Soldiers' time off hangs on war plan

WASHINGTON — The Army will have a harder time meeting a promise to give soldiers more time at home, if tens of thousands of additional troops are sent to Afghanistan, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said Monday.

Gen. Casey, at a joint press conference with Army Secretary John M. McHugh, said he still hopes to give soldiers two years at home for each year deployed by 2011 — a goal that has been in place for many months — but left open the possibility that events might overtake that objective.

"Do the math," he told reporters at the annual convention of the Association of the U.S. Army. "More troops makes it harder."

The demands on soldiers and their families from long, repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have been a constant since shortly after 9-11. Officials and lawmakers had hoped the drawdown in Iraq, plus expansion of the Army, would ease that strain enough to double the amount of time soldiers spend at home between overseas assignments.

The Army has made progress, Gen. Casey said, achieving its expansion to 547,000 active duty soldiers a year faster than originally planned. The service also is almost 90 percent of the way to completing the "modular" design of combat brigades that makes them more efficient, he said.

Still, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, reportedly is looking for as many as 40,000 additional troops. The White House has not indicated whether President Barack Obama is inclined to approve such a big increase, especially given the war's increasing unpopularity and unease among congressional Democrats.

Mr. McHugh, three weeks into his job at the Pentagon, said the measures he helped craft in Congress are helping the Army toward the goal of easing deployment strains, including "dwell time" at home.

"That's an objective we're working toward and making progress on," Mr. McHugh said.

The Army might have reached that goal earlier had Democrats' efforts to require it by law become reality. But Mr. McHugh and other Republicans pushed against the idea, saying the Pentagon needed to set its own timetable to achieve the goal based on military needs.

"There's no silver bullet" to solve those challenges, Mr. McHugh said Monday. And he repeated one of his positions when he was in Congress — that the so-called "stop loss" policy that keeps soldiers from ending their service on time should not be used as a long-term tool to manage the size of the force.

Asked how he would be handling the pressure to boost the U.S. presence in Afghanistan if he were still the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Mr. McHugh said he and colleagues would take a "holistic" approach and look at the options and alternatives available.

"I think what we'd be doing is what the president is doing," Mr. McHugh said.