Simple - necessity. We can't afford to leave the rest at home.
Simple fact is we didn't have enough infantry/dismounts to support repeated Iraq rotations, and therefore routinely have converted tankers, artillery, and sometimes engineers into ad hoc infantrymen. They did pretty well too - at a cost to their core skillsets which are beginning to get rebuilt.
None of it is ideal. We did this from the occupation phase of OIF 1 forward because of the decision to go in with a "light footprint". My Stryker CAV squadron will fundamentally act as infantrymen in Afghanistan next year. The cavalry hasn't trained actual recon in about 5 years, but have served as another infantry unit.
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