The Pentagon is about the weed out tens of thousands of military service members who for one reason or another are rated not fit to deploy.
“My favorite one is they are not Class 1 or Class 2 dental certified,” said Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in a breakfast session with reporters last month. “That means they haven’t had a dental exam and a dental cleaning in a year.”
This week the Pentagon’s new Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Robert Wilkie unveiled a new “deploy or depart” policy that could give the boot to some 286,000 troops who have not been, or will not be, deployable for a period of a full year.
“The situation we face today is really unlike anything that we have faced, certainly in the post World War II era,” Wilkie told Congress this week. “On any given day, about 13 to 14 percent of the force is medically unable to deploy.”
Under the tough new policy Wilkie issued Wednesday, service members who have been deemed nondeployable for more than 12 consecutive months, for any reason, will be processed for administrative separation, or will be referred into the military’s Disability Evaluation System. Pregnant and post-partum service members are the only group automatically excepted.
In testimony before a Senate Armed Services subcommittee, Wilkie called the number of nondeployable troops “staggering” especially when “forces are at a premium” and the military is “struggling to maintain the ranks.”
“We need to get a grip on this,” Wilkie said. “[It’s] as if Mr. [Jeff] Bezos and Amazon walked into Christmas week and 14 percent of his workforce could not perform their duties and he would no longer be the largest company in the world.”
Under the policy guidance issued to the services, they have until Oct. 1 to identify and begin processing out troops who are not medically able to deploy.
Under questioning from New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand about the effect the policy might have on transgender troops, Wilkie insisted the policy was gender-neutral and not aimed at any one group.
“I don’t think that there is any particular group that would be unaffected by a close scrutiny of all of our standards for deployability,” he said, calling it “an across-the-board standard that will apply to everyone.”
In discussing the situation with reporters last month, Selva noted that part of the problem is the reduction of medical support facilities on some bases or smaller installations.
“If you look at the number of installations where we no longer have dental clinics, where we depend on sending people out to contract dentists and that sort of thing for dental care, or we wait until the unit is scheduled to deploy, it’s actually predictable that a percentage of the force is not going to be available to deploy for that reason,” Selva said at a Defense Writer’s Group breakfast in Jan. 30.
Troops can also be deemed undeployable if they fail to get required vaccinations.
“There are roughly 14 inoculations that I have to have personally to be available to deploy,” Selva said.
“I’m actually pretty disciplined about marching upstairs to the flight surgeon’s clinic and getting the inoculation,” he said. “As a matter of setting the example for the rest of the force I actually go get my shots when I need to, I do my dental exam when I need to.”
The policy does allow for waivers to be granted in some circumstances, and Wilkie conceded that if the problem is lack of access to medical care, that would be corrected.
“If in our small units, our commanders discovered that half of our troops were not medically ready because they had not visited the dentist that would have been on us,” Wilkie said. “We would have been accountable as junior leaders to make sure that they visited the dentist to become dentally ready to deploy.”
