COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
Sailors on the ground
Mark D. Faram, Navy Times
February 20, 2006
Thousands of sailors are gearing up for war, but they won't ride into battle on gray ships.At least they won't in this war.
Over the next six months, the Navy expects to order as many as 2,000 more sailors to war zones inside the Central Command area of operations.
The bulk of those sailors will head to Iraq or Afghanistan for six-month to one-year tours in an ever-increasing effort to help spell war-weary Army and Marine Corps units.
The new deployments, confirmed by Navy officials Feb. 7, would increase the number of sailors serving in CentCom ground-based operations to roughly 12,000.
"Over the coming months and into the summer, the Navy presence on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in theater will continue to grow and could reach as high as 10,000 to 12,000 sailors," Cmdr. John Kirby, spokesman for Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Mullen, said Feb. 7.
What this means for every sailor in the Navy, the Navy's top personnel admiral says, is clear: Be ready to deploy. Now.
This new mandate not only applies to sailors on sea duty - where deployments are expected - but also to those on shore duty who could get sent forward to help with the fight in Iraq or Afghanistan.
"There are no sidelines anymore," Vice Adm. John Harvey, the Navy's chief of personnel, told Navy Times in a Feb. 3 interview. "If you're wearing this uniform, you are on the front line of service."
That mandate not only includes active sailors, but also selective and individual ready reservists, any of whom could get a call or even volunteer to go.
This news comes as Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Mullen announced that the numbers of sailors on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq will increase from today's 4,000 to nearly 6,000 in a few months.
Stretch the picture to a theater-wide look and that number could increase to a total of 12,000 sailors serving in or near the war zones, including in Kuwait and Bahrain, as well as those involved in operations in the Horn of Africa.
Those numbers don't include sailors serving on ships moving in and out of the Central Command area of operations.
It also doesn't include thousands of sailors who have been plucked from their own service to support the war from joint jobs in Northern and Southern commands, as well as in Europe.
This ramp-up started last summer, when the Navy announced the creation of the riverine warfare units and expeditionary battalions that are part of the Navy's largest expeditionary posture since at least the Vietnam War, and possibly since World War II.
Be ready
To date, the Navy's presence on the ground in the war zones has been with traditional, pre-existing units that rotate in and out of the war zones as part of regular deployments.
These units, both active and reserve, have largely been groups of Seabees, SEALs, and coastal warfare and combat helicopter squadrons.
Also rotating in are medical personnel who normally are assigned to naval hospitals and whose billets require them to deploy as part of Marine Expeditionary Forces to man forward aid stations. In addition, medical personnel and chaplains and their support teams deploy with Marine units.
And officials say those deployments will continue. What is changing is that an increasing number of sailors not in deploying units are being tabbed as individual augmentees. These sailors are being pulled from commands throughout the service, many from shore-duty jobs. Officials say no one is immune from getting the call.
What is not clear is how many sailors are volunteering and how many are being told to deploy.
"We'd like to go with volunteers, and we have a way for [reservists] to indicate they want to volunteer," said Capt. Kathy Isgrig, who heads the Navy's efforts to fill these IA wartime jobs from her Pentagon office in Arlington, Va.
Harvey, the Navy's chief of personnel, said he plans to implement a reservelike system in the active component, where sailors can have their electronic record tagged if they want to volunteer.
But if volunteers can't be found for a position, some sailors will be sent involuntarily.
"The other thought out there is, anyone in a uniform is a volunteer," Isgrig said.
That's why, Harvey said, being able to deploy on a moment's notice could become a deciding factor in whether a sailor is allowed to re-enlist.
"Commanders need to know who is ready to go and who isn't," Harvey said. He plans to implement new procedures Navywide to determine who is deployment-ready and who is not.
Harvey said he realizes personal, family and medical issues can temporarily make it difficult or impossible to deploy a sailor, but when those issues consistently prevent a sailor from deploying, career problems could result.
Readiness for deployment "is going to become a condition of service. If we can't maintain you in a condition of readiness ... can you serve?"
Skills needed
The categories of sailors the Navy is sending continue to grow.
"There's an awful lot of skills these great sailors have that are directly applicable," Harvey said.
To date, those most likely to be sent to a war zone are sailors with medical, intelligence security and construction skills, Harvey said. Though in smaller numbers, officials said, administrative and supply types also are filling billets. "The requests I've seen have pretty much run the gamut of what the Navy is able to provide," Harvey said.
And the calls for help are not stopping, either.
Tops among roles that could increase is explosive ordnance disposal, which Harvey said is on the threshold of major participation in the counter-improvised explosive device task force being formed.
"The greatest threat to our troops over there right now is the IED, and the Navy has the best people in the world to deal with that [threat]," Harvey said, alluding to the fact that sailors train the other services in ordnance disposal at the Navy's school at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla.
"I've told the system to gear up and get ready, because we're going to support this."
But it's not just the EOD sailors who are going to get into the IED fight.
"I suspect we're going have a greater demand for our electronic warfare capability ... to help in this counter-IED fight," Harvey said.
Who's going
A majority of those called individually are being used as plug-ins for joint staff or task forces, and Isgrig's office is responsible for finding bodies as these requirements trickle in.
She's also responsible for finding a replacement for sailors at the end of their tours, too - meaning thousands more sailors will get called for duty in the future.
"Once we fill a requirement, we assume there will be the need to continue filling that requirement until we are told it no longer exists," Isgrig said.
But in the past year, a growing part of her job has also been using these IAs in provisional units created from scratch.
"If we've got an existing unit, the preference is to send an organized and existing unit, active or reserve, [versus] creating capability as we go along," Isgrig said.
But that dynamic is changing, and fast. Already, units of IAs have been formed, trained and deployed.
One such unit has just taken over guarding prisoners at Fort Suse, a prison in northern Iraq. Another example is the companies of sailors expected to take over guarding detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, at the end of the month.
"As we create those capabilities, they don't tend to be active or reserve; instead, they are total force mixes," Isgrig said.
She also said that in some cases, provisional units with members from more than one service are being created.
On the table are six more of these provisional units, called reconstruction teams, that will be sent to Afghanistan to help rebuild infrastructure in the region - work U.S. officials see as key for long-term survival of the fledgling democracy there.
Though each will be commanded by an active-duty post-command Navy commander, they will be joint units, Isgrig said. The units must contain some offensive combat capability such as infantry - not a sailor's normal area of expertise. Those traditional combat arms duties will continue to be handled by soldiers and Marines.
Sailors will stick to exercising skills they're best suited for.
"Where the Navy can help is filling in with combat support and combat service support roles," Isgrig said.
Like many defense officials, Harvey sees the war on terrorism as "a long war" in which the Navy's role is only going to increase.
That means these requirements aren't going away anytime soon, and more and more sailors will be getting the call to become "dirt sailors," as some are fond of calling themselves.
That's why Harvey believes the service will have to use more reservists in this effort, requiring not only changes in the Navy's practices, but also changes to laws.
"I've got the time to accomplish this change on my watch," Harvey said. "Clearly, it is something that we must do for the service in the long run."
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