The Pentagon has abandoned time limits on the total deployment of its reserve, citizen-soldiers, as it prepares to expand its military capability to satisfy the latest strategies out of the White House. Just one day after U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the Army and Marines would expand their ranks by 92,000 over the next five years, the Pentagon announced Friday that it will no longer guarantee its reservists a maximum deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan of 24 months. General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that no single deployment will exceed 24 consecutive months, but reservists may be asked to return for a second deployment of 12 consecutive months. Pace said the change in reserve policy would have been made anyway because active-duty troops already were getting too little time between their combat tours. Under the old policy, reservist soldiers spent 18 months on active duty-six of those months in pre-deployment training in the United States. The new policy, Pace said, will accelerate training, deployment and demobilization into 12 months, allowing for each soldier to serve two deployments.
