WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Susan Collins on Tuesday asked the chief of staff of the U.S. Army about expectations for further Guard troop deployments and possible relief for Maine Guard units now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gen. Peter Schoomaker was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, on which Collins is a member.

“I want to emphasize that the members of the Maine Guard are very proud of their service and they do a fabulous job, but repeated deployments over a 10-year period have imposed a tremendous strain on their families and on their hardships,” Collins said. Maine has the third-highest percentage in the nation of guardsmen and women now deployed, many of whom have been mobilized several times over the past 10 years. In comparison, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said that only 7 percent of the country’s entire National Guard has been mobilized more than once in the past decade.

“Many Guard units from Maine have been deployed three times in the last 10 years. Some were mobilized with only five days’ notice. Many of them had no idea how long they were going to be gone nor when they would return,” Collins told Schoomaker. “I do think that we could see an exodus from the Guard and from the Reserves that is going to be very harmful, because of these repeated deployments.”

Schoomaker explained that certain units have been used more often because of their specialized capabilities. To address this problem, he said a goal of the armed forces is to train more troops for high-demand military needs in order to reduce the stress on the units that are being overused.

“This is not an issue of how many people, as much as it is what capabilities and how many units of capability we have available to us,” Schoomaker said.