ARLINGTON, Va. — The Navy plans to ease sailors into future individual augmentee assignments instead of plucking them from their regular assignments before their tour is complete.
Individual augmentees are both active-duty and Reserve component sailors who are sent to fill billets in support of ground forces. Their duties include guarding detainees, providing medical support and going on convoys.
Currently, about 3,950 such sailors are serving in Iraq and about 1,040 are in Afghanistan, according to the Navy.
Until now, sailors could be assigned IA duty at any point in their career, meaning they could be pulled out of their assignment midtour to fill billets in support of ground troops, said Cmdr. Jim Simpson, of Task Force Individual Augmentee.
The billets are known as global war on terrorism support assignments, or GSAs, said Simpson in an e-mail.
Now the Navy wants to select sailors to fill such billets when they are at the end of their tours and talking to their detailers about their next permanent-change-of-station move, he said.
“As GSA billets are transitioned to the detailers, pulling sailors midtour will become the exception and not the rule,” he said. “Once the members have executed their orders, it will be unlikely they will be ordered to a GSA assignment until they have completed that tour.”
The Navy has begun to move 1,200 GSA billets into the detailing process, Simpson said. The billets, which will become open between September and March 2008, account for one-third of the Navy’s current active-duty IA requirements.
This is the first phase of the Navy’s plan to make IA duty part of sailors’ career plans, he said.
“We will incorporate the lessons learned into our plan to implement phases two and three,” Simpson said.
The move will make it easier for sailors to volunteer for IA duty because the Navy plans to publish open GSA billets along with sea and shore billets, he said.
“And we’ll be confident we are getting the best possible match between the needs of the Navy and the wants and needs of the sailor,” Simpson said.
Simpson said all personnel should not expect to pull IA duty, but that sailors in ratings and designators that are important to the war on terrorism are more likely to fill GSA billets.
The Navy also expects to continue to be asked to provide sailors as individual augmentees who have expertise in other areas including supply, intelligence, medical, information technology and electronic warfare, Simpson said.
