During his presidential campaign, President Barack Obama promised to "Establish regularity in deployments: so that active duty and reserves know what they must expect, rather than the current trend of changing the deployment schedules after they have left home, which harms the morale of troops and their families."
As we explained in the last update, the administration has taken many steps towards making deployments more predictable for troops and families.
One of those steps was ending the "stop-loss" program, which forced troops to stay deployed for longer than their expected commitments. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced in May 2009 that he was ending the program, and he officially made good on that promise in June 2011, when he announced at a Senate hearing that "there are no Army soldiers stop-lossed."
The administration has also worked to standardize deployment time and dwell time for both active duty and reserve soldiers.
For soldiers, deployment and dwell times have become relatively standardized for almost all members, both active and reserve. In August 2011, Secretary of the Army John McHugh announced that beginning in January 2012, the Army would deploy most soldiers for only nine months, a decrease from previous 12-month deployments.
When it comes to the amount of time soldiers spend at home between deployments, the military has also made strides. In March 2011, U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Casey announced that, beginning in October 2011, members of the National Guard will spend four years at home between deployments. And in September 2011, the military announced that active duty members of the Army would spend two years at home between deployments. Both announcements represent significant improvements from only a few years ago.
Keith Weller, spokesman for the Reserve Officers Association, said that all of those achievements together have ultimately led to predictability in deployment. "Regularity has definitely been achieved," Weller said.
However, Weller noted a potentially harmful side effect of the achievement. Weller said that because of the regularity in deployments, employers now know exactly when reserve soldiers will be leaving for duty.
Weller said that this could lead to employer discrimination in determining who to hire and is one of the reasons why the unemployment rate – which stood at 13.3 percent in December 2011 for Iraq and Afghanistan-era veterans – remains so high.
Despite that consequence, the administration has nonetheless eliminated the stop-loss policy and has made deployments much more predictable for troops and their families. We rate this a Promise Kept.