The policy, which technically expired in November but is still part of the department’s force management guidance, includes a waiver process for units to revert to the mandatory minimum 1:2 deployment-to-dwell ratio, but the numbers on waiver requests and approvals are classified, Army Maj. Grace Geiger said.

“The Department has multiple processes in place to identify, approve, and track individuals and units not meeting the goal,” she added, including oversight from the services, the Joint Staff and the defense secretary’s office.

The Pentagon had not answered follow-up questions seeking details of these oversight processes as of Friday afternoon.

Questions about the Pentagon policy emerged following an Army Times investigation last week that found that members of Army armor brigades — units that largely have not met the dwell time goals over the past decade — were twice as likely to kill themselves than other active duty soldiers in recent years.

Long periods of high operational tempo can increase a service member’s suicide risk, according to Craig Bryan, a psychologist and mental health researcher at Ohio State University who spoke to Army Times.

Bryan, a former Air Force psychologist, was a member of the suicide prevention independent review committee convened by the Pentagon in 2022.

That committee found that “training demands and requirements … [are] primary sources of stress, burnout and demoralization.” Other common stressors include shoddy computers, byzantine promotion policies, unsupportive leaders and poor housing.

Army tank brigades have flirted with or broken the dwell threshold in recent years.

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team returned from a nine-month South Korea rotation in August 2021. But the Raider Brigade rapidly deployed to Europe six months later in February 2022, when Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine. The brigade’s families were furious about the move, detailing the hardships they faced during a March 2022 town hall with the Army’s then-top noncommissioned officer at Fort Stewart, Georgia.

This month, the Fort Carson, Colorado-based 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division, deploys to Europe approximately 16 months after returning from an eight-month Poland mission in December 2022.

Former officials argue that the sustained operational tempo has harmed units as well.

Retired Gen. Robert “Abe” Abrams, who led Army Forces Command before retiring in 2021, previously told Military Times that the Army’s armor units struggle with a 1:2 deployment-to-dwell ratio at current resourcing levels and “cannot sustain that tempo indefinitely.”

“That’s what’s crushing them,” he said.

Other communities, such as air defense, have faced high deployment rates as well.

The Navy has also dealt with a bruising tempo in recent years, with an ever-increasing assortment of missions. The COVID pandemic only exacerbated that pace, as pre-cruise quarantines and zero port calls became the order of the day.

The aircraft carrier Nimitz and its strike group spent an historic 11 months at sea from April 2020 through February 2021.

Precisely 22 months later, a perfect 1:2 dwell ratio, they were back on deployment. Policy dictates they would have needed a waiver to deploy again that quickly.

The review also found a range of discharge types and reentry codes for service members involuntarily separated after vaccine refusal, leaving some troops with full benefits after being kicked out, while others received partial benefits.

“Prolonged delays in addressing requests for religious accommodations could impact a service member’s job placement and impede the command’s ability to make well-informed deployment and assignment choices,” said Defense Department Inspector General Robert Storch said in a release.

The review began in February 2022, prompted by IG hotline calls alleging that the services were rejecting exemption requests en masse. In June that year, then-Inspector General Sean O’Donnell sent Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin a memo with preliminary findings, including concerns that requests were being processed too quickly and without thorough review.

“The denial memorandums we reviewed generally did not reflect an individualized analysis, demonstrating that the Senior Military Official considered the full range of facts and circumstances relevant to the particular religious accommodation request,” O’Donnell said.

These concerns also prompted multiple lawsuits against DoD and the services, alleging that adjudication authorities were blanketly denying religious waiver requests. One case resulted in a judge halting the Air Force from discharging anyone for vaccine refusal after a waiver denial.

In 2023, after federal legislation required Austin to repeal the mandate in January, DOD settled two of the lawsuits by paying the complainants’ legal fees.

In the end, the IG found that the Army and Air Force actually took longer to approve requests than their policies required.

While the Army has a 90-day deadline for processing requests, the cases reviewed averaged 192 days to receive a decision. In the Air Force, 35 reviewed requests averaged 168 days to adjudication, though the deadline was 30 days.

When Austin announced in August 2021 that the COVID-19 vaccine would become required, vaccine exemptions in the military were rare. Most were for medical or administrative reasons, like an allergy, a pregnancy or someone preparing to separate from service, rather than the highly subjective religious exemption requests that flooded the services after the mandate came down.

Policy requires that “sincerely held religious beliefs” be accommodated as long as they do not impact “military readiness, unit cohesion, good order and discipline, or health and safety.”

The IG found that decision authorities weighed expert advice while considering the health risks of allowing someone to go unvaccinated, and that in the end, each case was examined individually before making a decision.

But the “unprecedented number of requests” ― 16,000 from active duty troops as of January 2023 ― slowed down the adjudication process, the IG found.

At the same time, though the services followed DOD guidelines for discharges, those guidelines didn’t have uniform rules for using various types of discharges and reentry codes, which govern whether someone can re-join the military again at a later date.

“As a result, discharged service members experienced different impacts to their educational benefits and eligibility to reenlist in military service after discharge,” according to the report, as most vaccine refusals resulted in general discharges, which specifically denies GI bill benefits.

The IG recommended reviewing the exemption process to find ways to make it more efficient during high-volume periods, as well as creating standardized policy for discharges and reentry codes after vaccine refusal.

DOD accepted both recommendations and has efforts underway to address them, according to the report.

A key element in preventing suicide among troops and veterans could be the background of the people who deliver the message, according to a recent study on the effectiveness of safe firearm storage training.

The people best situated to teach firearms safety to troops are law enforcement officers, as well as other service members or veterans, according to a study by Rutgers University researchers published earlier this month.

“Law enforcement officers, military members, and veterans are ranked as highly credible sources by most subgroups of firearm-owning service members,” the study found. “Leveraging these voices in firearm safety conversations is necessary, may increase adherence to secure storage recommendations, and ultimately reduce suicide.”

More than half of military suicides are carried out with a personally owned firearm, according to Pentagon data.

Experts both inside and outside the military agree that one of the easiest ways to prevent suicide is to keep personally owned firearms in locked safes, with ammunition stored separately, because the time it takes to unlock and load a gun can be critical in reconsidering ending one’s life.

Currently, suicide prevention training is conducted either by unit leadership or by behavioral professionals, who may not be the most impactful messengers, according to the study’s findings.

Researchers surveyed 719 firearm-owning troops, asking them to rank a list of 20 sources by credibility. They then broke the respondents out into demographics to see which groups responded best to which sources.

Overall, respondents ranked military veterans as the most credible group of people to teach safe firearms storage, followed by law enforcement and then current service members.

Among white respondents, who made up 72% of the study subjects, police were third, behind veterans and current troops. And for Black respondents, 16% of the response group, law enforcement officers were top rated, followed by veterans and the National Rifle Association.

Broken down by service affiliation, soldiers and sailors found veterans the most credible, while it was current troops for Marines, and law enforcement for the Air Force and Coast Guard.

“This study highlights the need for more tailored secure storage messaging,” the researchers concluded. “…specifically, leveraging the voices of law enforcement, military members, and veterans will ensure that all races, sexes, and branches of military service members can be provided secure firearm storage messages from credible sources.”

The Monterrey, Amoros, Wilson Wharf and James A. Loux left Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, on Tuesday, Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters, following the departure of the Gen. Frank A. Besson, Jr. over the weekend.

“We expect the pier to be fully operational in approximately 60 days, which will be able to facilitate the delivery of up to 2 million meals daily,” Ryder said.

President Joe Biden first announced the port construction plan during the State of the Union address on Thursday. The 7th Transportation Brigade, including roughly 1,000 troops, will use the Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore program to build a modular causeway off Gaza’s coast and then anchor it to the beach.

Cargo ships carrying aid will then be able to offload to an offshore platform, where troops will transfer it to smaller vessels and drive it to the causeway, where it will be loaded onto trucks and driven into Gaza ― all without U.S. troops having to set foot in the territory.

The pier’s location will likely not be disclosed ahead of time, Ryder said.

In the meantime, the U.S. is continuing to air drop aid into Gaza. Another joint mission with Royal Jordanian Air Force on Tuesday delivered 5,000 meals, Ryder said, bringing the total from U.S. airdrops to more than 204,000 meals, 48,000 bottles of water and more than 5,000 of other food.

The fiscal year 2025 request asks for a drop of 7,800 authorized billets in the active component and an increase of 2,100 positions in the reserve component. That’s a 0.6% drop in overall end strength, Pentagon comptroller Mike McCord told reporters during a briefing Monday.

“Many of you who cover this know that we have had some recruiting challenges, but strong retention, so a bit of a mixed picture on the manning side over the last couple of years,” he said.

Here is the rundown:

• The Army is hoping to shed 1,700 active duty billets, down from 445,000 to 442,300 soldiers, and shift 1,000 of them to the Army Reserve, for a total of 175,800 soldiers. This move follows last year’s request to cut 2,200 Army Reserve billets.
• The Navy is also requesting to downsize its active force, by 5,500 sailors, but put 500 of those spots in the Navy Reserve, for a total of 390,000 sailors.
• The active Marine Corps stay flat under the budget request, but grow their Reserve forces by 500, for 204,800 overall.
• The active Air Force would also stay at 320,000 troops, but add 400 to the Reserve and 2,700 to the Air National Guard, for 494,700 airmen total.
• The Space Force, which doesn’t have a reserve component, would see the only active duty increase, growing from 9,400 to 9,800 guardians as the new service continues to fill its ranks.

The request drops the active force from 1,284,500 to 1,276,700, while growing the reserve component from 763,600 to 765,700.

This amounts to $182 billion in requested spending to cover pay and benefits for military personnel, with a 4.5 pay raise, down from last year’s historically high 5.2% bump.

The Pentagon is also requesting to increase the threshold for troops to receive the basic needs allowance, a special pay introduced in 2022 specifically for junior enlisted troops with families at more expensive duty stations. The proposal would raise income eligibility from 150% of the poverty level to 200%. For reference, the poverty threshold for a four-person household in the contiguous United States is $31,200.

Other personnel initiatives include $1.2 billion for the department’s sexual assault prevention and response office, $651 million of that for implementing recommendations from a 2021 independent review commission into the military’s sexual assault problem. Much of that money will go to hiring professional educators to craft training programs.

Another $547 million would go to suicide prevention programs, including $261 million to to implement recommendations from another independent review commission. Chief of among those efforts is hiring more mental health professionals to tackle long wait times troops face when seeking counseling.

Undeterred by attacks from Republican lawmakers, the Pentagon is requesting $162 million for its diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs.

“Leaders at all levels are responsible for fostering a climate of dignity and respect that supports diversity, is free from problematic behaviors, and does not tolerate retaliation or reprisal against those filing complaints,” according to department’s budget request summary.

And though the Pentagon’s top spokesman has said in recent weeks that leaders are not especially worried about the spate of service members leaking classified information in the past year, the budget specifically addresses insider threats, requesting $130 million.

That money will go to developing a better case management system to track reports, tools for analyzing data to pinpoint risks and a new hotline for troops and DOD civilians to report suspected “espionage, terrorism, workplace violence, suicide, and domestic violence,” according to the budget request summary.

The Pentagon’s wish list depends on Congress passing a budget. The Defense Department is operating under a continuing resolution currently, with funding levels capped to what Congress authorized for 2023.

“So I cannot emphasize this enough: we need predictable, adequate, sustained and timely funding goals,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said Monday during a briefing. “We cannot afford any more lost time time that we cannot buy back.”

The new policies allow anyone who has service-connected infertility to use either department’s program, lifting previous requirements that only married, heterosexual couples using their own sperm and eggs could participate.

Now, eligible troops and veterans can access IVF regardless of their martial status or sexual orientation, and they may use donor eggs or sperm ― changing a policy that previously discriminated against those whose infertility affected their ability to produce gametes.

The reforms were spurred on by a lawsuit filed in August by the Yale Law School and the National Organization for Women’s New York chapter.

“We are grateful to the Defense Department and overjoyed for the service members who, through this policy change, will now be able to access the reproductive healthcare so desperately needed in order to build their families,” Sonia Ossorio, executive director of NOW-NYC, said in a statement Monday.

DOD unveiled its new rules Friday, undoing restrictions that limited Tricare coverage of IVF to married couples only.

“We continue to identify ways to lean forward as much as we can in support of equity of access to reproductive health care for our service members,” Kimberly Lahm, who directors oversight of the Pentagon’s health affairs office, said in a statement Monday.

Veterans Affairs followed suit shortly thereafter, amending their policies to include married, same-sex couples and unmarried veterans in their IVF program. Officials there said they expect to begin enrolling newly eligible individuals in IVF programs in coming weeks.

“Raising a family is a wonderful thing, and I’m proud that VA is helping more veterans to have that opportunity,” VA Secretary Denis McDonough said in a statement. “This expansion of care has long been a priority for us, and we are working urgently to make sure that unmarried veterans and veterans in same-sex marriages will have access to IVF in every part of the country as soon as possible.”

But the moves don’t address everything in the original lawsuit, which seeks to open IVF access to all troops and veterans, regardless of whether their fertility issues were caused by illness or injury suffered while serving.

“This is substantial progress,” Donovan Bendana, a Yale Law School student representing NOW-NYC and member of the Reproductive Rights and Justice Project, said in a Monday release. “But the onerous requirement of linking infertility to a specific service injury will deny many service members the opportunity to build a family. This is especially arbitrary in light of the military’s decades-long disinterest in studying women’s health, including the impact of service on fertility.”

NOW-NYC intends to continue with the lawsuit, according to the release, seeking to remove all barriers to IVF for troops and veterans using federal health benefits.

Over the next 60 days, roughly 1,000 troops will deploy to the Mediterranean Sea to build a floating platform where cargo ships can offload aid onto smaller military vessels, which will transfer them to a causeway attached to the beach, where trucks can pick it up and distribute it within Gaza, Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters.

“The concept that is being planned involves the presence of U.S. military personnel on military vessels offshore, but does not require U.S. military personnel to go ashore,” Ryder said.

President Joe Biden first announced the effort on Thursday night during the State of the Union Address.

The capability, dubbed Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore, has most recently been used during Exercise Talisman Sabre, Ryder said, an annual event based in Australia.

The modular causeway will be assembled offshore and driven to the beach, where it will be anchored ashore.

The Pentagon is identifying units to deploy to the Mediterranean to start construction, he added, which will include soldiers from the 7th Transportation Brigade at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia.

What remains to be hammered out is how U.S. Central Command will be able to protect both the offshore pier and the causeway itself from attacks by Hamas, though Ryder said Israel is part of the planning process and could provide security through its own forces.

“If Hamas truly does care about the Palestinian people, then again, one would hope that this international mission to deliver aid to people who need it would be able to happen and unhindered,” Ryder said.

The causeway has the potential to increase the amount of aid flowing into Gaza by several orders of magnitude, supplementing trucks arriving daily through the border with Israel, as well as ongoing air drops by the U.S. military.

The U.S. carried out its fourth drop of aid via C-130 Hercules on Friday, Ryder said. Each plane carries about the same amount of aid as a truck does over land. Though at points during the Israel-Hamas war, up to 200 aid trucks drove into Gaza daily, the Pentagon said Monday that the pace has dropped to 100 or fewer trucks a day.

The temporary port has the potential to pick up some of the slack, Jonathan Lord, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Military Times on Friday, but with the same distribution concerns as aid arriving over land.

“How do you get aid not just onshore, but then securely distributed, such that it goes to everyone who needs it, and isn’t otherwise blocked in by Hamas insurgents, criminal gangs, vigilantes or others that might be taking advantage of emerging security vacuums?” he said.

Non-government organizations, the United Nations and other regional partners could be tapped to accept and distribute the aid ashore, Ryder said, though those details aren’t finalized.

Another issue is the inspection process for aid, which has slowed down the flow in land shipments.

“If you ask, the Israelis would argue that they, in fact, are not the bottleneck. They are inspecting more trucks than are actually going in on a day-to-day basis,” Lord said. “And when you ask them to what do they attribute that delta, they would say that the groups operating in Gaza don’t have enough drivers.”

Others, including two U.S senators, say Israel’s “cumbersome” and “arbitrary” inspection process is holding things up, comments the lawmakers made after a trip to Egypt to observe the Rafah border crossing in January.

“So that poses a question: Is, in fact, the problem one of a deficit of aid or deficit of aid distribution?” Lord said. “Likely, we’re going to find out, because if you can bring containerships worth of aid up to Gaza, you’re going to find out very quickly what your logistical supply line and your interior lines look like, and whether you have the capacity to effectively distribute it, in pretty short order.”

In any case, Lord said, the U.S. will continue to pressure the Israeli government to ease restrictions on incoming aid, as well as open up more land crossings, as Biden mentioned in his speech Thursday night.

“Several” of the 173 attacks by Iran-backed militias would have injured or killed troops, if not for fortunate snags, CENTCOM’s commander, Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Kurilla’s comments Thursday reinforced the harrowing nature of some of these attacks to a degree not previously disclosed.

“Incidents where [an air drone] is coming into a base, hit another object, got caught up in a netting, or other incidents where, had they hit the appropriate target that they were targeting, it would have injured or killed service members,” he said.

Between Oct. 17 and Feb. 5, the majority of the attacks did not result in any injuries, as the militias only successfully struck U.S. troops a handful of times.

Still, three U.S. troops were killed on Jan. 28 in a drone attack on a U.S. base in Jordan known as Tower 22 and nearly 200 more have been injured.

Pentagon press officials have said repeatedly over recent months that most of the militia mortars, missiles and drones missed their intended targets, but they have not mentioned any close calls.

“So I think it’s important that while we did see a spate of attacks against our forces, they were largely not successful with minor damage to infrastructure,” Sabrina Singh told reporters in December.

January’s fatal attack on Tower 22 ramped up the Pentagon’s response.

“The impact of those [attacks] on our bases have not been significant until what happened at Tower 22,” Singh said last month.

Asked whether any military measures could have prevented those attacks, Kurilla pointed to eight U.S. strikes in Syria and Iraq designed to target militia leadership and destroy stored weapons.

What would really help, he added, would be for Congress to pass a $118 billion national security appropriation introduced last year, specifically to field more equipment to detect and shoot down air drones.

“I have $531 million in counter-[drone] technology that I need to get forward into the theater, that will save lives,” he said.

The airdrop included 36,800 meals bundled by U.S. soldiers and flown via three C-130 Hercules planes, according to Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman.

The mission was “part of a sustained effort to get more aid into Gaza including by expanding the flow of aid through land corridors and routes,” he added.

The U.S. and Jordan made their first drop, of more than 38,000 meals, on Saturday, after President Joe Biden authorized the aid on Friday.

“In the coming days we’re going to join with our friends in Jordan and others who are providing airdrops of additional food and supplies” and will “seek to open up other avenues in, including possibly a marine corridor,” Biden said.

The U.S. is part of a larger regional effort looking into the possibility of maritime aid shipments, Ryder confirmed, including options for commercial or contracted vessels to deliver aid.

The move followed an incident Thursday in Gaza where Israeli troops fired on Palestinians rushing to an aid convoy, killing 115 and injuring more than 750, according to an estimate from Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

An early incident investigation by the Israel Defense Forces found that most of the casualties were trampled in the rush to the convoy, but the head of Gaza City hospital said most of the casualties treated there had gunshot wounds, the Associated Press reported.

The number of aid trucks entering Gaza has been throttled in recent days, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh confirmed Monday, down to 30 to 120 trucks a day from as many as 200.

“But again, that’s clearly not enough to get everyone — to feed the population there,” she said.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin urged Israeli War Cabinet Member Benny Gantz during a meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday to allow more aid into Gaza, according to a readout of the meeting. Ryder declined to say whether Gantz made any assurances that he would support that effort.

Lawmakers have urged the Navy to deploy the hospital ships Comfort or Mercy to help care for Gazans injured or otherwise needing medical care because of Israel’s military campaign, but the Pentagon has repeatedly said they have nothing to announce on that front.

“We’re going to work closely with the interagency to look at what the requirements are how best to meet those requirements,” Ryder said. “And as I mentioned, that include both commercial or contracted options, but recognizing that the [Defense Department] has unique capabilities, that’s what we will bring to the discussion. But again, I don’t want to get ahead of that planning process.”

Sending U.S. assets to the coast of Gaza comes with its own list of complications, including finding a port deep enough to accommodate ships, as well as a security plan to protect it from attacks.

The Pentagon’s independent watchdog is looking into the Navy’s efforts to prevent and respond to suicides, according to a project announcement posted Tuesday.

The review follows an internal Navy audit spurred by two clusters of suicides within the same command during 2022.

The project began in February, according to the announcement, and will assess whether the “Navy effectively took actions to prevent and respond to incidents of deaths by suicide, suicide attempts, and suicidal ideation among members of the Navy assigned to sea duty or shore duty,” according to the announcement.

It will include site visits to Norfolk Naval Air Station, Virginia; Naval Base San Diego, California; Naval Base Kitsap Bremerton, Washington; and Naval Station Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The Navy’s suicide rate in 2022, the most recent year for which complete data is available, was 20.6-per-100,000, lower than the Army’s 29-per-100,000 and the Marine Corps’ 35-per-100,000, and just slightly above the Air Force’s 19.7-per-100,000.

Those numbers include at least three suicide deaths by sailors assigned to the carrier George Washington in spring 2022, as well as four suicides at Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center later that year

A year ago, the Naval Audit Service released a report of its findings that the 21st Century Sailor Office, the Navy’s hub for quality-of-life policy, was not tracking reports of suicidal ideations and suicide attempts alongside completed suicides, hampering the service’s ability to create strategies and policy.

It also found that some of the selected commands reviewed couldn’t confirm whether all of their sailors received required annual suicide prevention training, or didn’t have required crisis response plans in place.