By Terri Moon Cronk DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, Feb. 18, 2018 — The Defense Department has a
“higher expectation” of deployability by its forces, Defense Secretary James N.
Mattis said yesterday.
Speaking with reporters on a return flight from Germany to
Washington, the secretary said the undersecretary of defense for personnel and
readiness last week defined a problem that initially was brought to his
attention by the Army, where “many non-deployables were on their rolls.”
Aside from combat-injured personnel who are in a separate
category, Mattis said, the issue concerns service members “who are, just for
one reason or another, not able to deploy with their units. It was a
significant number, and the Army brought their concerns forward. The other
services also highlighted [their] concerns.”
New Policy
DoD’s office of personnel and readiness has “come out with a
policy that if you're not deployable for a year or more, you're going to have
to go somewhere else,” he said.
As an example, Mattis said, if 10,000 troops out of 100,000
are not deployable, that means 90,000 deploy more often to meet the same
deployment standard.
“That's unfair,” he said.
The secretary talked about a service member who is on his
sixth deployment in 11 years.
“When that sort of thing happens, that brings sharply into
focus that some people are carrying more than the share of the load that I want
them to carry,” he said.
“They need time at home,” Mattis emphasized. “They need time
with their families. We may enlist solders, [but] we re-enlist families. That's
the way it is. If you can't keep the family together, then you're either going
to lose the family or you're going to lose the soldiers, and that's a net loss
for our society and for our military. [We] put a lot of training into people
nowadays. So that policy is now out.”
Military Must Be Deployable
The secretary said as he reviewed the services’ policies,
they were already strong enough, “so some of this may simply be more adherence
to the current policy that we have; some of it may require an effort within the
DoD, the Office of Secretary of Defense policy, that we put out for the
department now,” he added.
“But the bottom line is, we expect everyone to carry their
share of the load,” the secretary said, adding, “and sometimes things happen.
People bust their legs in training or they're in a car accident. We understand
that.”
But DoD comprises a deployable military, which is a lethal
military that aligns with its allies and partners, he said.
“If you can't go overseas [and] carry a combat load, then
obviously someone else has got to go. I want this spread fairly and equitably
across the force.”
The only exemption is for those who have been injured in
combat, he noted.
“If they were wounded in combat, and they want to stay in
and they've lost their leg or something like this, and they can't be a paratrooper
anymore, then we'll find a place to use them. That's a special category.
They've earned that special status,” Mattis said.
“Otherwise, you're either deployable, or you need to find
something else to do. I'm not going to have some people deploying constantly,
and then other people who seem to not pay that price to be in the U.S.
military,” he said.
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