Call of Cthulhu

Update on Guard Deployments

I've been receiving comments and emails about the bleak picture I painted in this post: Unanimously, I've been told that my picture isn't bleak enough.

The problem is that the troop strengths of combat units (ie, trigger-pullers; not MP's, medics, et al) are difficult to guage, and here is why:

An Infantry Squad usually consists of 12 men. That number fluctuates a bit after deducting sick/injured personnel that have yet to be replaced, a variable that is impossible to know, so not taken into account here.

An Infantry Platoon consists of three or four Squads, and a Platoon Leader and Platoon NCO. Sometimes there is also a Platoon-level Heavy Weapons Team (60mm or 81mm mortar, AT-4, etc) that may have 2-6 men per weapon(s).

An Infantry Company has three or four Platoons, a Company HQ with a variable number of men, and often a Company Fire Support Team (Mortars, Javelins, MPAD Teams and/or additional HMG teams). There may or may not be a motor transport section and/or an AD section assigned to the Company as well.

As you can see, the larger the unit, the harder it is to guage its actual manpower.

To make matters more hazy, an Armored Platoon consists of four tanks with four men each, including both the Platoon Leader and Platoon NCO, approximately half the personnel of an Infantry Platoon. With Armored Cavalry, you have four tanks, two Bradleys, and two Mechanized mortar carriers and/or ITV's. You may or may not also have a FISTV or other supporting vehicle. The crew-counts on these vehicles vary, especially the Bradleys, which could mount anything from Heavy Infantry to small Scout Sections. You also get a bit of variability with Mechanized Infantry. All this assumes, of course, that the tracks are all present and working (something I'm told is rare among mechanized units).

When running through the DoD .pdf, I had to do a lot of averaging to figure out how many people were actually in any given unit--and that averaging came out to be wildly more than the 40K given in the WaPo article that I had quoted. And while the WaPo article doesn't specifically state that these 40K are all combat units, it is an easy assumption to make: 99% of the Reserve is dedicated to support, logistics, and/or combat support. 52% of the Guard is made up of combat units--more than half of the Army's total fighting strength. In short, if you activate the Guard, it isn't to drive a truck.

The DoD .pdf says that there are 143,714 Guard/Reserve personnel currently deployed to Iraq. The Reserve has exactly NO ground combat units in Iraq (the 100^th Infantry Battalion is scattered over the Pacific right now). The same .pdf makes no numerical distinction between combat units and combat support units. You can read which units have been deployed, and make a guess about their size based on their name, but that's about it.

Then there is this: Guard units that are returning from deployment have a period of time where they are standing-down, when they are unavailable for further deployment. I don't know how long that period is (I think it's as much as three months) and so I couldn't factor that in to the total Guard deployment count. The DoD .pdf didn't make any distiction between any of the three deployment types: Whether they were gearing up, already in Iraq, or standing-down. For all I know, they may only have been counting "boots on ground" (and if that's the case, then my tally of trigger-pullers deployed was very rosy by comparison).

To summarize, I initially said that 44% of the Guard's combat units are already deployed. I am told by people in the Guard that that number is probably too low. A harrowing thought indeed.

If anyone who knows about the real timescale of Guard rotations and actual unit manpower could look over this .pdf and fill in the blanks for me, I'd greatly appreciate it. Until then, I'm telling my friends of Draft age (18-26) to dust-off their passports and start looking for countries that don't have extradition treaties with the US (you can forget Canada, btw).