WASHINGTON, April 6 (UPI) -- A third of the 12,000 National Guard soldiers alerted for 2008 Iraq duty had been deployed in the last two to four years, a defense official said.
The alert order will affect four brigade combat teams of about 3,000 soldiers each. Across the four-brigades, some two-thirds have not yet deployed to Iraq. About a third have deployed for up to 18 months in the last two to four years.
The Guard units are being notified almost a year in advance to allow time for training and to let soldiers make arrangements with their employers. The group is to be part of the regular planned rotation.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is trying to shift deployment schedules to prevent any National Guard soldiers from deploying more than once every six years, but the demand for troops in Iraq has been to great and the active-duty Army too small.
"My hope is that by moving to mobilization by units, limiting mobilization time for the reserve to a year and by adding to the end strength of the Army and the Marine Corps, that over a period of time we will be able to move to achieve those goals of one year at home, two at home, and one to five for the reserves," Gates said Thursday. "But I think we always anticipated and talked pretty clearly about the fact that there would be a transition time when ... there would be both extensions and violations of dwell policy, just because of the ... the magnitude of the commitments we have."
The process is further complicated by the Pentagon's decision in 2001 not to activate National Guard units but rather to use National Guard soldiers who volunteered as individual augmentees to deploying units. Because of restrictions on how often Guard soldiers can be deployed involuntarily, many Guard units would have to take personnel from other units in order to deploy to Iraq.
In January, Gates issued a new policy setting a one-year limit on Guard deployments, and reiterated the goal of deploying citizen-soldiers just once out of every six years.
