Thousands of soldiers unfit for war
David Wood, Chief Military Correspondent
THOUSANDS OF U.S. SOLDIERS HAVE BEEN DEEMED UNFIT FOR WAR, by David Wood
AFGHANISTAN – More than 13,000 active-duty Army soldiers — the equivalent of four combat brigades — are sidelined as unfit for war because of injury, illness or mental stress. In an unmistakable sign that the Army is struggling with exhaustion after nine years of fighting, combat commanders whose units are headed to Afghanistan increasingly choose to leave behind soldiers who can no longer perform, putting additional strain on those who still can.
The growing pool of “non-deployable” soldiers make up roughly 10 percent of the 116,423 active-duty soldiers currently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands more Army reservists and National Guard soldiers are also considered unfit to deploy, a growing burden on an Army that has sworn to care for them as long as needed. “These 13,000 soldiers, that number’s not going to go away,” said Brig. Gen. Gary Cheek, who heads the Army’s Warrior Transition Command, which oversees the treatment and disposition of unfit soldiers. “If anything, it’s going to get larger as the Army continues the tempo it’s on.
“This is an Army at war.” Among these “non-deployable” soldiers are those recuperating from combat wounds, some severe, and various forms of brain injury. Far more numerous are soldiers with non-battle conditions, including cases of coronary disease, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, acute anxiety, kidney disease, leukemia, chronic back pain and dozens of other maladies. Sometimes, these cases are complicated by drug or alcohol abuse, according to senior Army officers and internal Pentagon documents.
The Army is struggling to diagnose and treat this huge pool of unfit soldiers, helping to enable those with the desire and ability to return to their units, and assisting others to transition into civilian life. But more soldiers are pouring into the pool than are going out, leaving the Army scrambling to house, supervise and treat them. “We are seeing the cumulative effects of years of war — and they are cumulative, the physical and the mental,” said Gen. George Casey, Army chief of staff. With the growing number of unfit soldiers, the Army has been forced to send into combat units manned “at less than 90 percent,” Casey told reporters in May.
“That is not a good place to be,” he said. Even with the manpower shortage, combat commanders increasingly are casting off soldiers who have physical or mental health issues, drug or alcohol problems or a history of bad behavior, Army officials said. The number of soldiers left home by combat units has doubled since 2007, to an average of 135 for each deploying brigade combat team of about 3,500 soldiers, the Army acknowledged. Three years ago an average of 67 soldiers per brigade were being left behind. Deploying combat units are also leaving behind soldiers who are disciplinary problems at a rate 43 percent higher than in 2007, according to Army data.
About 5,000 of the 13,000 troops have serious medical and mental problems. They have been detached from their combat brigades and housed in the Army’s Warrior Transition Units. Established in 2007 to care for battle wounded, these units are instead filled mostly with non-battle wounded troops. The other 8,000 non-deployable soldiers are simply left behind under the nominal care of their combat brigade’s rear detachment, which has neither the time nor the expertise to supervise soldiers struggling with behavioral or health problems or other issues, Army officers said.
Within this population of 13,000 unfit troops are genuine combat wounded soldiers — about 10 percent — as well as those who have fallen ill on deployment, or succumbed to chronic knee or back problems exacerbated over three- or four-year-long combat tours. But non-deployables also include some who are faking combat stress to win lucrative compensation and a fast ticket out of the Army, according to senior Army officers and senior NCOs who work in Wounded Warrior units. Other soldiers, senior officers acknowledge, should never have been allowed into the Army in the first place because they have chronic physical or mental problems not discovered when they were recruited, or because they are ill-suited to military life.
“In all honesty, a lot of our unit commanders have found a lot of guys that they perhaps didn’t want to take with them” to combat, said Cheek, an artillery officer educated at West Point and who won a Bronze Star during a combat tour in Afghanistan. “There are probably some commanders who … probably transferred some guys that maybe should have had disciplinary actions taken” against them.
David Wood writes about war for Politics Daily. In 30 years of covering conflict, he has filed dispatches from dozens of battlefields (alphabetically, from Afghanistan to Zambia) and has embedded many times with U.S. Army and Marine Corps units as well as with guerrillas and brigands in Africa. This article was originally published on Politics Daily.