By Ann Roosevelt
For the past three years, the Army chief of staff has talked about the service being out of “balance,” being so weighed down by current commitments that it couldn’t do what was necessary to sustain the force for the long term, and have the strategic flexibility to do other things.
However, Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said that’s changing.
“With this [fiscal year] ’11 budget…contains the resources to basically finish what we set out to do back in 2004 in terms of changing the Army away from its Cold War formations into formations more relevant today,” Casey said yesterday at the Defense Writers Group.
As part of this massive rebalancing, the service is going to a rotational model, much the way the Navy and Marine Corps have been on for years.
“We have to do that because I believe we’re going to have to continue to generate trained and ready forces for employment around the world for the next decade or so,” he said. This requires “huge institutional change on our part.”
The changes aimed at rebalancing the service have been ongoing since 2004 and while 150,000 soldiers have been deploying and redeploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The ’11 budget contains the money to basically finish that organizational transformation,” by and large the modular units the Army created to give itself more versatility because such modular units can be tailored to a particular situation,” Casey said.
“We need to posture ourselves to operate successfully across the spectrum of conflict,” he said.
In February 2008, new Army operational doctrine was released that said formations would be able to simultaneously conduct offensive, defensive and stability operations to “seize and retain the initiative and achieve decisive results.”
“That is what has been driving us,” Casey said. However, it is not an easy intellectual shift to move from the notion the Army is to fight other armies.
“We say it takes a decade to fully ingrain a doctrine in an organization the size of the Army,” he said.
Once soldiers are able to spend more time at home than deployed or preparing to deploy, they will have the time to train on different aspects of full spectrum conflict, not just counter-insurgency scenarios for Iraq and Afghanistan.
But Casey said extra time doesn’t mean going back to force on force training scenarios. They will now be involved hybrid threat scenarios.
“This fall the first units will go through the Joint Readiness Training Center that will go against hybrid scenarios that will look more like Southern Lebanon in 2006 than large armored formations,” he said. The scenarios will be a mix of conventional, irregular, terrorist and criminal capabilities.
The intellectual work for Army change was done in 2002 and 2003, and it was “good work,” Casey said, but now the service knows more about the operating environment.
“We are going to continue to adapt those formations that we have built over the next several years,” he said. “I believe that we, not just the Army but the country, is in a period of fundamental and continuous change. Everything we do has to be very adaptable.”