I don't really know much about this, except that it was controversial when it began, and that it is supposed to be ending by 2011.

I know there are a lot of military folks around here so, I'd like to hear opinions.

It's really stop loss. It is tough to take when soldiers are thinking about returning to friends, family or maybe even a job if they were in the reserves, only to be told they have to deploy again and they have to stay in until they are told they can go.

Stop Loss is correct. Stop gap is my error.

Stop-loss was started because the army was having trouble trying to keep people in the military. Families were being torn apart with a soldier going on mulitple deployments and not seeing the kids grow up. A lot of spouses divorced deployed soldiers. So the army decided to allow felons in, about 2,000/year or so and force people to stay in. Lower ranking soldiers saw 3 and 4 deployments while I know of several officers who hid out and have never deploy in 15-20 years of service. I came back in to take some of the burden off of these brave soldiers who were deployed so many times. My wife even joined up. Stop-loss really makes a huge impact. Think of the soldier who joined for college money, hit stop loss and got killed instead of going to college.

So, it sounds like a bit of good news in a bad news week.