Frederick Kagan: Webb's dangerous amendment on troop deployments
Jim Webb, the loquacious freshman senator from Virginia, is again proposing an amendment that would mandate a certain amount of time that soldiers must spend at home between deployments. At first glance, supporting this amendment looks like supporting motherhood and apple pie — Webb's stated aim is to take care of America's soldiers at war, and who could possibly object to that? The amendment, furthermore, gives the president the right to waive the requirement "if the President certifies to Congress that the deployment…is necessary to meet an operational emergency posing a threat to vital national security interests of the United States." So voting for this amendment is really just a way to show that you really care about the troops without actually tying the commanders' hands, right? Wrong.
The amendment as offered earlier this summer (when it garnered 56 votes in the Senate) would present a nightmare in execution. It specified not only that a particular unit had to spend basically a day at home for every day it spent deployed, but that every member of the armed forces had to receive such "dwell time," as the period between deployments is called. The problem is that when a unit returns from a deployment, its personnel are often reassigned to other units and other assignments. Brigades don't stay together forever. So this amendment would actually require the Army and Marine Corps staffs to keep track of how long every individual servicemember had spent in either Iraq or Afghanistan, how long they had been at home, how long the unit that they were now in had spent deployed, and how long it had been home, and somehow find units to deploy that had been home for the specified time and all of whose personnel had also been home for the required period. Since that would be patently absurd, the alternative would be to pull people out of units that were going to deploy if those individuals did not have enough "dwell time," breaking up leadership and soldier teams the formation of which is the express purpose of the Army and Marine training system. Requiring the president to issue a certification to Congress to waive this requirement for every individual soldier who might be affected is even more absurd....
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The amendment as offered earlier this summer (when it garnered 56 votes in the Senate) would present a nightmare in execution. It specified not only that a particular unit had to spend basically a day at home for every day it spent deployed, but that every member of the armed forces had to receive such "dwell time," as the period between deployments is called. The problem is that when a unit returns from a deployment, its personnel are often reassigned to other units and other assignments. Brigades don't stay together forever. So this amendment would actually require the Army and Marine Corps staffs to keep track of how long every individual servicemember had spent in either Iraq or Afghanistan, how long they had been at home, how long the unit that they were now in had spent deployed, and how long it had been home, and somehow find units to deploy that had been home for the specified time and all of whose personnel had also been home for the required period. Since that would be patently absurd, the alternative would be to pull people out of units that were going to deploy if those individuals did not have enough "dwell time," breaking up leadership and soldier teams the formation of which is the express purpose of the Army and Marine training system. Requiring the president to issue a certification to Congress to waive this requirement for every individual soldier who might be affected is even more absurd....