That said, look at what Secretary of Army Geren says to Congress about keeping their noses out to how he and other leaders in the administration and Pentagon can use the manpower to meet the mission requirements. He is quoted saying to not push laws to make sure units get their required time at home station as it is in the deployment policy already.

Geren, who served four terms as a member of Congress from Fort Worth, Texas, also had rather strong words of caution for his former colleagues’ efforts to put limits on deployments and require a one-year break at home.

After ruling out deployments longer than 15 months, Geren would not say what options are under consideration to maintain current troop levels beyond spring of 2008 if that is what the Army is asked to do.

“We’d have to look at the whole range of options,” he said. “I don’t want to speculate on how we would meet the demand that combatant commanders might make next year but we’re looking at all the options to meet what that demand might be.”

This decision will ripple down across the active duty units down to reserve and National Guard units. Geren is trying to weasel out through another opening to make sure there is proper amounts of troops are in the queue to be available for yet another deployment. The amount of time which units can spend time at home station was set by policy a few years ago.

Though Geren has come out to oppose the 18-month long deployment, the 15-month long deployment is still out there for units. With a limited resource to meet a mission requirements, either the scope will need to be cut to get an adequate amount of troops to do the job, deployment times will be extended (Geren and GEN Casey say no), or spending less time at the home station (and still doing 12-15 month long deployments for Marines and army soldiers).