraq as well as Afghanistan.
-Take some troops from the main Army
force permanently stationed in South Korea - the 2nd
Infantry Division - and send them to Iraq. That would be
a radical step, because the soldiers in South Korea have
long been considered untouchable so long as communist
North Korea poses a threat.
-Use members of the 3rd Marine
Expeditionary Force, based on the Japanese island of
Okinawa, in Iraq, even though they normally are
considered reinforcements for Korea.
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