15 months

Just watch Defense Secretary Robert Gates's news conference on CNN. The armshare strategist in me says that unit familiarity with the local situation can only be good but man this is going to play havoc with recruitment and retention. It also makes me wonder about unit effectiveness. Something there hasn't been much research done for counterinsurgency. Most have been done on fixed deployments. Algeria had a combination of both but there were political variables that makes the analysis pretty difficult. It has not been easy to get numbers for recruitment and retention recently wonder why.