Restore 24-month limit on cumulative Guard and Reserve deployment time

No restoration yet for cumulative limits on Reserve, Guard deployments

Updated: Thursday, January 14th, 2010 | By Louis Jacobson

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to "restore the 24-month limit on cumulative deployment time" for members of the Reserves and National Guard.

The 24-month limit on cumulative (or lifetime) deployment had been lifted under President George W. Bush in January 2007. After that was announced, some worried that fatigue from long and arduous deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan could lead to high attrition rates among reservists and Guard members, as well as difficulty recruiting newcomers.

But despite taking several steps to ease the burden on reservists and National Guard members (Promise 141 and Promise 142), the administration has done nothing to restore the 24-month cap on lifetime deployment.

"There is no longer a 24-month lifetime limit on deployment, but each mobilization of National Guard and Reserve troops is now capped at 12 months," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a Jan. 28, 2009, news release. Before the 2007 decision was made, troops could be on duty for up to 24 consecutive months.

So, while the Obama administration has acted to scale back the frequency of deployments for the Reserves and National Guard, as noted in the other two promises we rated, it has not done anything to advance the president's specific promise to reimpose a cumulative service limit. So we rate this promise Stalled.

Sources:

Associated Press, "Pentagon Ends Active Duty Limits on Guard, Reserve Troops," Jan. 12, 2007

U.S. Army, "Gates: Guard's domestic missions must not suffer" (news release), Jan. 28, 2009

Interview with Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former assistant secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan, Jan. 14, 2010