News of the brigade’s deployment caught public affairs officers with the 173rd off guard

[MADem]

No doubt an "Oh, SHIT" moment for many.

DOD: 173rd Airborne headed back to Iraq

http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=41592

....The entire 3,300-strong brigade will be among the 57,000 troops slated to be part of the 2007-2009 Iraq rotation, officials said.

Some soldiers from the unit have spent two of the last four years serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, though most Sky Soldiers are new to the unit. It experienced about a 60 percent turnover after returning from Afghanistan......Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said standard operating procedure is to notify units about upcoming deployments first, then tell Congress, before finally making deployments public......Whitman would not give specific dates for when each unit will deploy citing operational security concerns, but he said the troops are expected to arrive in country in early 2007.

He said an additional 37,000 combat support troops also are expected to be part of the upcoming Iraq rotation.

“We will be alerting approximately 27,000 active-duty and 10,000 reserve component combat support and combat service support units in units smaller than brigade size,” Whitman said......