Today's news report that the Pentagon will be sending deployment orders to at least four National Guard brigades for their second combat tour in Iraq is raising a good chunk of noise. However this really is not new news. I wrote about the preperation orders for the four brigades from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Indiana and Ohio in February and this was widely reported at the time.
Preparation orders are the last step in the normal process of activating a unit. The DOD has always issued these orders a six to eight weeks before issuing the actual deployment order. The preparation orders allows units to get their deployment process started or at least allows units to dust off their plans, while keeping them from committing too much time/energy if they are later not needed to deploy. Almost all DOD preperation orders have followed up with deployment orders. The only exception is a brigade of the 1st Infantry Division was told to prepare for deployment to Iraq for December 2005/January 2006, but was later not deployed.
With President Bush's stubborn insistence on escalation and expansion of the US baseline force from fifteen brigades to twenty brigades as he tries to run out the clock on his failed presidency we are going to see some great linguistic tap dancing. The AP report has an unnamed DOD official say that these deployment orders are not related to the expansion of forces, but at this point disaggregating surge v. non-escalation rotation patterns is a near impossibility as some of the normal rotation units became part of the escalation, and therefore they created gaps in the queae that are being backilled by extending tours, decreasing CONUS reconstitution and training times and activating more of the National Guard for a second combat tour.
Today's news is not really news. Instead it can be logically derived from past announcements and from basic analysis of reality.
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