Being a good liberal veteran, I subscribe to the VoteVets.org newsletter. Upon checking my email first thing this morning, I noticed I had received an email from Peter Granato and our very own Brandon Friedman (aka The Angry Rakkasan). The email contained a brief on the highlights of a recent VoteVets.org meeting in DC and a referral to the website RestedAndReady.com.
I was surprised, and not pleasantly, by what I found when I clicked the link.
On its face everything at RestedAndReady.com looks great. The website promotes H.R. 3159, which is Representative Ellen Trauscher’s (D, CA-10) Military Readiness Through Stability and Predictability Act.
On the front page is a description of what this bill is designed to do:
Every day, we ask our troops to make heroic sacrifices -- yet as soon as they return we rush them back into battle. In fact, the President's surge has sent many of our Army units to Iraq for the second and third time -- without adequate rest or training. Army generals recommend that in times of war, our troops have two years away from combat after one year on the battlefield.
H.R. 3159 sets a bottom line: a minimum period of rest, recuperation and training between deployments to keep American troops at the ready.
This sounds great, right? Not when you actually read the bill, which you can do by clicking the "Read H.R. 3159" link on the right side of the front page.
AN ACT
To mandate minimum periods of rest and recuperation for units
and members of the regular and reserve components of the Armed
Forces between deployments for Operation Iraqi Freedom or
Operation Enduring Freedom.
Still sounds good. Well, this paragraph is a bit misleading as we see further down in the bill.
(2) Sense of congress on optimal minimum period between
deployments.—
It is the sense of Congress that the optimal minimum period
between the most recent previous deployment of a unit of the
Armed Forces specified in paragraph (3) and a subsequent
deployment of the unit in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom
should be equal to or longer than twice the period of such most
recent previous deployment.
What does this mean? A unit that deploys to Iraq for 15 months will be stabilized no less than 30 months before another deployment to Iraq. A unit who has returned from a 15 month deployment to Afghanistan could not be deployed to Iraq for at least 30 months.
However, the rest mandates would not apply to units deploying to Afghanistan after a previous deployment. A unit could deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, return and be deployed again to Afghanistan without any rest requirement.
This would nearly guarantee that a unit leaving Iraq would be deployed to Afghanistan within 12 months. The same is true for a unit just returning for Iraq. It seems that as the bill stands, it will hurt as many if not more Soldiers as it will help.
Please contact Rep. Trauscher, as well as your Congress-Critter, and request that Congress amend H.R. 3159 to mandate rest periods before any deployment into the CENTCOM area of operations, which includes 25 nations that stretch from the Horn of Africa through the Arabian Gulf region, into Central Asia.