WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will send four National Guard brigades to Iraq and may extend the tours of five active-duty Army brigades by as much as four months as it strains to find troops to sustain the buildup in Baghdad through the end of the year.
The National Guard deployments -- 13,000 soldiers based in Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma and Ohio -- mark the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that entire brigades are being called up for second combat tours. The four brigades served in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Balkans in 2004 or 2005.
"Obviously everyone is going to be a little apprehensive about going back to Iraq," said Col. Kendall Penn, commander of the 39th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Arkansas. "However, this is a mission that the unit has trained for.... It is a mission that we are capable of doing."
The deployments come at a politically difficult time for President Bush, who is fighting efforts in the Democratic-controlled Congress to force him to withdraw combat forces from the 4-year-old war.
The Army said the National Guard alert, sent over the weekend, was not related to the current buildup in Iraq. It said the action was taken in part to limit the tours of soldiers going to Iraq to a one-year deployment.
The National Guard units will not be sent to Iraq until December, so the military has to find other troops to meet the administration's goal of deploying 20 combat brigades in Iraq through the end of the year.
To meet that goal, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is considering four-month extensions for five brigades, or about 15,000 soldiers, according to a Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity because Gates had not signed off on the plan.
Troops scheduled to return home in late summer would stay in Iraq through the fall, maintaining the desired brigade level until the National Guard units arrived.
Under rotations already announced by the Pentagon, the troop buildup would last through August and then start dropping to 15 brigades as units returned home.
The Army has been forced to send two combat brigades back to Iraq without their normal one-year respite in order to sustain the buildup.
The deployments come as Congress is working on a bill that would fund the war through the end of the year but force Bush to start withdrawing troops.
Several Arkansas Democrats expressed concern that Bush was relying too heavily on the state's National Guard.
