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thedrifter
07-16-07, 08:00 AM
Commandant talks deployments, cammie policy
By Kimberly Johnson - kjohnson@militarytimes.com
Posted : July 23, 2007

TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. — The Corps is pushing back against pressure from other services to extend combat deployments in Iraq, the commandant told Marine families July 9.

Pressure to extend the already yearlong tours of individual Marine augmentees in Iraq is mounting in the wake of the Army’s recent decision to extend its combat tours from 12 to 15 months, Commandant Gen. James Conway said during a town hall meeting at Camp Pendleton, Calif.

“I’m sorry, we’re not going to do that. We are not going to a longer cycle,” he said. “We’ve had some reverse pressure on us to justify seven months when the Army is going to 15.”

Over a protracted period, however, the time deployed is about the same, he explained. In the span of 27 months, a soldier will have been deployed 15 months. The 15-month deployment is aimed at ensuring soldiers have 12 months at home, Conway said.

However, Marines are averaging about seven months home between their seven-month deployments, totaling about 14 months deployed out of 28 months, he said. Most Marines at the battalion level and below deploy for seven months, while a small number of leathernecks at the group or regimental level pull yearlong tours.

Conway, who was on a West Coast tour of Marine bases, reiterated that the ongoing increase to the Corps’ end strength— which will bring the force up to 202,000 Marines by 2011 — will go a long way toward stretching time between deployments from seven months to his goal of 14 months.

However, the current combat tempo is affecting the Corps’ ability to respond to other situations, Conway said later in the day when he met with Marine families at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.

“There is a 3,500-person requirement for police training in Afghanistan,” Conway said. “We’ve basically put that one on hold saying that is too large. We can’t manage that right now with everything else that’s going on.”

Also during his tour, Conway told Marine Corps Times that the Corps will soon issue a more strict policy for wearing the combat utility uniform to counter what he said is a hodgepodge approach from local bases.

“We’re going to try to get uniformity across the Corps,” he said. “I want it to be more controlled than what we see right now where a lot of those things are decided on a local level and what you get is a lack of uniformity,” he said.

The Corps has been in a transition period with uniform standards since digital cammies hit the fleet in late 2002, he said.

“We’ve done that long enough now that I think we can come out with a policy that talks to uniformity,” Conway said.

That’s not the case now, he said. “If you look closely, you didn’t see that [uniformity], there was disparity. Sleeves up, sleeves down, greens, the desert, and so forth.”

While aiming for mirror-image Marines, the new policy will also offer leeway, Conway said. “We’ll give some waiver authority to commanding generals. Maybe we’ll need to have sleeves down at Twentynine Palms because of the heat and the protection,” or at a joint command, such as U.S. Central Command, where desert cammies are worn year-round, he added.

The new policy will regulate when during the year Marines would wear the woodland and desert patterns, he said.

“If that would go against CentCom policy, we could probably issue a waiver on that,” Conway said.

Ellie