Iraq

[den]

There is something I don't understand about the US troops in Iraq. They all appear to be reservists. Why are reserves in a battle zone? Does the US Army have any regulars over there? If not, why?

All the Australian troops in Iraq are Regs; Army, Navy and Airforce. Their job is full-time Armed Services. The Reservists are part-timers; two weeks training a year and they hold down jobs and support their families.They're called up when the Regs are in trouble, not INSTEAD of the Regs.

Can anyone explain this to me?

Comments

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

The US military is one of the largest in the world, once you factor in the navy (which is absolutely tremendous by anyone's standards), and the air force. The army proper is something in the vicinity of 200,000 to 300,000 soldiers; I don't recall the exact number (someone else might be able to help out here).

Of those, about 100-140,000 are in Iraq, something like 30,000 are in Korea, I think 10,000 are in Afghanistan, and there's significant deployments in Japan in the range of several thousand as well. Right there you've got something like 150,000 to 190-200,000 of the soldiers, most of those being regular army.

If we assume a higher figure for the total - say, 250-300K for the army, that still means there's plenty left over, right? Well, it does on paper. Most of that remainder is either out on smaller deployments - Balkans, token UN ops around the world in dribs and drabs, etc - or just having returned from those or larger deployments. After a major deployment, like a tour in Iraq or, in the past, something like WWII or Vietnam, usually the soldier does one or so tours abroad. (They can do more, but it's usually by choice or extraordinary things.) After that they're usually cycled back home, doing US Army stuff stateside - either internal security, helping to train the next batch of soldiers, or just being paid off since they're near the end of their active term.

If you keep using only the regular army for that sort of thing, sooner or later you're going to burn out your soldiers, and the quality overall is going to drop. Rather than running the regular army into the ground, folks have decided to start using the reservists. This preserves the regulars by taking some of the pressure off them, and lets the reservists get more experience - which is good in a military sense, after all.

I think they should've been careful about having deployments get so high that this needed to be considered, but the reasoning makes sense even if it's a result of bad planning.