Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
NPR
April 7, 2008
Morning Edition (NPR), 11:00 AM
STEVE INSKEEP: Few people listen more closely to the words of Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus than soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Those words could directly affect the soldiers' lives. These are troops that are deployed repeatedly to Iraq or Afghanistan. They're struggling from family separation and they are wondering when more troops will come home.
NPR's Tom Bowman traveled to Fort Bragg with the Pentagon's top military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen.
Unidentified Man #1: Please, let's give a warm Fort Bragg (unintelligible) Air Force Base welcome to the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.
(Soundbite of applause)
TOM BOWMAN: Mullen strides into a small theater on base. His back is to a semi-circle of state flags. Before him sit hundreds of young soldiers and airmen. It's not long before one soldier grabs the mike and gets to the big question on everyone's mind - 15 month tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's up from the traditional 12 month Army tour.
Unidentified Man #2: And I was just wondering if that's becoming the new standard as long as we are in the Middle East, or are we actually going to revert back to 12 month tours and so forth?
BOWMAN: Mullen has his standard answer.
ADMIRAL MIKE MULLEN, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: I have been very public for many months now that we need to get off of 15 month deployments as fast as we can. Not my decision - that's a decision for secretary of defense and the president.
BOWMAN: Mullen and other senior officers hope that decision will come soon, to reduce these deployments. But they caution that the next step, bringing more troops home, depends on conditions on the ground in Iraq. These soldiers at Fort Bragg know the recent fighting in Basra shows the country is a long way from peace.
SGT. MICHAEL LAYO(ph) (U.S. Army): I've been here for four years and I've been deployed twice already.
BOWMAN: Sergeant Michael Layo stood outside the theater and talked to reporters. It tears at him to leave his wife and two children.
LAYO: I have a seven-year-old and a ten-year-old and - excuse me - you know, just hearing them on the phone when you're over there and then the look in their eyes when you have to tell them you're going again.
BOWMAN: Layo and many of his fellow soldiers will be going again for at least a year's tour with no end in sight. It's likely the next president will inherit about 140,000 troops in Iraq. That's more than the American invasion force in 2003. So top officers are wondering what the continuing wars mean for the future of the all-volunteer army, especially the quality of the force.
Many stellar candidates aren't enlisting. Parents and coaches are against it, so the Army is bringing in more lower-quality recruits - more without high school diplomas, more with waivers for criminal offenses. Experienced sergeants are leaving.
Sergeant Kingston Dillard plans on staying but his wife is a sergeant who may leave the Army and, he says, their marriage.
SGT. KINGSTON DILLARD (U.S. Army): We've separated. Because of all the time we've spent apart, we've decided to go through, like, a trial separation, because we've been thinking about splitting. I mean, not saying we don't like each other; just all that time apart, we've kind of, you know, gone apart.
BOWMAN: Pentagon officials say they have not seen a spike in divorces yet, but they are seeing an increase in the number of captains leaving too. Captains are sort of the junior executives of the army, the future generals.
COL. LENNY WONG (U.S. Army, Retired): The people who are leaving are those with the highest potential.
BOWMAN: Lenny Wong is a retired colonel and a researcher at the Army War College.
WONG: Those who came from West Point, those who went to the top tier schools, those who were the highest distinguished military graduates from their ROTC programs, those are the people with the highest potential inside the Army but also outside the Army.
BOWMAN: That means they can easily find top-notch civilian jobs. But Wong and others say their departure will eventually degrade the Army senior officer corps.
WONG: What it means for the future is that we might look around 15 years from now and say, so where is the next Petraeus? What happened to the Army?
BOWMAN: The Army senior officer, General George Casey, also worries about the future, and talks about crossing a red line with the Army, sort of like that danger line on a dashboard gauge.
He says the continued stress of large numbers of deployments could eat away at the Army, taking a decade or more to rebuild the force. The same thing happened after the Vietnam War. Admiral Mullen agrees the Army is edging closer to that red line.
MULLEN: First of all, we don't want to cross it, not exactly sure where it is. I don't think we're standing right in front of it, but I don't think it's out there at infinity either.
BOWMAN: The challenge now, says Mullen, is how to move away from that red line. Tom Bowman, NPR News.
April 7, 2008
Morning Edition (NPR), 11:00 AM
STEVE INSKEEP: Few people listen more closely to the words of Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus than soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Those words could directly affect the soldiers' lives. These are troops that are deployed repeatedly to Iraq or Afghanistan. They're struggling from family separation and they are wondering when more troops will come home.
NPR's Tom Bowman traveled to Fort Bragg with the Pentagon's top military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen.
Unidentified Man #1: Please, let's give a warm Fort Bragg (unintelligible) Air Force Base welcome to the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.
(Soundbite of applause)
TOM BOWMAN: Mullen strides into a small theater on base. His back is to a semi-circle of state flags. Before him sit hundreds of young soldiers and airmen. It's not long before one soldier grabs the mike and gets to the big question on everyone's mind - 15 month tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's up from the traditional 12 month Army tour.
Unidentified Man #2: And I was just wondering if that's becoming the new standard as long as we are in the Middle East, or are we actually going to revert back to 12 month tours and so forth?
BOWMAN: Mullen has his standard answer.
ADMIRAL MIKE MULLEN, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: I have been very public for many months now that we need to get off of 15 month deployments as fast as we can. Not my decision - that's a decision for secretary of defense and the president.
BOWMAN: Mullen and other senior officers hope that decision will come soon, to reduce these deployments. But they caution that the next step, bringing more troops home, depends on conditions on the ground in Iraq. These soldiers at Fort Bragg know the recent fighting in Basra shows the country is a long way from peace.
SGT. MICHAEL LAYO(ph) (U.S. Army): I've been here for four years and I've been deployed twice already.
BOWMAN: Sergeant Michael Layo stood outside the theater and talked to reporters. It tears at him to leave his wife and two children.
LAYO: I have a seven-year-old and a ten-year-old and - excuse me - you know, just hearing them on the phone when you're over there and then the look in their eyes when you have to tell them you're going again.
BOWMAN: Layo and many of his fellow soldiers will be going again for at least a year's tour with no end in sight. It's likely the next president will inherit about 140,000 troops in Iraq. That's more than the American invasion force in 2003. So top officers are wondering what the continuing wars mean for the future of the all-volunteer army, especially the quality of the force.
Many stellar candidates aren't enlisting. Parents and coaches are against it, so the Army is bringing in more lower-quality recruits - more without high school diplomas, more with waivers for criminal offenses. Experienced sergeants are leaving.
Sergeant Kingston Dillard plans on staying but his wife is a sergeant who may leave the Army and, he says, their marriage.
SGT. KINGSTON DILLARD (U.S. Army): We've separated. Because of all the time we've spent apart, we've decided to go through, like, a trial separation, because we've been thinking about splitting. I mean, not saying we don't like each other; just all that time apart, we've kind of, you know, gone apart.
BOWMAN: Pentagon officials say they have not seen a spike in divorces yet, but they are seeing an increase in the number of captains leaving too. Captains are sort of the junior executives of the army, the future generals.
COL. LENNY WONG (U.S. Army, Retired): The people who are leaving are those with the highest potential.
BOWMAN: Lenny Wong is a retired colonel and a researcher at the Army War College.
WONG: Those who came from West Point, those who went to the top tier schools, those who were the highest distinguished military graduates from their ROTC programs, those are the people with the highest potential inside the Army but also outside the Army.
BOWMAN: That means they can easily find top-notch civilian jobs. But Wong and others say their departure will eventually degrade the Army senior officer corps.
WONG: What it means for the future is that we might look around 15 years from now and say, so where is the next Petraeus? What happened to the Army?
BOWMAN: The Army senior officer, General George Casey, also worries about the future, and talks about crossing a red line with the Army, sort of like that danger line on a dashboard gauge.
He says the continued stress of large numbers of deployments could eat away at the Army, taking a decade or more to rebuild the force. The same thing happened after the Vietnam War. Admiral Mullen agrees the Army is edging closer to that red line.
MULLEN: First of all, we don't want to cross it, not exactly sure where it is. I don't think we're standing right in front of it, but I don't think it's out there at infinity either.
BOWMAN: The challenge now, says Mullen, is how to move away from that red line. Tom Bowman, NPR News.