The US Army is making plans to expand its active and reserve forces by 74,000 troops in four years instead of five to ease stress on the force, the service's secretary said Thursday.
Army Secretary Pete Geren said the plan was under discussion with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who favors adding troops more quickly to the army, which has shouldered the biggest burden of the war in Iraq.
"We concluded that we could expedite the growth by a year and that would help relieve stress on the force. And Secretary Gates has been supportive of the concept and we're working through the ... details," Geren told reporters.
In one of his first acts as defense secretary, Gates set in motion plans to increase the size of the active army to 547,000 by 2012 in large part by adding seven thousand troops a year over five years.
Geren said accelerating the army's growth by a year would cost an additional 2.7 to 2.8 billion dollars, and would require recruiting more than 80,000 troops a year.
"There are some who have expressed concerns that in this recruiting climate we wouldn't be able to accomplish. We believe that we could," he told defense reporters here.
Geren said another factor is the army's re-enlistment rates, which have remained high despite the stress of repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
A surge of some 30,000 US troops to Iraq this year forced the army to extend combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan to 15 months with just a year at home between deployments.
The service is stretched so tight it had to delay the deployment of a combat brigade in Germany to Iraq from December until March because one of its units otherwise would have had less than a year between deployments.
General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, said earlier this month that he plans to shrink the number of combat brigades in the country by five by mid-July.
Even so, Geren said it was not yet clear how much the force in Iraq must shrink before it reaches a sustainable level over the long term.
Even as the number of combat troops go down, the number of support troops and trainers could go up as the US military shifts to a new mission of training and supporting Iraqi security forces, he indicated.
"One of the issues that I think is still on the table, (is) if we do bring down the brigades will that require more or less soldiers that are serving outside the brigades, various types of training teams and support teams," he said.
"It's a mosaic of assignments over there that will determine what is sustainable," he said.
He said the mix of forces is up to Petraeus.
But the levels of combat troops versus support forces "don't necessarily move in tandem -- one could go up and the other could go down," he said.
"I think it's important as we think about the demand on the resources of the army we have to recognize the possibility that we could have them move in different directions," he said.
Geren said the active duty army was on track to grow to 519,000 this year.
The 74,000 troop increase that Geren referred to included an immediate permanent increase of 30,000 troops in the army's authorized endstrength from 482,400; 35,000 active duty troops to be added over five years; and 9,000 national guard and reserve troops to be added by 2013.
