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Edited on Sun Jan-25-09 12:01 PM by Statistical
I did two tours one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan (my enlistment ends in Nov).
NG troops make up about 40% of combat force in Iraq (not sure about Afghanistan) so that is about 60,000 or so.
The reality is worse. When national guard deploy for a year in Iraq they need to "mob" (pronounced moab) or mobilize. Training, Equipping, and Prepping at the mob-site takes 2-3 months depending on the duty assignment. Then travel time (round-trip) plus down-processing on the way back is another month. So 1 year in Iraq = 15-16 months active duty time.
Deployable force is reduced even more. You can't send soldiers back to back from one deployment to another. I doubt you would want soldiers patrolling your streets that just came back from firefights in Iraq.
So figure if 60,000 National Guard are deployed another 20,000-30,000 are in processing/out processing. Add to that that another 160,000 or so are non-deployable because they just came off a deployment going with VA ARNG policy of 1 up, 2 down (1 year deployed, 2 years not).
So at any given point maybe 60,000 troops are in Iraq but it reduces the deployment strength for natural disasters or law and order ops by 250,000 or so.
Given the National Guard is only 1 million soldiers a ballpark figure is that about 1/4 are involved in the Iraq conflict in some fashion.
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