BAUMHOLDER, Germany — After several weeks of review, U.S. Army Europe said Friday that a company of 1st Armored Division, 2nd Brigade soldiers would deploy as scheduled in November, just nine months after returning from their last Iraq deployment.
However, Pentagon officials said the decision had not been given final approval.
If it deploys, Company A, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment will do so without the full 12-month dwell time called for under Army policy. The policy, adjusted in April by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, requires soldiers to deploy for 15 months instead of 12. That three-month extension is to be offset by a so-called dwell time of no less than a year.
USAREUR officials said Friday that Company A soldiers are expected to deploy as scheduled as part of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, based in Baumholder.
“The company is part of a brigade combat team put on order” to deploy, so the company is going to go, Bruce Anderson, a USAREUR spokesman said Friday.
But both Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, told reporters Friday that no one has asked permission to deploy the unit, and that this permission is specifically required before the soldiers can break dwell time.
“I have not been asked to approve a unit to go over with less than a year of dwell time,” Gates said when asked why he allowed an exception to be made to his 12-month policy for the company.
Told by a Stars and Stripes reporter that USAREUR has formally announced its decision, Pace, who was attending the news conference with his boss, replied, “the system is very precise about this.”
“Any unit that might go over with less than 12 months of dwell time will specifically be brought to the secretary,” Pace said.
“They will explain to him why, and will explain to him why there is nobody else possible to fill that spot. We have not yet done that,” Pace said.
For the soldiers of Company A, the fact that their situation was under review brought little hope that a potential delay in their deployment was in the works.
“It’s been assumed for a while,” said Spc. Jason Ammerman, who was among the Company A soldiers who returned from a 13-month deployment in February. “We got the short end of the stick. It’s a disappointment.”
While the rest of the 2nd BCT returned from Iraq in November, this company fell out of sync with the rest of the brigade in the fall of 2005 when it was kept behind to serve as an augmenting force for the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, based in Friedberg, Germany.
Defense officials were prompted to look into why the unit was not getting its full dwell time after a reader from Baumholder informed Stripes that the unit would be getting less than a full year at home.
USAREUR officials then asked the 2nd BCT to not deploy Company A — a unit of roughly 150 soldiers — with the rest of the brigade until the unit gets its full 12 months per Army policy, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said on May 11.
Later, Army officials said the matter was in the “analyzing stage” and was under review by the “whole chain of command,” from the 1st Armored Division to USAREUR to European Command.
On Friday, the Army explained its position this way: The dwell time issue “is a consideration,” for the company, Anderson said. But if the brigade combat teams deploys, Company A must go with it.
Stars and Stripes reporter Lisa Burgess contributed to this report.
