Wars stretch Army and Marine Corps particularly thin

In mid-July, Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to Fort Drum near Watertown, N.Y., to meet with soldiers in the 10th Mountain Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team, which had recently returned from a year in Iraq. Gates wanted to thank the troops for their service and to hear their concerns. It's a practice he began months earlier after reconsidering his distaste for town hall meetings, which he felt tended to be staged events with soldiers serving as props.

"I realized that it was a chance mainly to thank you personally . . . to shake hands with each and every one of you," he told the troops.

But Gates will have to make more trips to Watertown if he's going to shake every battle-tested hand: The 2nd Brigade Combat Team was in Louisiana training for its return to Iraq this fall, and the 3rd Brigade Combat Team was in Afghanistan.

"No other division or post has been asked to do more," Gates acknowledged.

Fort Drum illustrates the stresses the military faces eight years after the first U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan and six years after the invasion of Iraq. The ground-intensive conflicts have been far more taxing on the Army and Marine Corps than the other services. The stress can be measured in casualty, divorce and suicide rates - all of which are trending upward. Nearly 200 10th Mountain Division soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; 11 others died in a helicopter crash during pre-deployment training in 2006.

The strain is evident in the questions the troops ask Gates. They want to know why some units are deployed over and over, while others are not. They want to know why units appear fully staffed on paper, when the soldiers in them know there are hundreds of unfilled positions, in part because so many of their comrades are recovering from combat wounds.

The questions are hard, and the answers are harder. "I don't think we can ever even out the deployments," Gates told the soldiers. "The truth of the matter is there's about a third of the Army that's never deployed at all. But that's just the way it is, frankly, given the different specialized capabilities of the different units."

When military planners looked at the four Army brigades scheduled to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan in late summer, they discovered the units were understaffed by 690 soldiers. Some vacancies were the result of the Army's decision to begin phasing out the stop-loss program that has forced thousands of soldiers to involuntarily remain on duty after they have completed their service obligations. Some soldiers were gone because they were attending mandatory professional training programs. But 156 vacancies were for medical reasons, including 75 soldiers with orthopedic problems and 39 with mental illnesses. The rate of medical exclusions has climbed since 2007.

Four days after his visit to Fort Drum, Gates announced that the Army would temporarily add another 22,000 soldiers. "The Army faces a period where its ability to continue to deploy combat units at acceptable fill rates is at risk," he said.

In the Sept. 1 issue of Government Executive, Katherine McIntire Peters explores the stresses the wars are placing on troops. Click here to read the full story.