ARTICLE

October 2004

Army Undergoing Biggest Makeover Since World War II

by Harold Kennedy

The U.S. Army has embarked upon what is described as its most important and controversial reorganization in decades in an effort to improve its ability to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while defending the home front.

If they take place as planned, the changes eventually will affect virtually every soldier in the service. Steps already under way or recently announced include:

• Transferring 60,000 to 70,000 service members—mostly Army—and 100,000 family members and civilian employees from Germany and South Korea back to the United States during the next decade.
• Reducing the number of large military installations particularly in Western Europe; replacing them with smaller, more austere bases in places closer to Middle Eastern trouble spots, and expanding facilities in the United States to accommodate returning soldiers.
• Restructuring the Army from a division-based force into one focused on smaller, more rapidly deployable organizations that are called “brigade combat team units of action.”
• Increasing the size of the active-duty component, which has an authorized strength of 482,400 soldiers, by at least 30,000 during the next three years.
• Strengthening the ability of National Guard components to play their assigned roles in frequent overseas deployments.

The politically sensitive changes reflect “a comprehensive review of America’s global force posture, the numbers, types, locations and capabilities of U.S. forces around the world,” according to President George W. Bush.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker called the reorganization “the most significant changes ... that we have made since World War II.” In 1940, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, expanding the small, under-equipped standing Army into a mighty force that included millions of adult males.

At the end of the war, many U.S. servicemen and women remained in Europe and Asia, at first to help restore order and then to deter invasion by the Soviet Union, China and North Korea. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States cut these forces in half, from about 400,000 in 1990 to approximately 200,000 currently on permanent overseas assignments, said a recent Congressional Budget Office report. That number does not include forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army now stations 56,000 troops in Germany and 28,000 in South Korea. Under the Pentagon’s plan, the two heavy divisions stationed in Germany—the 1st Infantry and the 1st Armored, both based at Wiesbaden—would return to the United States and be replaced by a much smaller, more rapidly deployable Stryker Brigade.

This brigade will join V Corps, which is headquartered at Heidelberg. V Corps, the Army’s contingency force for Europe and the Middle East, is being made more deployable, disclosed a senior Pentagon official, who requested not to be identified. Also, a battalion has been added to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which will remain based in Vicenza, Italy, he told reporters.

In addition, Pentagon officials intend to remove 12,500 service personnel, largely infantry soldiers, from South Korea. That process already may have begun. The Army has begun redeploying the 2nd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade from South Korea to combat duty in Iraq. When the unit’s tour in Iraq is complete, it is likely to return to the United States, not South Korea.

Troop reductions will be possible in South Korea—which continues to face a large conventional army in North Korea—because U.S. military capabilities in surrounding Pacific region are increasing to help compensate for the smaller number of forces actually in the country, a senior military official said. Also, the U.S. troops who remain will be consolidated south of Seoul, which makes them “a more credible fighting component,” he said.

As troops depart for the United States, many of the bases they occupied will be shut down, a senior Defense Department official said. All told, he said, the United States has 5,458 military installations around the world, many of them 100 acres or less in size—legacies of the Cold War. “We don’t need those little properties any more,” he said.

The United States, however, plans to keep its large overseas facilities. For example, the official noted, “the largest footprint that we have in Germany is the Grafenwoehr, Vilseck and Hohenfels training complex, and that is where we believe the Stryker Brigade will end up.”

The United States also intends to establish small, “bare-bones” bases, called forward operating locations, in places such as Poland, Romania, Uzbekistan and possibly Mali. These sites would not be permanent bases, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters. “They’re not places where you’d have families. They’re not places where you have large numbers of U.S. military on a permanent basis.”

Instead, the forward locations would be used for U.S. forces to conduct joint training exercises with troops from host countries, to refuel aircraft, and to preposition supplies and equipment. Such facilities would be maintained only by small groups of support personnel.

Even Australia figures in the emerging plans. “While there will not be any permanent basing of U.S. forces [there], it appears very likely that Australia will welcome the opportunity to serve as an important location for training a number of friendly forces, and that’s a prospect we welcome,” a State Department official told Pentagon reporters.

As part of the reorganization, the administration proposes to bring home 100,000 family members and civilian Defense Department employees currently stationed abroad. Reducing the number of civilians working overseas will save taxpayers’ money, and bringing military families home will improve their lives, Bush said. These shifts will not take place quickly. They would not begin until fiscal year 2006 at the earliest, and they would be spread over the next 10 years.

At press time, however, announcement of the plans prompted renewed calls to delay a round of base closures and realignments scheduled for 2005 until the Pentagon figures out where the returning troops will be stationed.

“As the Defense Department makes its base realignment and closing recommendations, defense officials should consider how the pending decision to bring several thousand troops to the United States from overseas bases will affect the needs of the military,” said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, whose state hosts 17 military installations. “We must ensure that new troops and new missions are part of the calculus before any base is closed or realigned.”

The House of Representatives has approved a two-year delay for the 2005 base realignments program as part of the year’s defense authorization bill, but the Senate version does not contain such a provision. Conferees from the two bodies were scheduled to meet in late September to agree upon a single bill to send to the president.

Some bases may have received at least partial insurance against BRAC in July, when the Army Department announced where it planned to station its new brigade combat team units of action in fiscal years 2005 and 2006. The decisions were deemed temporary, pending the outcome of the pending facility realignments.

The Army intends to increase the number of such units in its active-duty component from 33 currently to 43 by 2006. In 2005, the Army plans to stand up units of action at Fort Polk, La.; Fort Richardson, Alaska, and Fort Hood, Texas. As part of this process, the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, currently at Fort Polk, will move to Fort Lewis, Wash., and convert to a Stryker Brigade Combat Team.

In 2006, the service will form units of action at Fort Benning, Ga.; Fort Bliss, Texas; Fort Bragg, N.C., and Fort Riley, Kan. At that point, Schoomaker told a Pentagon press briefing, the Army would “make a decision whether or not we ought to continue to grow an additional five brigades.”

The Army began switching to the new design in autumn 2003. Since then, the 3rd Infantry Division, at Fort Stewart, Ga., has been reorganized into four of the units. This spring, the Army’s first unit of action—the 3rd Division’s 2nd UA—conducted exercises at the National Training Center, located at Fort Irwin, Calif., to field test the concept and to prepare for the division’s return to Iraq.

The 101st Airborne Division, at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 10th Mountain Division, at Fort Drum, N.Y., will begin converting later this year. Eventually, all 10 of the Army’s active-duty divisions and the National Guard’s eight divisions will reorganize, Schoomaker said.

Currently, the Guard’s eight divisions contain 36 traditional brigades, but only 15 of them are fully resourced, he said. After the reorganization, the Guard will have 34 fully equipped and staffed units of action. “That’s a significant increase in capability,” Schoomaker said. “That will put us somewhere between 77 and 82 brigades available across our force.”

With that number of brigades, the Army can sustain the current level of deployments “indefinitely,” he said. That consists of one deployment every three years for active-duty personnel, and once every five or six years for the Guard, he explained.

Such a cycle provides one force that always is ready to deploy, another that is preparing to go and a third that is recovering from a recent deployment, Schoomaker noted. It also provides predictability for the troops, their families and—in the case of the Guard—their employers, he added.

A major difference between the units of action and the traditional brigades is that the units of action will contain elements previously found at the division level, Schoomaker told reporters. These, he noted, include civil affairs, engineers, human intelligence, counterintelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and even unmanned aerial vehicles. Some corps assets also will move down to the units of action. “We’re ending up with units of action that are capable of independent action, operating much like a division did in the past, modular enough to aggregate into larger operations,” Schoomaker said.

A division could employ, for example, two heavy brigades, an infantry brigade, a Stryker brigade and even a Marine Corps expeditionary brigade. In addition to units of action, divisions will have access to support units of action, such as aviation, fires and security, officials said. Division headquarters will have a greater capacity for joint operations and force packaging.

Although the units of action are expected to give the Army more flexibility in deploying its troops, Schoomaker conceded that the Army is stretching to meet current wartime demands. “We’re authorized 482,400 soldiers,” he said. “We have more than 600,000 soldiers on active duty today.”

That reflects a combination of factors, including the mobilization of Army reservists and National Guardsmen. Also, the service in June announced a stop loss/stop movement program, preventing members of active-duty units headed for Iraq from leaving the service until they return from overseas.

In July, the Army called up 5,600 soldiers in the Individual Ready Reserve to serve in Army Reserve and National Guard units headed to combat. Soldiers usually enter the IRR after finishing the active-duty portion of their enlistment. When they enlist, soldiers incur an eight-year service obligation, with most serving four years of active duty and four years in the IRR. Other soldiers enter the IRR after completing reserve duty. Officers serve in the IRR until they resign their commissions.

Also in July, the Defense Department launched a new program called Operation Blue to Green, that encourages members of the Navy and Air Force—which are reducing their numbers—to transfer to the Army.

Schoomaker would like to add 30,000 more active-duty soldiers to the Army during the next three years.

According to critics, that’s not enough, particularly in an election year. U.S. Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, has called for 40,000 new troops and an end to the stop loss and involuntary recalls that he said amount “to nothing more than a back-door draft.” Nor is he impressed with Bush’s plan to reduce U.S. forces overseas.

“Let’s be clear,” he said, also speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “The president’s vaguely stated plan does not strengthen our hand in the war on terror, and in no way relieves the strain on our overextended military personnel.

“And this hastily announced plan raises more doubts about our intentions and our commitments than it provides real answers. For example, why are we unilaterally withdrawing 12,000 troops from the Korean Peninsula at the very time when we are negotiating with North Korea—a country that really has nuclear weapons?” Kerry asked.

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