The argument whether or not the surge is working or has worked is still raging. According to GEN Petraeus we need another Friedman Unit (FU) to determine wheter or not it has been a viable success tactically in Iraq. Well, I'll tell you where it hasn't been a success...it hasn't been a success for the soldier's and units that were there to fight it and the soldiers and units that are going to cover down on those units now leaving.
The land combat force of the generic Army is only so large. The largest portion of course comes fromt the actual U.S. Army for which it is their primary job. The second most comes from the Marine Corps whose actual job is to secure beachheads to allow the Army to come through and take land. Then there is the small contingent of SOF from the Navy which helps in pinpoint tactical missions, not adding any real numbers to the force.
So, we have this limited number of people from which we can draw to staff the forces in Iraq. The rotations are unit and not person based. It's not like the forces in Germany where there are units permanently assigned and people rotate in and out to fill vacancies created as people serve their time and leave.
When people come back they now, thankfully, have mandatory dwell time that can only be waived on an individual basis by a general's signature and is almost impossible to get even if the person volunteers to waive the dwell time. You may think that it may be insane to waive time at home. There are certain situations where it would make more sense to deploy two times in a row than deploy and wait. Dual military runs into this dilemma frequently. Now that deployments are at 15 months if your spouse is deployed on an opposite rotation you will be separated for up to 3 years depending on when you get out of the opposite cycle trap. So, some opt to deploy and then move to their spouses unit and deploy with them so that after the deployment they might have a chance of being on the same deployment cycle. Some dual military spouses have already been separated for as long as 4 years, essentially since the beginning of the war. And with stop-move/stop-loss, having a low-density MOS, or just being bottom man on the totem pole they never get the chance to switch units, or deployment cycles.
There are other issues that arise from the 15 month deployment plus mandatory dwell time. There are only so many units in the Army and the personnel system is setup so you spend so much time at a unit then move to a new unit. Well, after a unit is deployed all of their soldiers are now due one year of dwell time. The unit expecting to get their soldiers does indeed get them except that the unit now has to deploy with soldiers holding spots in their unit until they're dwell time catches up and they are able to deploy. So, while units aren't technically deploying understrength, they practically are. They are so short people in certain specialties and grades that you have people working in MOSs they don't have and a grade or two above what they should be. OJT is more the rule than the exception in today's Army. So, having technical experts on anything, especially in the officer corps, is a real rarity. I've been field artillery doing infantry and logistics. And now I'm specialty logistics doing a completely different logistics job a rank above me. The rank makes a big difference when it comes to whom you can give suspenses and orders, and the specialty makes a big difference when it comes to knowing what you're doing.
The surge has created other problems in conjunction with the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program signed by Rumsfeld. More units are being condensed into smaller areas. In these areas the the civil infrastructure both civilian on and off post and the military infrastructure is not prepared to deal with the number of people. Everything was fine when units were on predictable one year rotations, but the surge has thrown BRAC and the infrastructure and support structure off kilter. Now, when they were expecting to be servicing X number combat units they are actually servicing X+1 to X+3. And when they were prepared to service X+3 they are now servicing X-2. So, the support structure now has to fall into the new rhythym. This is easier to do with military infrastructure, but so much of the army is now civilian contractor based that it is hard to change. The civilians do the best they can but they only have so many hours a day also.
Bottom line we need a surge at the garrisons. We need a surge in personnel to cover the surge in Iraq.