FEATURE ARTICLE

August 2005

Army Brigades Will Deploy With Hundreds More Trucks

by Sandra I. Erwin

The Army is expanding its logistics and transportation operations as part of a broader reorganization intended to field combat brigades that can operate independently, without the support of higher echelons.

The plan is to morph the Army’s 10 combat divisions into 77 self-deployable brigades. Each brigade, however, will have to deploy with its own logistics battalion because it will no longer have division- or corps-level support for supplies and transportation.

“That’s a big change,” says Lt. Gen. Claude V. Christianson, deputy chief of staff for logistics. “We’ve made brigades more independent.”

In a brigade today, the support battalion has no trucks to deliver supplies to the combat battalions, he says in an interview. The support battalions in the new brigades will be able to move supplies out to the combat brigades. “That’s a huge increase in the amount of trucks and truck drivers in that brigade,” he adds.

A light infantry brigade that currently has 92 trucks, for example, would need as many as 584 trucks. A heavy brigade’s support battalion would grow from 539 to 657 trucks.

“We continue to go through the ‘total Army analysis’ process to refine these numbers,” says Christianson.

The surge in transportation assets is attributed to the Army’s shift from a “supply-based” to a “distribution-based” organization, he explains. That means the Army no longer will set up supply depots in the field to support combat units. Each brigade’s support battalion will be responsible for distributing supplies to the front lines.

This does not mean necessarily that the Army’s “logistics tail” is getting larger, he asserts. The increases in truck units will be offset by the elimination of other organizations that were intended for the supply-based system. “Some supply and maintenance organizations will go away, or will be converted to transportation units,” says Christianson.

A brigade support battalion with 800 people in a heavy brigade may require more than 1,000 soldiers under the new makeup.

To fill the brigades’ logistics positions, the Army will be recruiting thousands of new drivers. About 4,000 to 5,000 active-duty truck operators will be needed over the next four years, says Maj. Gen. Brian I. Geehan, chief of Army transportation. Approximately 4,800 National Guard and 4,800 reserve truck drivers also will be sought.

It will take at least two to three years to build those forces into the Army, says Christianson.

Besides more trucks, logistics units will have advanced communications systems. Upgrading the technology is a “complicated task,” he says. “We are going from almost no connectivity for logisticians to giving them full network access.”

In Iraq, Army logisticians received 138 new satellite terminals. Without the terminals, it took four to five days for a supply request to get from Iraq to the United States. “Only about 60 to 65 percent of the requisitions made it. About a third dropped off and had to be reordered,” says Christianson. “Today, it takes less than a day.”

Before Iraq, the Army would have been less inclined to spend millions of dollars on communications technology for logisticians. “Today, what’s critical is to have real-time connectivity between your sources of supply and the units that need the supplies,” Christianson says. “If we couldn’t talk to each other, we ran diskettes back and forth.” That practice continues, as the technology is not available across the Army.

Three of the Army’s divisions that are reorganizing into independent brigades—the 4th Infantry, the 10th Mountain and the 101st Airborne—have received 120 satellite terminals for the logistics battalions.

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