The U.S. Army in a Time of Transition
Building a Flexible Force
Summary
With the Iraq war over and U.S. troops returning from Afghanistan, the U.S. Army faces a decade of change, writes its chief of staff. It will need to adjust to smaller budgets, focus more on Asia, and embrace a fuller range of potential missions.
RAYMOND T. ODIERNO is Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.
After six months as chief of staff, I can see clearly that the coming decade will be a vital period of transition for the U.S. Army. The service will have to adjust to three major changes: declining budgets, due to the country's worsened fiscal situation; a shift in emphasis to the Asia-Pacific region; and a broadening of focus from counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and training of partners to shaping the strategic environment, preventing the outbreak of dangerous regional conflicts, and improving the army's readiness to respond in force to a range of complex contingencies worldwide.
SMALLER BUDGETS
To ensure that declining budgets do not lead to shortfalls in training and equipment, the size of the active-duty force will have to be reduced. The reductions will be painful, but they are necessary and can be done responsibly. We must do our utmost to ensure that the soldiers leaving the force are treated fairly and that they and their families are provided with support to help them successfully transition to civilian life. We must also cut units as we cut soldiers, to prevent units from becoming undermanned and ineffective.
Although maintaining a smaller active-duty army will involve some risks, those risks will be less than some believe because of the changes that have taken place in the army in recent years. Today's force is qualitatively different from the army of a decade ago. It is more combat seasoned, more tightly integrated with the other military services and with special operations forces, and more technologically advanced.
Today's army also has an unprecedented level of integration between its active and its reserve components. The Army National Guard and the Army Reserve have stood shoulder to shoulder with active-duty troops around the globe, and the level of trust, respect, and mutual understanding between them is unparalleled in the army's history. Our reserve component soldiers are better than they have ever been, and we will dedicate resources to ensure that some of them will be either deployed or ready to deploy around the globe. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137423/raymond-t-odierno/the-us-army-in-a-time-of-transition
Full article
WASHINGTON (April 25, 2012) -- After six months as chief of staff, I can see
clearly that the coming decade will be a vital period of transition for the U.S. Army. The
service will have to adjust to three major changes: declining budgets, due to the
country's worsened fiscal situation; a shift in emphasis to the Asia-Pacific region; and a
broadening of focus from counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and training of partners to
shaping the strategic environment, preventing the outbreak of dangerous regional
conflicts, and improving the army's readiness to respond in force to a range of complex
contingencies worldwide.
SMALLER BUDGETS
To ensure that declining budgets do not lead to shortfalls in training and equipment, the
size of the active-duty force will have to be reduced. The reductions will be painful, but
they are necessary and can be done responsibly. We must do our utmost to ensure that the
soldiers leaving the force are treated fairly and that they and their families are
provided with support to help them successfully transition to civilian life. We must also
cut units as we cut soldiers, to prevent units from becoming undermanned and ineffective.
Although maintaining a smaller active-duty army will involve some risks, those risks will
be less than some believe because of the changes that have taken place in the army in
recent years. Today's force is qualitatively different from the army of a decade ago. It
is more combat seasoned, more tightly integrated with the other military services and with
special operations forces, and more technologically advanced.
Today's army also has an unprecedented level of integration between its active and its
reserve components. The Army National Guard and the Army Reserve have stood shoulder to
shoulder with active-duty troops around the globe, and the level of trust, respect, and
mutual understanding between them is unparalleled in the army's history. Our reserve
component soldiers are better than they have ever been, and we will dedicate resources to
ensure that some of them will be either deployed or ready to deploy around the globe.
Multiple initiatives are under way to ensure that the army continues to improve the
stewardship of its resources and increase its return on the investment of public dollars.
These include broad-based reforms of the processes that support key army functions,
changes to how the army defines its equipment needs and then buys and fields systems to
meet them, a careful examination of both institutional and operational headquarters to
eliminate excess layers of command, and the pursuit of alternative energy sources and
practices that can increase operational effectiveness while also saving money.
Ultimately, maintaining the army the country requires with fewer resources will mean
balancing three variables: the overall size of the force, its equipment, and its training
and readiness. All the budgetary adjustments I recommend as chief of staff will be
governed by the necessity of ensuring that each of these pillars is sufficiently robust to
field an army with the capability and capacity to perform its assigned missions.
PIVOTING TO THE PACIFIC
The United States serves as a critical guarantor of stability in the Asia-Pacific region,
and a robust joint military presence there is an important part of the country's broader
regional strategy. U.S. naval and air forces maintain the ability to provide rapid
strikes, and if a broader conflict arose, they would play a key role in enabling the entry
of the U.S. Army or the Marines into the theater. But the army has a critical regional
role to play in peacetime as well. The presence of army forces in the region is an
essential component of deterrence against aggression, complicating potential adversaries'
planning and diverting their resources from other investments. And despite the region's
vast expanses of oceans, Asia's militaries remain dominated by armies, making the U.S.
Army's robust relationships with its regional partners a vital resource in a broad range
of situations.
The recently announced training initiative between the United States and Australia has
already demonstrated a renewed U.S. commitment to the region. This adds to the army's
partnership with South Korea, its long-standing record of exercises with Japan and
Thailand, and special operations forces' training missions in the Philippines. Over the
next decade, the army will build on this strong foundation, seeking opportunities to
engage new partners. We will also look to increase exchanges with other forces, better
align our foreign assistance programs with additional engagement opportunities, and
explore a range of other changes, from new command-and-control structures that would
enhance responsiveness to modifications in how army forces in the region are provisioned
to increase their readiness.
Of course, even as the army increases its activities in the Asia-Pacific region, it will
retain substantial responsibilities elsewhere in the world. The posture of the U.S.
military in the Middle East is critical to maintaining regional stability there. Peace
between Israel and its neighbors remains elusive, Iran's behavior continues to be
provocative and destabilizing, and the trajectory of the Arab Spring is by no means fixed.
To maintain U.S. influence, particularly if additional U.S. naval assets will be devoted
to the Pacific, the army will continue to need some combination of prepositioned equipment
and a permanent and rotational presence there throughout the next decade.
In most of Africa and the Americas, as elsewhere, the dominant military forces are armies,
giving the U.S. Army a major role to play in continued U.S. military engagement. In
Africa, past partnership activities have included assisting local forces in assuming
greater responsibility for peacekeeping operations, and this will remain an important
responsibility. With wars proceeding elsewhere, the army's efforts in both Africa and the
Americas have been limited in recent years. But we are exploring new ways to enhance our
support to the U.S. Africa and Southern Commands as needs arise and existing operational
commitments decline, while remaining respectful of local sensitivities.
Relationships with our European partners will be even more critical as so many Western
nations reduce their defense expenditures. We have already announced the removal of two
army brigades from Europe. But we will continue our pattern of robust engagement with our
allies and partners in the region by deploying rotational forces to ensure continued
interoperability and the further development of advanced military skills. Furthermore, the
army intends to continue to invest in logistics hubs, intelligence facilities,
state-of-the-art medical capabilities, and training grounds there, all of which serve as
dramatic multipliers for U.S. joint forces and allied military activities both within and
beyond Europe.
Finally, the challenges in the United States itself remain daunting. Although the actions
of our forces overseas have helped preclude more terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland,
the threat persists. The need for U.S. armed forces, and the army in particular, to
provide planning, logistical, command-and-control, and equipment support to civil
authorities in the event of natural disasters continues to be demonstrated regularly and
is unlikely to diminish. And many security challenges in the Americas are transnational,
including humanitarian crises, illicit trafficking, organized crime, terrorism, and
weapons proliferation. Army forces will continue to be ready to contribute to broader
national efforts to counter those challenges at home, if needed. Our reserve component
soldiers remain the bedrock of the army's domestic response capability, but where
appropriate we will also dedicate active-duty forces, especially those with niche skills
and equipment, to provide civilian officials with a robust set of reliable and rapid
response options.
A BROADER MISSION SET
The final major transition the army must manage is that from a force focused on
counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and advising and assisting to one that actively
prepares to effectively conduct a fuller range of potential missions. Since
counterterrorism missions will not diminish in the foreseeable future, the army will need
to preserve and enhance its relationship with joint special operations forces. The
evolution of this partnership over the past decade has been extraordinary, and the ties
can become even stronger as we continue to develop new operational concepts, enhance our
training, and invest in new capabilities. The army will also need to preserve the
intellectual and organizational knowledge it has gained about counterinsurgency, stability
operations, and advise-and-assist missions. This expertise has come at a very high price
that is etched into the hearts and minds of all of us who have worn the army uniform over
the last ten years, and we will not dishonor our fallen comrades by allowing it to
atrophy. But we will address new needs as well.
The army will make it a high priority in the next several years to more fully integrate
cyberspace capabilities into our tactical and operational units. Despite continuing
ambiguities about how and when such capabilities may be employed, we will clearly be
increasingly challenged in cyberspace, and we must accelerate our efforts both to protect
ourselves and to exploit our advantages in this domain.
The army will also make sure it firmly embeds one of the most costly lessons it has
learned over the last decade: how to deal with the challenge of hybrid warfare. In the
future, it will be increasingly common for the army to operate in environments with both
regular military and irregular paramilitary or civilian adversaries, with the potential
for terrorism, criminality, and other complications. Advanced technology and the
information revolution have fundamentally altered the battlefield. Now, any activity a
soldier undertakes can rapidly evolve into a combination of combat, governance, and civil
support missions, and any individual, military or civilian, can alter the trajectory of an
operation with the push of a button on a cell phone. The army's experiences in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere have shown that failing to account for this challenge is
dangerous. In recent years, we have made great strides in incorporating the complexity of
hybrid warfare into our training for deploying forces, and we are determined to
consolidate and build on those gains to ensure that our soldiers and leaders are prepared
for the uncertainty they will face in the future.
Finally, the army needs to prepare for doing many different things well. In addition to
combat of all kinds, possible operations in the next several years will include everything
from helping victims of a flood to restoring order in a collapsed state with large-scale
criminal activity, violence, and perhaps even unconventional weaponry. But how can the
army broaden its scope and maintain its readiness even as the available resources decline?
First, we must align our forces, both active and reserve, with regional commands to the
greatest possible extent. Regional commanders' anticipations of likely contingencies
should dictate the mission set for which aligned units prepare. This means that some units
may focus on higher-end war fighting while others dedicate much of their training to
disaster relief or exercises with partners in the region. Regional alignment will also
help inform the language training, cultural training, and even the equipment that units
receive. Second, we will develop our capacity for adaptation and rapid adjustment so as to
be able to respond to unexpected demands of any kind as and when they emerge. At the
individual level, this means revitalizing how we train and prepare our leaders. At the
unit level, it means reexamining how to provide the most efficient, effective, and
flexible forces to joint force commanders -- making sure they retain a high level of
war-fighting competency while still training for other missions as appropriate. And at the
institutional level, it means ensuring that the army's equipping strategy includes
realistic projections about the industrial base and reevaluating the army's capability to
rapidly project power around the world.
PREVENTING, SHAPING, AND WINNING
The English philosopher Francis Bacon noted that "things alter for the worse
spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly." The army is
determined to design its better future, given the constraints and requirements it faces.
Over the next ten years, we will be increasingly focused on preventing conflict and
shaping the broader security environment. This means maintaining a force of sufficient
size and capacity so that potential adversaries understand clearly our ability to compel
capitulation if necessary. It also means maintaining a vigorous presence abroad, one that
reassures our partners and dissuades our foes.
As we shift away from active involvement in major combat operations, we will increasingly
emphasize activities aimed at deepening our relationships with partners and demonstrating
our country's commitment to global security. Ideally, a focus on prevention and shaping
will keep future conflicts at bay. Should they emerge nonetheless, the army, as part of
the joint force, will be ready to decisively achieve American ends, whatever they may be.
Ten years of war have produced an exceptional cadre of commissioned and noncommissioned
leaders able to shift among different missions and different physical, political, and
cultural environments. With years of sacrifice in Iraq behind us, and a responsible
transition in Afghanistan on the near horizon, army leaders will put those skills to use
again to posture the force for the decade ahead. www.army.mil/article/78563
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON The Army is reshaping the way many soldiers are trained and deployed, with some conventional units to be placed officially under Special Operations commanders and others assigned to regions of the world viewed as emerging security risks, like Africa.
The pending changes reflect an effort by the Armys top officer, Gen. Ray Odierno, to institutionalize many of the successful tactics adopted ad hoc in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the Army shrinks by 80,000 troops over the next five years, General Odierno is seeking ways to assure that it is prepared for a broader set of missions, including in hot spots around the world where few soldiers have deployed in the past.
The initiatives are a recognition that the role and clout of Special Operations forces are certain to grow over coming years. Faced with impending budget cuts and public exhaustion with large overseas deployments, the military will focus on working with partner nations to increase their ability to deal with security threats within their borders. The goal is to limit the footprint of most new overseas deployments.
Senior Pentagon policy makers briefed on the plans say they are fully in keeping with the new military strategy announced early this year by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Creating new sets of formal relationships between Army general-purpose units and the Special Operations Command would be a significant change in Army culture. For more than a generation, the large, conventional Army and the small, secretive commando community viewed each other from a distance, and with distrust. Armor and infantry units trained and operated separately from counterterrorism and counterinsurgency teams.
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed that. The demands of combining high-end conventional combat and counterinsurgency missions for complementary and overlapping operations in Afghanistan and Iraq pushed conventional and Special Operations forces together. General Odierno, who now serves as Army chief of staff, oversaw many of those tactical initiatives.
He was a division commander in northern Iraq when Saddam Hussein was captured there in a mission that combined mechanized infantry units and the elite counterterrorism force. And during his tours as the No. 2 and then the top commander in Iraq, he integrated conventional and Special Operations missions on a daily basis.
Under the emerging plans, conventional Army units would train alongside Special Operations units, and would deploy with them, under their command, on overseas missions.
Other units would remain in the conventional force, but would be told in advance that their deployments would focus on parts of the world, like Africa, that do not currently have Army units assigned to them. This would allow officers and soldiers to develop regional expertise.
General Odierno foreshadowed his planning in an essay published last week in Foreign Affairs, in which he wrote that the Army will need to preserve and enhance its relationship with joint Special Operations forces.
The evolution of this partnership over the past decade has been extraordinary, and the ties can become even stronger as we continue to develop new operational concepts, enhance our training and invest in new capabilities, he wrote.
On the effort to prepare Army units with a regional focus, General Odierno wrote, We must align our forces, both active and reserve, with regional commands to the greatest extent possible.
The militarys global combatant commanders would guide whether the units focused on high-end combat skills, disaster relief or training missions to improve the capability of militaries within partner nations. Regional alignment will also help inform the language training, cultural training and even the equipment that units receive, General Odierno wrote.
The first unit to be designated for this new regional orientation will be a full brigade that will train for missions in support of the militarys Africa Command, Army and Pentagon officials said. (5.02.2012, Thom Shanker) www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/us/politics/odierno-seeks-to-reshape-training-and-deployment-for-soldiers.html
Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security
By Spencer S. Hsu and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 1, 2008
The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.
The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.
There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.
But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, dedicating 20,000 troops to domestic response -- a nearly sevenfold increase in five years -- "would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable," Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in remarks last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the realization that civilian authorities may be overwhelmed in a catastrophe prompted "a fundamental change in military culture," he said.
The Pentagon's plan calls for three rapid-reaction forces to be ready for emergency response by September 2011. The first 4,700-person unit, built around an active-duty combat brigade based at Fort Stewart, Ga., was available as of Oct. 1, said Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., commander of the U.S. Northern Command.
If funding continues, two additional teams will join nearly 80 smaller National Guard and reserve units made up of about 6,000 troops in supporting local and state officials nationwide. All would be trained to respond to a domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive attack, or CBRNE event, as the military calls it.
Military preparations for a domestic weapon-of-mass-destruction attack have been underway since at least 1996, when the Marine Corps activated a 350-member chemical and biological incident response force and later based it in Indian Head, Md., a Washington suburb. Such efforts accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks, and at the time Iraq was invaded in 2003, a Pentagon joint task force drew on 3,000 civil support personnel across the United States.
In 2005, a new Pentagon homeland defense strategy emphasized "preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents." National security threats were not limited to adversaries who seek to grind down U.S. combat forces abroad, McHale said, but also include those who "want to inflict such brutality on our society that we give up the fight," such as by detonating a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city.
In late 2007, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed a directive approving more than $556 million over five years to set up the three response teams, known as CBRNE Consequence Management Response Forces. Planners assume an incident could lead to thousands of casualties, more than 1 million evacuees and contamination of as many as 3,000 square miles, about the scope of damage Hurricane Katrina caused in 2005.
Last month, McHale said, authorities agreed to begin a $1.8 million pilot project funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency through which civilian authorities in five states could tap military planners to develop disaster response plans. Hawaii, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Washington and West Virginia will each focus on a particular threat -- pandemic flu, a terrorist attack, hurricane, earthquake and catastrophic chemical release, respectively -- speeding up federal and state emergency planning begun in 2003.
Last Monday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates ordered defense officials to review whether the military, Guard and reserves can respond adequately to domestic disasters.
Bert B. Tussing, director of homeland defense and security issues at the U.S. Army War College's Center for Strategic Leadership, said the new Pentagon approach "breaks the mold" by assigning an active-duty combat brigade to the Northern Command for the first time. Until now, the military required the command to rely on troops requested from other sources.
"This is a genuine recognition that this [job] isn't something that you want to have a pickup team responsible for," said Tussing, who has assessed the military's homeland security strategies.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Cato Institute are troubled by what they consider an expansion of executive authority.
Gates gave commanders 25 days to propose changes and cost estimates. He cited the work of a congressionally chartered commission, which concluded in January that the Guard and reserve forces are not ready and that they lack equipment and training.
Domestic emergency deployment may be "just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority," or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU's National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of "a creeping militarization" of homeland security.
"There's a notion that whenever there's an important problem, that the thing to do is to call in the boys in green," Healy said, "and that's at odds with our long-standing tradition of being wary of the use of standing armies to keep the peace."
McHale stressed that the response units will be subject to the act, that only 8 percent of their personnel will be responsible for security and that their duties will be to protect the force, not other law enforcement. For decades, the military has assigned larger units to respond to civil disturbances, such as during the Los Angeles riot in 1992.
U.S. forces are already under heavy strain, however. The first reaction force is built around the Army's 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team, which returned in April after 15 months in Iraq. The team includes operations, aviation and medical task forces that are to be ready to deploy at home or overseas within 48 hours, with units specializing in chemical decontamination, bomb disposal, emergency care and logistics.
The one-year domestic mission, however, does not replace the brigade's next scheduled combat deployment in 2010. The brigade may get additional time in the United States to rest and regroup, compared with other combat units, but it may also face more training and operational requirements depending on its homeland security assignments.
Renuart said the Pentagon is accounting for the strain of fighting two wars, and the need for troops to spend time with their families. "We want to make sure the parameters are right for Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. The 1st Brigade's soldiers "will have some very aggressive training, but will also be home for much of that."
Although some Pentagon leaders initially expected to build the next two response units around combat teams, they are likely to be drawn mainly from reserves and the National Guard, such as the 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade from South Carolina, which returned in May after more than a year in Afghanistan.
Now that Pentagon strategy gives new priority to homeland security and calls for heavier reliance on the Guard and reserves, McHale said, Washington has to figure out how to pay for it.
"It's one thing to decide upon a course of action, and it's something else to make it happen," he said. "It's time to put our money where our mouth is." (washingtonpost, 12.01.2008, Spencer S. Hsu and Ann Scott Tyson) www..com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113002217.html?hpid=topnews
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." Thomas Jefferson