Bush’s Troop-Increase Plan Is Expected to Draw Six Guard Brigades to Iraq
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The increased demand on the National Guard in coming years is a likely byproduct of Mr. Bush’s decision, expected to be announced in a speech Wednesday night, to send five active-duty combat brigades, or about 20,000 troops, to Iraq, starting at the end of this month, according to current and former officials.
Two of those brigades are likely to be in place in Iraq by mid-February, with the rest flowing in one a month until May, according to a military official with access to a recent version of the plan. The Bush blueprint also envisions sending two additional Marine battalions to Anbar Province, as well as delaying the departure of 2,200 additional Marines now in the province.
In a governmentwide effort to expand the American commitment to Iraq, a program to operate Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq will be doubled and renamed as Provincial Support Teams, a senior administration official said Tuesday. Currently, the United States operates seven of these teams and allies operate three; the Bush plan will call for adding nine more. They will be staffed by personnel from across the government — the Departments of State, Defense, Agriculture and Justice — to help neighborhoods manage economic and political development, the official said.
It remains unclear whether Mr. Bush will discuss the heightened future demand on the National Guard during his much-anticipated address but identifying the additional units for possible deployment is likely to begin in the days and weeks after he delivers the speech. That process would raise the political stakes for Mr. Bush, since it would highlight the increased contribution his plan would require from reserve units.
The full extent of the National Guard role in future years will also depend on whether conditions in Iraq improve enough to permit significant overall troop reductions. Of the 15 combat brigades now in Iraq, only one is from the Guard. Depending on how it is organized, an Army brigade typically has between 3,500 and 5,000 troops, and a battalion about 1,200.
National Guard combat units that have already gone to Iraq and returned may have to be sent back for second tours in order to relieve some of the stress on the active duty Army, Pentagon officials said Tuesday. Such a move would most likely require revising a Pentagon policy that has limited mobilization of Guard units to 24 months every five years, officials said.
National Guard officials said Tuesday that they had not been notified that Mr. Bush would require a greater combat role for the Guard beginning next year. Guard officials have spent the last several months fighting attempts by some Army officials to have the 24-month deployment limit loosened.
But several Guard officials said Tuesday they would not be surprised to see Mr. Bush make changes in mobilization time limits so that Guard units would be eligible for duty in Iraq sooner.
Maj. Gen. Roger Lemke, the head of Nebraska National Guard and of the association that represents state Guard officials, said in an interview that many guard units were short of equipment and would need to be re-equipped to be useful in Iraq. He also said the Guard would like to shorten the predeployment training in the United States, and do more of it in the units’ home states to lessen the burden on their soldiers, who must leave civilian jobs to serve.
The first active-duty unit that are likely to move to Baghdad would be a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division now in Kuwait, Pentagon officials said Tuesday. The elite light infantry of the brigade is especially useful in urban operations.
Should Mr. Bush want other brigades to accelerate their arrival in Iraq, he then would look to a brigade of the Third Infantry Division, from Fort Stewart, Ga., that is already set to head for Iraq later this month but whose departure could be pushed up. The next brigade in line for Iraq is one from the First Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Tex., military officials said.
Pentagon and military officials said Tuesday that large and continued deployments in Iraq would put particular strain on those performing certain military tasks in the National Guard and Reserve, in particular military police, engineers, civil affairs, and transportation and trucking units. But efforts are under way to fill the need through volunteers from within the Guard and Reserve before resorting to forced remobilizations.
A range of senior Army officials have said since the autumn that the Iraq mission could not be sustained without fuller access to the reserves.
The question of how best to manage them presents the Bush administration with a political conundrum: how to balance the pressing need for troops in the field against promises to limit overseas deployments for the Guard.
While the National Guard’s goal is to guarantee five years at home between foreign deployments, it has been sending units every three to four years, according to Guard officials. The Guard and Reserve were used most extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004, and have regularly supplied brigades throughout the fighting.
Also presenting a problem is that many Guard members have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan as individuals, and not with their full units, and in that process have come close to fulfilling their 24 months under the president’s current mobilization order.
In what officers call “Swiss cheese units,” some military units have been hollowed out by members who could be off-limits for overseas duty, restricting the ability to send the entire team, unless the restrictions are reinterpreted or erased so that these individual members, who have already deployed, could be sent overseas again with their entire units.
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