Army prioritizing 37,000 GIs for first combat tours

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Army prioritizing 37,000 GIs for first combat tours

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Army is prioritizing 37,000 soldiers for assignment to units heading downrange after a records review showed that four in 10 on active duty have never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Many of the 40.6 percent of soldiers who have not gone downrange have valid reasons: They are in boot camp, assigned to units that are scheduled to Iraq or Afghanistan, or are not eligible to deploy.

But after scrutinizing Army personnel records, Human Resources Command officials in Alexandria, Va., have identified 37,000 soldiers who have yet to deploy and have no reason not to serve in combat.

Personnel officials “will prioritize these soldiers for assignment” to combat zones, Col. Louis Henkel, deputy director of the Enlisted Personnel Management Directorate at HRC, said in a Tuesday e-mail to a Stars and Stripes query.

Those orders might be for a soldier to report to a new brigade combat team or other unit that is deploying to combat zones, as an individual augmentee to fill an empty slot somewhere in a unit already deployed or for a military transition team, which advise and mentor members of the Afghan or Iraq military or police forces, Henkel said.

With no immediate end in sight to the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and multiple tours becoming the norm in many units, personnel officials at HRC decided to determine which active-duty troops have yet to go downrange, and why.


Rest of article at: http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=50594