WASHINGTON – The Pentagon on Monday delayed for six weeks the return home of about 4,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq’s volatile Anbar province – the second extension of U.S. forces in Iraq in two months – as the insurgency and rising sectarian violence exert heavier demands on a stretched American ground force.
A brigade of the Army’s 1st Armored Division, operating in Anbar’s contested capital of Ramadi, has been ordered to stay on for 46 more days. Another brigade – from the 1st Cavalry Division based at Fort Hood, Texas – will depart a month early, in late October, for a year of combat duty in Iraq.
“There’s no question but that any time there’s a war, the forces of the countries involved are asked to do a great deal,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said when asked about the troop decisions at the Pentagon Monday.
According to a Pentagon announcement, the shift is necessary to “maintain the current force structure in Iraq into the spring of next year.” That confirms an assessment last week by Gen. John Abizaid, the senior U.S. commander in the Middle East, that no cuts in the more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are likely before the spring of 2007.
In this case, commanders had to choose between extending thousands of U.S. troops serving in one of Iraq’s deadliest cities – the 1st Armored Division brigade in Ramadi – or requiring another combat-hardened unit that has already served two tours in Iraq, a brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, to return to the desert after less than a year at home. They opted for the former.
In July, the Pentagon extended the Iraq tour of the 172nd Stryker Brigade, based at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, for about four months.
The Army set a goal in 2003 of allowing active-duty soldiers to spend two years at home for every year overseas. But that aim has proved elusive because of the limited number of active-duty combat brigades available to deploy – currently 36 – as well as the continued high troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 20,000 U.S. troops are now serving in Afghanistan.
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