When Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno retires this fall, he leaves to his successor a legacy of uncertainty in end strength, modernization, funding and the service’s role in an increasingly volatile world.
Budget uncertainty, along with a continuous requirement to downsize, has cast a pall over Odierno’s entire tenure as Army chief of staff. When Gen. Mark Milley takes over for him later this year, if he is confirmed by the Senate, he will inherit budget battles that have second and third order effects on soldier morale and on future modernization, Odierno said.
“The major thing I thought we would have settled was what the end strength of the Army would be,” Odierno said at a May 28 breakfast Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington, D.C. “About a month after I took over was when we started all the budget discussions and so it’s been all about budget and end strength. The thing I worry about is it has put a lot of turbulence in the Army and it has caused a lot of angst for soldiers.”
Given that Congress has not found a permanent fix for sequestration, which will go into effect in fiscal year 2016, the eventual size of the Army is “very much still up in the air,” he said.
Odierno has repeatedly testified to Congress that the Army cannot dip below 450,000 troops, which is the absolute bare minimum it needs to execute the Obama administration’s national security strategy of being able to fight one war while being able to respond to another, lesser contingency.
The Army currently has 143,000 soldiers deployed to at least 150 countries. The active duty force is slated to shrink to 475,000 from half a million troops this year. The Defense Department plans by 2018 to reduce Army end strength to that bottom-barrel level of 450,000.
The Army plans to buy 49,000 joint light tactical vehicles (JLTV) to replace a large portion of its Humvee fleet. It also has firm plans to replace thousands of its Vietnam-era M113 armored personnel carriers with a new armored multi-purpose vehicle and purchase a futuristic replacement for its entire fleet of helicopters. Odierno added to the list an ultralight vehicle for airborne troops and the possibility of purchasing a light tank.
The Army has a dismal track record in the past decade of procuring top-end combat platforms, to include the cancellation of the ground combat vehicle and the armed aerial scout helicopter.
JLTV is still on track, he said. The program seeks a wheeled truck capable of carrying several soldiers inside a chassis and body that provides the soldier protection of a mine-resistant, ambush protected (MRAP) vehicle.
“The plan is funded and that we will build 49,000 and we have not walked away from that,” he said. “When we look at vehicles, we look at a family of vehicles and what we need. This is one we absolutely need.”
“I feel really good with what we’ve done with JLTV. … It will be a central piece of the Army as we move forward. We certainly have many other capabilities that we have to take a look at.”
After more than a dozen years of combat, the Army is in need of a fleetwide technological refresh. It has embarked on a plan to modernize existing vehicles with communications and survivability upgrades while creating a list of capability gaps that its maneuver forces would experience in scenarios like forced-entry operations, Odierno said.
“One of them is, for example, when the airborne gets on the ground, we want to be able to move them very quickly somewhere,” he said. “They can’t necessarily do it walking, so we have this ultralight vehicle that we’re doing tests on down at Fort Bragg.”
The Army also needs some sort of light reconnaissance capability and mobile protected firepower, he added. The latter would be a mid- to long-term acquisition priority.
“Through using the Army operating concept and the systems that we have set up in reviewing the warfighting challenges, we are now identifying where the gaps and seams are and for the first time we are doing it not in stovepipes.”
I think now we can ease the way forward with how we can start identifying short-term, mid-term and long-term gaps that we now can invest in,” he said. “Actually, I think it will improve our relationships with industry because they are going to be in this with us. “
Odierno said the Army would increase the speed of combat vehicle and weapon development by measuring needs against its operating concepts.
“One of the problems we’ve had in the past with our major programs is we tried to build the perfect vehicle and so the requirements were so high they were difficult to meet and they ended up being over budget and sometimes we found out we couldn’t meet them.
“I think where we’re headed now is we’re developing requirements that leave room for improvement and that we can become iterative in the development of a program,” Odierno said. “So as we develop first a system and it’s 80 percent of what we want initially but in the next iteration it can be 90 percent. In the next iteration it can be 100 percent of the requirement.”
In the next two years, he predicted the Army will publish formal requirements for a future vertical lift platform—an effort that is already underway with the joint multirole helicopter demonstration—and infantry fighting vehicle, which could be a new start program or satisfied under the ongoing armored multipurpose vehicle (AMPV) program.
“We have also identified we might need a lighter, tank-like capability and I think you could see that coming out soon,” he said. “I think the manned-unmanned in ground systems and how that relates to each other is something you’re going to see come out of this.”