Just had some questions about military deployments:
–How long is the average stay at a military base or outpost? Do they differ between branches or commands?
–Outside of combat zones and ships at sea, how common is it for personnel to be stationed away from their families?
–Do personnel have any choice where they are stationed at all?
I think you are confusing two different things. The word Deployment has a very specific meaning. Being stationed in Germany is not a deployment. In general A deployment is a unit being sent to a location for a specific amount of time as part of a larger operation. Things like being stationed in Germany are individual moves That are no different than moving from Fort Bragg to Fort Hood.
To partially answer the question, most Army deployments are about a year. Small groups and Special Ops people usually do 6 month deployments, but big Army units a year. During the early stages of the Middle East stuff, there were 15 month deployments or longer, but that is bad PR and they don’t like doing it.
Can’t say about Air Force / Navy deployments, but I expect they are generally less than a year?
If it’s a real deployment, you are not going to have family along. If you’re lucky, you’re on a base with internet and you can Skype.
Regular overseas assignments for the Army are normally 3 years, like non-overseas. Korea is shorter, 1 or 2 years depending on if you are away from family or brought them. Most other overseas assignments families are usually there.
As to choice, if it is a deployment, no. Your unit gets orders, and you go. For regular assignments, you have input into where you want to go, but needs of the Army takes precedence (your selection is pretty much the least important factor, but they do consider it). With exceptions again, like you are contracted specifically for a station, or asked for by name by a senior officer, etc.
Navy deployments are generally 6-9 months, but can go as long as a year. The longest deployment I was on in two different Seabee battalions was about nine months. Deployments are without family, by the way.
First we have to define what we mean by a ‘deployment.’ Your post here seems to be conflating several ideas. There are generally four categories for a military assignment.
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Permanent Duty Station - Everybody has a permanent station or base they are assigned to. A tour at a certain base or camp and usually lasts many years. A change in permanent assignment is called a ‘Permanent Change of Station’ or PCS. When a servicemember does a PCS move, they are expected to bring with them all / most of their household. This includes the family. There is often housing on-base for the soldier to live, and if not they receive a stipend for renting property. On rare occasion, a servicemember might have a PCS move that does not permit the family to come (eg to Korea or certain schools). These PCS moves are usually less than a year long.
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Temporary Duty - AKA the TDY. This is a reassignment that is less that 180 days, with the expectation that you will return to your permanent duty station when the assignment is complete. Practically any travel (from one day to 180 days) can be called a ‘TDY.’ Usually, families are not authorized to come on a TDY assignment. (For example, I once had my family accompany me to a school but had to pay out of my own pocket for their travel.)
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Temporary Change of Station - AKA a ‘Deployment.’ This is what people usually think of when they hear the word ‘deployment.’ It’s when an entire unit gets on the plane and goes to strange countries to shoot bad guys. Families are emphatically NOT permitted. Nowadays these usually run to 9 months, but it depends on the service and the unit. A few years back it was normal to have 12 month deployments. For a little while people had to do 15 months. At the same time, some units do less. A Special Forces unit, for example, might do lots of three-month deployments instead of a single long one.
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Cruises - I’m not going to talk about these, because I’m not in the Navy and the Navy is rather different. Junior and unmarried sailors are normally billeted on their ships. They go to sea for several months at a time, then have a certain amount of time in their home port. I’ll let someone else with better knowledge fill in the details.
For the last question: ‘Do personnel have any choice where they are stationed at all?’ The answer is ‘Kinda-Sorta-Maybe.’
The assignment process is essentially a messy, chaotic process. Junior enlisted have basically no choice at all. They MIGHT get an option as an enlistment incentive, but mostly they are at the mercy of the assignment manager. They are allowed to submit a list of their preferences, but it is universally agreed that these preferences don’t mean much when weighed against the needs of the service. Sometimes a person will get their number one pick, sometimes they get their least-favorite assignment. There are a few things that can influence the process, including: Whether you have personal or family health needs, whether you are married to another soldier, whether the assignment requires certain schools, etc. If your top choice is a very unpopular location, you are more likely to get it because fewer people will compete for it.
For more senior servicemembers, plans and career progression also play a role. For example: Imagine there are two slots for a certain move cycle. The first slot is to be an instructor at a prestigious military school. The second slot is a guard post on the Korean DMZ. The assignment manager has two candidates. The first says he intends to stay in the military, and has ambitions to get to the highest rank possible. The second says he intends to retire in the near future. Want to bet which one is going to Korea?
Both my deployments to Iraq were 12 months. There were some reservists I met there who had been in country for 18 months and still weren’t sure when they would get to leave. I heard horror stories in the Army Times about units who spent 2 years or more there.
We also called our 1 month trip to National Training Center in California a “deployment” and before the Iraq War we had a detachment from our brigade deploy to Kuwait for 4 months. So it isn’t always combat and it isn’t always in another country. I think it basically means “mobilize”. A big part of the training involved in going to NTC was practice shipping our vehicles by rail and packing all our gear and flying the whole battalion across the country and then unpacking everything in the desert and setting up living quarters and working areas. You don’t get that experience when you transfer to Korea or Germany. They’ve already got trucks and tanks, barracks to live in, and you’ll receive new equipment to replace the stuff you turned in when you left your last duty station.
The essence of deployment is about taking all the people and stuff a unit has in, say, Kansas, and getting it across the world, unpacked, set up and ready to execute the mission as quickly as possible. It’s not about a single soldier changing duty stations.
I have a cousin in the Navy who served in Iraq. It was supposed to be a year deployment, but in months nine and ten he was granted leave (correct term?) to come home for some personal matters. After the second trip home, the Navy said just stay in the U.S., we’ll send someone else to replace you.
He was later offered a year deployment in Afghanistan, after which he was promised his choice of posting for the rest of his career. His wife talked him out of it, preferring that the family move on occasion rather than sending him to another war zone.
Assuming you’re talking about assignments and not deployments (see Loach’s post)…
2-4 years is the ballpark standard. There are a lot of reasons for variance but generally speaking rank and career have the most to do with it.
Not very common. There are a few bases (e.g. in Korea) that have typically been unaccompanied tours, but those are the exception. You’ll also get people later in their careers choosing to live separately, as moving constantly is hell on a spouse’s career as well as on the kid’s schooling as they get older.
With exception, no. You do submit preferences, but those preferences don’t weigh much against the needs of the DoD. There are special duty assignments that you can apply for and thereby have some control over where you live, and people returning from overseas often get “base of preference” choice, but for your average assignment you just get orders one day and you have to uproot.
The answers are for the US Armed Forces, which is what I presume the OP wanted. Things are similar with certain differences in other countries.
Your right for a very specific defintion of stationed but if someone is using the word more colloquially it can obscure things. The old understanding has been tweaked some with a mix of deployments and unit stationing providing forces in theaters that used to see only permanently stationed units. In recent years iwe’ve started providing maneuver forces to Korea by rotational deployment instead of entirely by permanent stationing. With Operation Atlantic Resolve in process since Russian involvement in Crimea, that’s also being used as a method to increase forces available in Europe for EUCOM. In 2017 that included the start of an ABCT (Armored Brigade Combat Team) rotational deployment to Poland. There’ve been rotations to Germany under Atlantic Resolve.
It’s possible to be either stationed in or deployed to Germany now.
A great post with a lot of important detail for the OP. The answer to the rhetorical question bears some specificity because I think most people who haven’t been officers in the US Army would bet wrong. The officer looking to stay in and get promoted is probably begging for Korea …or clueless about career management. Commands are among what the US Army calls “key development positions.” Even getting offered command at Lieutenant Colonel and above is competitive. Not having that command makes it exceptionally difficult, to near impossible, to ever be promoted again.
The officer retiring soon should not be going to Korea to command.
It’s more complicated than that. Mobilize is not just a synonym for deployment even if units tend to do both.
From the DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms with references to the publication that’s the source for the definition:
I spent the end of my career in a training support battalion responsible for helping reserve component units mobilize. They assembled, prepared, and conducted pre-deployment training with our help at the mobilization station. When they were certified to go, they then deployed forward to conduct their mission. When they were done they redeployed and went through the demobilization process here in the US.
Ever notice how grumpy officers and senior NCOs assigned to staffs look? Part of it is the very pedantic definitions that matter and can get you hammered by an even grumpier XO/chief of staff.
Within reason. I picked all but one of my duty assignments. But it helps that I knew what was actually possible and what wasn’t. I didn’t try to get a posting in London because, while it might be possible, it isn’t likely. But I’ve managed to get stationed in Korea, Germany (twice), Italy, and Alaska–all by choice. It’s a great way to experience the world.
Some of the answers here mention that families can’t come to Korea. Why not?
Logistical support.
Yeah this is the one I’m mainly interested in, just couldn’t find the right term.
Yes, I agree. I should have used more specificity in my example. For a combat arms officers, any command position (eg Company Commander, Battalion Commander, etc) are KD slots and highly coveted. However, there are some Branches for which this is not the case, and staff positions are more valued.
I picked this example because when I was in the Army, I was a Warrant Officer. Therefore, getting command of a unit was not a consideration. Near the end of my career, I had a phone call with my branch manager. He essentially said: “If you intend to be a W5 you need to get onto a certain career path. That starts with coming to the [warfighting function school]. I can put you on that path if that’s what you want, but if you intend to retire you need to let me know so that I can give that to someone who is staying in.”
I hear some people even call Kuwait a deployment.
There are dependents in Korea. Or has that changed again?
There are more and more accompanied Korea assignments as time goes on. The unaccompanied assignments were always difficult to fill and they were typically short because family separation sucks. I always assumed they were unaccompanied because of the NK threat but I don’t have any special knowledge of the reasoning behind the shift.
There are, and for the most part, always have been. It just depends on the area. Combat Arms hotspots like Camp Casey traditionally did not allow command sponsored tours because they simply did not have the logistical support for wives and children. There was no housing, no medical, no dental, no schools, too small of a commissary, etc. Hell, there aren’t even parking spaces for POVs at any of the units, and only a tiny lot at the PX. Soldiers were not even authorized to own or drive POVs. The base housed an entire Heavy Brigade Combat Team. It would be difficult to support the families of a unit that size.
Places further south have always allowed command sponsored dependents. In places like Daegu, they even have an American high school. Soldiers get to own cars down there–an unheard of luxury north of Seoul.
Lately, everything is moving south to Camp Humphreys, which has become one of the largest (if not the largest) OCONUS US Army base. We’re even pulling out of Yongsan. Families are welcome.
Even with all of the added logistical support, most tours to the ROK are now TCS deployments, where entire units rotate out for 9 months at a time. For obvious reasons, families will not accompany soldiers are those tours. In the past, it was common for a solider to arrive at Korea for a 12 month dependent-restricted 12 month PCS assignment which included 1 month of chargeable RnR. But now, it’s more common (especially for combat arms), to rotate through in a TCS status with one’s entire CONUS unit for a 9 month “deployment”.
Yeah, it depends very much on the time and place. Budget is part of the concern, as is living space, plus the number of people they can realistically evacuate in the event of hostilities. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Korea, but when I was there they had a list of how many families were allowed to be ‘Command Sponsored.’
Funny Story: A buddy of mine married a Korean. He showed up to his duty assignment and said “My wife is coming next week.” His new boss said no. He repeated, “My wife is coming next week.” His boss said, “You don’t understand. She’s not command sponsored, she can’t live here.” Buddy said, “Actually, she’s a Korean citizen, so she can live wherever she wants.”