By Ann Roosevelt
The Army Force Generation (ARFORGEN) process was successful in ensuring the service produced trained, ready and cohesive units to meet requirements for the surge, according to a top general.
“I would suggest that it’s worked pretty effectively,” Gen. Charles Campbell, commanding general, U.S. Army Forces Command, said at a recent media briefing.
In January 2007 the nation’s leaders decided on a surge to reinforce the multinational force in Iraq, first by deploying five additional brigade combat teams. Then decisions were made to deploy the associated combat support enablers–an aviation brigade, engineers, medical forces, military police and other structures to support the brigade combat teams. Additionally, a decision was to deploy an additional division headquarters. All this totaled about 30,000 people.
“ARFORGEN was the process that enabled us to synchronize across the systems…as well as across all the organizations that had equities in executing the surge,” Campbell said. That included the Department of the Army Staff, Forces Command, Training and Doctrine Command, Army Materiel Command and any other organization with some sort of an equity in executing the surge.
“I would suggest to you that had we not had a process like ARFORGEN we might not have been able to deploy the capabilities and the capacities that were requested by the combatant commander in the timelines that they needed to have those capabilities,” he said. “That was a largely unreported success as people have focused on the effects of the surge, vice understandably on the complexity of having executed the surge.”
The ARFORGEN applies across all the components–active, guard and reserve, and Forces Command is the executive agent.
It is useful to think of ARFORGEN as a model and as a process, Campbell said.
“As a model, it is supply based,” he said. “As a process, it is demand based. As a model, it is very useful for the Department of the Army because it provides a programmatic underpinning of how the Army will generate forces predictably to the combatant commanders for their employment. For Forces Command, it is a process that allows us to respond to the full continuum of demand, the full spectrum of demand.”
ARFORGEN is also a process of systems. The Army has systems for modernizing, organizing, planning, equipping, training, mobilizing and deploying, he said. It is now evolving a reset system. And it has a transforming system.
“Now left to their own devices, these systems are not self-synchronizing, Campbell said. “Indeed, within the systems themselves, they’re not self-synchronized and so ARFORGEN provides the process by which FORCECOM attempts to synchronize the Army systems. And synchronization relates to a range in activity in time and space and in purpose.”
All the different Army systems must be synchronized because the service is in a period of cyclical deployments and reset of forces, more complicated than in years past because all the synchronization has to occur at the unit level in very compressed periods of time, he said.
“I would say to you that ARFORGEN as a process has been very successful,” he said. And it’s a process that continues to be refined and matured.
“Commonly, when you find people who are unhappy with ARFORGEN, they’re really unhappy with it as the model,” he said. “Because the model suggests that an objective state we will be at the BOG [boots on the ground] dwell ratios of at least 1:2 for the active component and 1:4 for the guard and reserve. And we’re clearly not at those current radios of BOG and dwell. So the fact that the unit has a very compressed dwell returning to the theater in little more than a year creates stresses on the forces, and in some cases that comes as a criticism of ARFORGEN.”
Such criticism reflects the current environment where the demand for a land force capability exceeds the sustainable supply, he said.
“The mechanisms by which the Army can accommodate that trend with the existing level of supply is by either extending the BOG–which we did for the active component to 15 months for selected units or by compressing dwell which we’ve done commonly for both units in the guard and in the reserve.”
The process generally goes like this: First, requirements are identified, and the priority requirements, for the most part, are generated by the combatant commander. Force requirements then pass through Central Command and are validated there. They then go to the Joint Staff, which also must validate the requirements, and then on to Joint Forces Command, which looks at all the services to determine how to fill those requirements. The requirements they think can be filled by the Army are passed to Forces Command.
“Forces Command looks at all the requirements, those from the combatant commanders and the operational support requirements come from the Army,” Campbell said. “These relate to support to exercises, support to the military academy, the testing and experimentation and then Forces Command sources units against those requirements.”
Once the requirements have been sourced, units must receive resources and then they must be coherently manned, equipped and trained over time, he said. “ARFORGEN is the process by which we then synchronize how those formations are manned equipped trained and then subsequently deployed.”
All this must meet a deployment schedule that allows the units to meet the theater requirement, he said.