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Guard chief backs deployment rotation plan

An Army proposal keeping soldiers at home for at least three years for every year deployed would ease the strain on the Army Guard’s deployment headaches, the Chief of the National Guard Bureau told reporters Monday at the Center for National Policy in Washington.

“[There is a] willingness by [Army Chief of Staff] Gen. [George] Casey to create a plan for soldiers to spend as much time as home as possible and still be willing to contribute to this era of conflict,” the Guard chief, Air Force Gen. Craig McKinley, said.

The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have rotations that give service members a clear timeline on when they would expect to deploy.

“If we can get on for predictable rotational model, we can pretty much do this indefinitely,” McKinley said.

The Guard and reserve were never designed to operate at a high operational tempo. Instead, they were designed to act as a bridge until a larger force could be drafted to fight major conflicts, McKinley said.

But the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the Army Guard to near its limit, he said.

Seventy-five percent of Guard members have full-time jobs. A yearlong deployment, with no predictable schedule, can wreak havoc with employers, McKinley said.

Reservists’ jobs are protected by federal laws that state they can’t be fired for being deployed.

The proposed Casey plan would put each active Army unit into four pools. One slot would be deployed or ready to deploy, while the other three would be in various states of readiness at their home bases. The Guard and reserve have worked on similar models, but with goals of four or five years at home between deployments.

Approval of the plan would depend on the Quadrennial Defense Review, Casey said Thursday in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.