{"id":42078,"date":"2019-03-26T17:29:58","date_gmt":"2019-03-26T17:29:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/uncategorized\/2019\/03\/26\/this-is-how-border-deployments-are-affecting-army-readiness\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T03:30:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T03:30:25","slug":"this-is-how-border-deployments-are-affecting-army-readiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/news\/your-army\/2019\/03\/26\/this-is-how-border-deployments-are-affecting-army-readiness\/","title":{"rendered":"This is how border deployments are affecting Army readiness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

About 4,700 active and reserve soldiers<\/a> are on the U.S. border with Mexico in support of President Trump\u2019s efforts to stem illegal immigration<\/a>, but according to Army senior leaders, the unexpected mobilization late last year hasn\u2019t impacted the service\u2019s overall readiness<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the deployed units did have to drop their plans to head south, the effect is small, Army Secretary Mark Esper and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., during Senate Armed Services Committee testimony on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the scale of a 1.1 million-man Army, the impacts on readiness, if there are any, are negligible,\u201d Esper said. \u201cIt\u2019s part of our mission set that we accept.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The effort is comparable to many of the Army\u2019s impromptu humanitarian aid missions, Milley added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAny time an Army unit goes on an unplanned contingency op, whether it\u2019s Hurricane Katrina or Puerto Rico or Ebola, or goes to Afghanistan or wherever \u2015 doesn\u2019t matter where it is \u2015 they\u2019re going to cancel whatever they were doing prior,\u201d he said. \u201cSo the short answer would be yes, for the specific units.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heinrich\u2019s question was inspired by a March 18 letter, first made public by the Los Angeles Times, from Marine Corps commandant Gen. Joseph Neller, requesting funding relief from Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, in light of the impact border deployments would have on several of the Corps\u2019 planned exercises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the Army, Milley said, the deployments don\u2019t cut nearly as much into readiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe larger answer, though \u2014 does it impact the readiness of the Army? And the answer is: No, it doesn\u2019t have a significant impact at all,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a very modest, negligible impact on the Army as a whole, primarily because of scale, which is a slightly different scale than what the Marines are talking about in that letter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the deployed soldiers are support personnel, he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo our assessment is that the units that are going down there \u2014 primarily engineers, [military police], some aviation, transportation, medical units \u2015 they\u2019re within their mission profile, in terms of the tasks that they\u2019re actually doing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\t