The number of U. In Afghanistan, the Obama administration announced plans to withdraw 10, troops by the end of the year and 23, more by September The move to shorter combat tours, which was immediately cheered by many soldiers and their families, represents one of the Pentagon's strongest moves to date to ease the strains on the over-stretched military after a decade of nearly continuous conflict.
Year-long tours had largely been in keeping with the military's historical norms-soldiers serving during the Vietnam War typically deployed for 12 months-but troops fighting in earlier conflicts rarely had to do more than one or possibly two overseas tours. That has not been the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, where many soldiers, particularly from Army infantry and aviation units, have done three, four, and in some cases five lengthy tours in the war zone. Some soldiers have done even lengthier tours: during the height of the Iraq War, combat troops did month deployments to the country.
Senior Army officials believe the grueling length of those deployments led large numbers of troops to retire early. The former system had also been deeply unpopular within the military because soldiers complained that they were separated from their families for far more than the official lengths of their tours.
Troops bound for Iraq or Afghanistan undergo months of training inside the United States before deploying. In practical terms, that means a month tour in Afghanistan actually involved at least 14 months away from home, while an ostensibly month tour in Iraq actually kept soldiers separated from their families for more than a year and a half. The new move comes as senior Army officials work to fully eradicate a second hated policy, the so-called "stop-loss" system that prevented troops from leaving the military even after their enlistments ended.
At its peak, the policy impacted tens of thousands of troops, leading Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. The Pentagon began phasing the system out in and hopes to eliminate it completely later this year. When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information.
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The Eagles Nest - Nov. Prep Sports Blitz - Nov. The Special Operations world is the most secretive and insular component of the military.
The Pentagon maintains several units and taskforces whose work - typically hunter-killer missions designed to track and eliminate militants around the globe--is so secretive that Washington won't disclose their names or formally acknowledge their existence.
Despite that customary veil of secrecy, however, the non-stop deployments are raising alarms throughout the Pentagon. Top officials from the U. Special Operations Command, which oversee the elite troops, have been increasingly vocal about their concerns that the highly-trained forces are beginning to buckle under the strain of such request-deployments to war zones around the world.
In February, for instance, Adm. Eric Olson, the then-commander of SOCOM, warned that his forces were "beginning to show some fraying around the edges. Dwight Eisenhower sent a letter of reprimand to Patton, who had hit crying soldiers on more than one occasion, writes F.
Attempts have increased to understand war trauma and to use psychiatry to pinpoint which troops will suffer inordinately from what they have seen and done, but they remain primitive, military officials say. Smith recalls doing screenings for Antarctica missions. The bottom line is that war is a gruesomely powerful and ultimately unwieldy force that has the capacity to change the people who fight it in ways large, small, or negligible — but nearly always unpredictable. It is a frustration echoed by Gen.
Chiarelli, now chief executive officer for One Mind for Research, is pushing for collaborative research that he hopes will ultimately help troops who have been fighting the longest wars in American history. For now, however, the tools remain limited. Already a subscriber? Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in.
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