A straight-talkin', snake-eatin', Army chief of staff
By Phillip Carter - INTEL DUMP
Sean Naylor and Megan Scully have an extremely interesting interview with Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, in this week's Army Times. Gen. Schoomaker came out of retirement, after a lengthy career in U.S. special operations forces, to lead the Army after Gen. Eric Shinseki's retirement in 2003. Since then, he has struggled to balance the ongoing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan with longer term initiatives to transform and reform the Army.
October 22, 2004
Q & A with Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker
Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker has been Army chief of staff since Aug. 1, 2003, when he was called out of retirement to take the top job. Since then, he has embarked on revolutionary changes in force structure and manning the force, as well as leading the Army during the war in Iraq and a multi-front war against terrorism. Staff writer Sean Naylor and Defense News writer Megan Scully sat down with the chief for an interview Oct. 14. Here’s what he had to say in response to their questions:
Q: Starting with [Future Combat Systems], the last time we talked you talked a bit about force structure and what was going on there. Let me hear some things that the [Key Performance Parameters], the temporary KPPs, that they’re starting to shift and the Army/Navy sort of stepping away from the transportability KPP for FCS. The C-130 performance parameter. I wanted to see if that was the case or if it’s something that you’re committed to.
A: As we look at FCS we’re examining everything all the time, but right now we’re committed to the C-130 sizing and all the rest of that, so there’s no change in that right now. But we have had discussions and we want to make sure why we think what we think and whether it still makes sense. We’ll continue to always challenge what we’re looking to do. There’s no decision or any serious effort to walk away from that right now at all.
Q: If it did, would it be a matter of cost or would it be because the operation’s proven that that’s no longer necessary — in terms of the transportability KPP and any of the others for FCS.
A: I have no idea why we might. As we think about it, as we learn more, we’re asking ourselves if they still make sense. We’ve accelerated the strategy and we’re taking a look at how we are trying to spiral things back into the current force. We’re moving to close it.
You’ve seen the acceleration strategy. That’s a pretty important move there that we’re making, and trying to draw the current force into what we were thinking about conceptually as FCS.
I would say the C-130 sizing isn’t the only thing that we’re asking ourselves about. We’re looking at the whole thing, across the spectrum — what we’re learning in the operation and what we think the technology will bring us.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that you may be questioning or reviewing in terms of FCS or the future force as a whole? New systems or new capabilities you think you’ll need in the future force because of current operations, lessons learned, or things that perhaps were going to be fielded with FCS that you no longer see as necessary.
A: I can tell you that we are fairly certain we know we’re going to need. We have to move towards a full spectrum capability. So we have to ask ourselves, as we do, to make sure that across all of the issues of doctrine, organization, training, and the materiel, and the rest, that we want to make sure that we’re maintaining our relevance vis-à-vis the fact that the nation expects the Army to be able to fight sustained campaigns as it always has asked us to do, and to be effective across the entire spectrum, through the kinds of things that we’re seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and through other things we can anticipate.
So we’re always concerned that we are balancing all aspects of what we’re doing. And with the soldier being increasingly important, I think what we’ve done is we’ve reaffirmed the fact that the soldier is the centerpiece of the Army and that the Army is always going to remain fundamentally a human endeavor. The soldiers, the people who lead our soldiers, and how we enable those soldiers and leaders, are the central issues.
So as we think about this concept of the FCS, remember we’re not talking about individual platforms. We’re talking about a system of systems to accommodate the full spectrum. There are a lot of reasons for us to continue to ask ourselves if we are on azimuth, and is it still moving the right way? And remember, many of the systems we have today — the M1 tank, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the Paladin and Apache — many are going to be with us out the next 25 years. They are going to be part of this Army and what its total spectrum capability is going to be.
We can’t just think about the end game. I think it’s wrong to think about Transformation as a path to a destination. I think this is really a journey without destination. The Army will continue to have to be adaptable and have to be transforming in some form or fashion because the war is changing and so is the strategic environment in which we operate. We can’t look in a crystal ball today and predict 25 years from now what it’s going to look like.
So I think the things that we see that are enduring is the fact that soldiers are going to remain central to what we’re doing and that warfare is going to remain essentially a human endeavor, and that this is all about how we maximize this across the spectrum. Anybody who thinks FCS is just replacing humans with technology is wrong.
I think we’re really talking about how to enhance the human dimension with increasingly more capable technologies and how we leverage things like networking and some of the more holistic geometry of the battlefield in the future. But we’re still going to have to have soldiers who are masters of the low tech while they’re very comfortable in the high tech kind of solutions.
Q: You mentioned a bit about the Army being flexible and adaptable. One of the things we’ve seen in the last year is this priority kind of changing, and I think the FCS restructure is a reflection of that.
The Army just sat down and crafted its next five-year spending plan from FY06 to 2011. What makes the top of your shopping list when you’re buying equipment? Is it soldier equipment? Is it ground vehicles, futuristic, FCS network sort of capabilities?
A: It’s more holistic than any one thing. If you look at how we have modified the balance of our program during the post Cold War period where we thought we were in kind of a hiatus, we were taking some risk in the current force and really weighting the future.
We’ve seen that that’s not an acceptable strategy right now so we’re trying to balance that see-saw. What we are doing is taking things that we know are going to be relevant in the future and that are available now to us, and spiraling them in on top of our current force and at the same time, balancing the fact that we are committed in going to the future.
Take a look at how we restructured FCS. Look at the previous program and the major components of the Future Combat Systems as it was outlined. And remember, we’re early on in this because FCS is relatively young. If you compare it to Comanche development, Comanche is over two decades old. What are we into FCS now for four years or something?
But if you took a look at that program, you have 18 systems, platforms, that are integrated within an overarching network, and most of us feel that by a long shot the network is central to the success of the system of systems. And so it makes sense to us to start pulling that network back earlier on top of our formations and start acting, organizing, fighting, much like we envision doing in the future.
If we looked at the previous program, we would not see much of that network available to us until sometime beyond 2010. And it was a very small piece of that network that we would start seeing coming into the force.
Q: Now it’s 2008?
A: But it’s much broader. If you know that chart we had. This is being done in concert with modularity. We’re building these modular units. If you look at the previous one, by 2014, only a narrow band of those modular units would have been covered by that network. So we restructured it to start bringing that network in earlier and broadening the fielding of that network so that by 2014 we’re going to cover the force, or 99 percent of the force by 2014. That’s a huge difference in what we’re doing.
And if you looked at the previous program, we were only going to be able to close about 13 of the 18 systems within FCS. Under the restructuring, the way we’ve accelerated it, we’re going to close 18 of the 18. So by 2014, we should have 18 of the 18 in an actual FCS unit of action and have all of our modules, our modular formations, covered by the network. This helps us ramp into the future in a much more seamless way than before. Before we were going to have very little change in our current force and all of a sudden leap up on this big plateau with a radically different kind of way of doing business.
I ask people, what was our potential to complete the previous program? We have all kinds of estimates, but one of them was something like 28 or 30 percent chance of completion on the first one. And the estimate on this one shows there’s a greater than 70 percent chance of closing. It’s a much more complete program. And to me it makes a lot of sense. There are lots of things that we are yet to learn as we go forward into the future and we see what the strategic environment is going to be. I feel much more confident that by structuring it the way we have, that we’re moving into the future in a much more balanced way with our feet up under us where we have a lot more ability to adapt to what we may find and anticipate what the challenges may be in the future.
So there’s less risk in it from the warfighters’ perspective, and I think there’s significantly less risk than the approach we have now from the programmatic perspective. We’re all much more comfortable with the way we’ve structured it.
Q: Shifting gears a little bit, I was at an acquisitions conference last month and [Lt. Gen. Joseph Yakovac Jr.,] said, I’m quoting him here, the Army would be in a world of trouble if it didn’t receive supplemental [funding bills], and that planning in the [Program Objective Memorandum] was predicated on the supplementals.
How much longer do you expect the Army to get these supplementals and what happens after that ends?
A: First of all the supplementals are not designed to pay for our war-related efforts. A good example, when I arrived here, we had less than 500 up-armored Humvees in the entire Army because the way the Army was structured, we saw the Humvee being associated with MPs and Scouts. We’ve had a demand in theater for 10 times that many and we’re filling that demand, but that was not something inside the program, nor should it be something inside the program. Supplemental funding is providing for the force protection that’s directly related to the war effort.
The level of operational tempo that we have is being paid for with the supplemental. The increased consumption of repair parts and ammunition are all being funded by the supplemental. But the issue is that, from a strategic perspective, we have a war to fight and we’re receiving increased dollars. I call that the window of opportunity — these dollars that we’re receiving. And we have an Army to transform. So what is important to understand and I think what really is the extraordinary window that we have here is that we can combine these two. Combine this momentum – the momentum from the focus that war gives us, the funding that we’re getting from the war, and our transformational effort. So as we go through the POM, and you can imagine these being different fiscal years, we don’t know how long this will go long or how long supplemental funding will continue to support our wartime effort. But it makes sense to us to leverage the momentum and the additional funding we have so that where we go forward to a transformed force for the 21st Century.
We should not think about these as two separate efforts. In other words, Transformation should parallel what we’re doing and we shouldn’t be resetting our forces back the way they were. We should be resetting them forward. It’s a two-for. It’s two birds with one stone. It’s good for the taxpayer and it’s good for the Army and it’s good for the nation and what we’re doing.
So I don’t quite agree exactly with what perhaps either Gen. Yakovak said or the way you interpreted what he said. I think that the rate at which we’re transforming has a lot to do with the degree to which we are operating. The demand that the war has on us gives us an opportunity for us to leverage that momentum, to help us transform faster.
If we did not have the war or we did not have this supplemental funding, or if the war wasn’t there to focus us and we didn’t have the funding associated with it, Transformation would take much, much longer. So we’re attempting to accelerate our transformation to get ourselves postured properly for the future as early as we possibly can. And quite frankly, it’s a strategy that is paying off for us.
What we’re able to do here is to transform not only our active component to the units of action but also our Army National Guard and Army Reserve force structure in a way that in fact makes it one Army. And we are, today, operating as a total Army.
Q: I’ve heard that a lot recently, and the National Guard and Reserve, were they supposed to transform at a slower speed than the Army or not receive the same technologies or —
A: Remember that in normal times our National Guard and Reserves spend about 39 days a year on active duty. How many 39-day periods do you think it would take to get a year’s worth of training? A man-year would take you eight or nine 39 day cycles. It gives us the opportunity, as we mobilize the National Guard and as we mobilize our Reserve support formations, to transform them simultaneously with the active component. It really accelerates it.
So in that way I agree with Gen. Yakovak It’s not just the material piece, it’s the overall transformation that this momentum give us to build. Not only are we getting a lot of combat experience and a lot of experience on the leadership, but we’re also able to outfit National Guard formations precisely the way we’re outfitting active formations and we’re using their deployment on the way to war to outfit them correctly so that we’re fielding soldiers that are in fact equipped the same, trained the same and can operate the same in formations that are interchangeable. This has proven out.
If you take a look right now, we have a National Guard brigade with the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq. We have a National Guard brigade with the 1st Infantry Division. We had a National Guard brigade with the Marines. We had a National Guard brigade with the 82nd when the 82nd was over there, and they’re operating very effectively. You can go over there and visit, but I daresay you go to a National Guard organization and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in terms of how they’re operating and the kinds of things that they’re doing.
This is extraordinary because without that momentum, it would have taken us decades to get where we are today. That’s how I explain it. Gen. Yakovak looks at it from the material acquisition piece and from that perspective he’s correct. We’re putting Rapid Fielding Initiative, on the reserve component soldiers just like our active component. That’s something that probably, in normal times, would have taken us many more years to do.
That’s why I say we are one Army. We have an Army of several components. It’s actually almost a 1.2 million person Army if you’re talking about 500,000 active, talking about 350,000 National Guard, 205,000 Army Reserve, and about 110,000 in the IRR. We now have a holistic approach to our Army. The difference between the components is their availability. There are different availability factors to the Guard and Reserve, the IRR or the active. But if I look at the Army today, we have about 640,000 soldiers on active duty. That includes about 130,000 or 140,000 reserve component soldiers.
Q: One of the things that has come up in the last couple of months has been the issue of end strength. In January, you discussed temporarily increasing the size of the Army. Senator Kerry, if elected, said he was going to increase the size of the Army by two divisions. The House and Senate authorizers recently voted to permanently increase end strength by 30,000 initially and then growing over the next few years.
If the resources are there, are you opposed to increasing the end strength of the Army on a permanent basis?
A: I don’t want to speak at all [about] either one of the presidential candidates.
I’ll talk to you about what the Army’s doing and you can draw your conclusions. We are growing the Army. We’ve grown the Army this year by almost 15,000 soldiers and that does not involve stop-loss. It involves recruiting more soldiers, which we did this year. We raised our recruiting target. In 2003 our recruiting target was 71,000 soldiers and we recruited 71,000 soldiers. We raised it for ‘04 to 77,000 soldiers with a goal of perhaps 77,500. In fact, we recruited about 77,580. So we not only met our objective but we exceeded our goal in terms of recruiting for the active component.
We also raised our retention goal from around 51,000 to around 56,000 and we actually exceeded our retention goal. Something like 102 percent is what we made.
So in real terms, we grew the Army this year by almost 14,000 soldiers, or a little over 14,000. At the same time, we are going inside the Army and finding where we have soldiers who are doing things that soldiers don’t have to do and we’re converting some of those positions to civilian positions so that they can relieve those soldiers.
Another initiative we have is the stabilization of the Army. In the past, we PCS’d over two-thirds of our force every year. I’m talking about people coming in the force, people leaving the force, people going to school, people going between duty stations. We were averaging somewhere between 61,000 and 67,000 soldiers a day who were moving outside the force. If you just stabilize 15 percent of 60,000 soldiers, you have three brigades.
An example is Korea. Forty percent of our soldiers were moving voluntarily between duty stations. 40 percent of them were going to Korea because of the one-year individual replacement system. So we opened a program in Korea called the Assignment Incentive Program. We offered soldiers the opportunity to extend their tour in Korea either one year or two years beyond their normal one-year tour. We had over 2,000 soldiers voluntarily extended their tour by two more years in Korea. We had more than 6,000 voluntarily extended their tour for one year. That means for every soldier who extended one year, that’s one soldier we don’t have to move. So 6,000 times two is 12,000 soldiers who we stabilized. That’s almost a division.
If you take a look at the soldiers who stayed two years, that’s three soldiers we don’t have to move. By going to unit manning and unit stabilization, we are taking people off of buses, trains, planes, cars, with their dogs, cats and families, and keeping them in units longer. It makes the unit more cohesive. It takes out all the turbulence and churning that you have inside of a unit and it puts a team together that, when it deploys, is a coherent team. That’s what we are doing. That’s kind of under the water line.
Back to your question. I went and said we have to grow the Army, and we’re growing it. I asked to grow it by 30,000. I asked to do that with supplemental funding because it’s directly related to the war. Because if we had to go inside of our program at this stage, not knowing how many people we’re going to find to be able to stabilize in the Army and not knowing what the demand is going to be if we continue on this war, and we had to go inside of our program to pay for those people — You see, you have to pay for all those people every year. The year that they’re there you have to pay for them. That means we would have had to have gone to our other accounts such as modernization accounts or RDT&E accounts.
When you look at the outlay there you’ll find out that to pay for manpower with procurement you end up paying a much higher price. In fact because of the outlay they say, if you had to go to your procurement accounts, it would take almost $5 to pay for every one of those one. If you went to the RDT&E accounts it could cost you anywhere from $2 to $3 for every one.
So it’s not necessary at this time. We’re growing the Army and we can postpone the decision about whether it should be permanent because we’re operating under extraordinary authorities right now because of the emergency. We can postpone the decision about whether or not it should be permanent and then put it inside of our program and it will not impact our ability to transform the other aspects of the Army out of a program. So that’s what we asked to do.
Now the legislation that was just passed said we approve what you’re doing in ‘05 and supplemental funding will pay for your growth. And they told us we could have a 20,000 larger statutory end strength. So, if I understand the legislation correctly, our actual statutory end strength right now is 502,400. But we can pay for that with supplemental [funding].
Then it says that they want us to grow. They authorized us to grow another 10,000 by 2009. We’re trying to get clarification on exactly what that means. But the fact is, next year we’re going to grow the Army by another 15,000. So we’re going to reach 30,000 by the end of ‘05, and at that time we will know where we are and I may very well feel that we have sufficient size to do what we need to do, or maybe I have to go to the [Secretary of Defense] and say the Army’s needs to be bigger. I would expect that we would continue to use the authorities to grow it.
But there are a couple of things here that are bookends that I think are really important for people to understand. One is that we’re growing the Army and we’re growing it as fast as we can. It’s not an issue of “should we grow the Army,” because the answer is yes.
We are doing it so that we can transform and so that we can meet our operational commitments. The question is how to pay for it and what impact it. How to pay for it has different kinds of impacts on how fast we can transform, what we can transform, what we can buy, and what we can build. So that’s always been the discussion. How can we pay for it? Now what I’m concerned about is that we don’t precipitously grow the Army above what is necessary, absorb that, and then turn around and have to create a more hollow force to pay for the people.
When we get beyond this emergency, whenever it ends and whenever the supplemental funding dries up, we have to be able to sustain what we’ve built with the program that we get. And we know the kinds of pressures that we’re going to see in the out years on defense. The whole government’s going to have pressures and Defense will see pressures. So we have to be prudent so that we don’t inappropriately build either structure or encumber ourselves to form an end strength that is not affordable and then go back into the kind of condition that sometimes we found ourselves in the past.
There are people with different perspectives and different understandings. Many agree with us, some see it a little bit differently, and some see it a lot differently. But on balance I think what we are doing is doing what we all want to do, and that is build the Army, transform it to the 21st Century, and create it in a size that is prudent.
And what I have to remind everyone is this isn’t about end strength. It’s about how many deployable entities do you have in the Army. And if you want to take stress off the Army you must have increased numbers of brigades, increased numbers of support units of action, increased numbers of deployable, whole, ready units. That’s what we’re trying to create. And yes, it’s tied to the number of people you have. But right now we know that we have people who are in positions who could be better used to help us build the kind of Army we want that are mal-positioned. Especially if you look at our reserve components and you take a look at how over-structured they have been in the past and how it’s important to bring that structure down and organize. There are more positions in units than there are people authorized to fill. so you have automatic unreadiness across that force. You have 80 people and 100 slots and sometimes it’s actually worse than that.
We have to shift, between the Reserves, the Guard and the active force, certain specialties so that we balance better, so the active force has in it the kinds of things it needs as an active force, and that the depth in the National Guard and Reserve is appropriate. Depending upon what kind of demand we have on the force, we must be able to reach into the appropriate pockets for available and ready things to help us.
So we are really talking about three big things: Modularity — building units that are interchangeable — restructuring, and the stabilization of the force. Those are the big areas.
Q: Last year you debuted sort of the 15 focus areas around this time. What major announcements have you got up your sleeve for the [Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting] this year?
A: That wasn’t meant to be a surprise to everybody. I was called back to active duty on pretty short notice and so I asked the transition team to take a look at these ideas and give me other ideas and tell me how we should use our time and determine the most important things we ought to do. The 15 focus areas came out of that — focusing on the soldier, focusing on leader development, taking a look at the combat training centers, taking a look at our leader development and education, the network, fixing Army aviation, and AC/RC rebalancing. I’ve talked to some of those.
Those were to prime the pump. We added a couple since then such as actionable intelligence, which has become an interesting one. Another one was focused logistics. We wanted to take a look at our resources processes and how it we do these kind of things in ways that were more relevant to the way we go. So that was just to prime the pump.
But what that translated to was some big decisions that we’ve made over the last year. Getting support on the modularity was one. Getting support on growing the Army by 30,000 was another. Getting support on fixing Army aviation by canceling Comanche and keeping the money. Canceling Comanche was not a hard decision. Getting the commitment to keep the money to fix Army aviation was the hard decision. The restructuring and acceleration of FCS was another. The corporate decision we got in ‘04 out of [the office of the Secretary of Defense] that helped us through ‘04 to maintain our momentum. OSD took better than $4 billion from across OSD to help us do that.
And then finally getting a bridge supplemental of $25 billion late last summer. That allowed us to continue our momentum, especially on things like long lead term items, on our contracts instead of having to come to the end of the fiscal year and to stall for awhile.
Those six decisions were direct outgrowths of this and the way we primed the pump on the thing.
I don’t think that I have anything that’s going to be a big surprise. We have some progress to report and we’ve made some considerable progress. I think that a very high percentage of what we do is working very well. I think we understand better about some of the challenges we face and we’re making the adjustments.
So I would say that what I can report is that we were pretty spot-on in terms of the kinds of things we were looking at in transforming the Army, and that we have achieved a lot of success in a very short period of time in getting the train moving in the right direction and getting the right fuel into the system to do it.
I don’t see AUSA as being any kind of a coming out party or a big deal other than it’s good news.
Q: Talking about resources, your predecessor, General [Cordon] Sullivan, over at AUSA and his organization, and I believe even [retired Vice Chief Gen. Jack] Keane recently has said the Army’s share of the defense budget should increase. Given the fact that those sort of slices that have stayed fairly constant through the Cold War are based on a Cold War type military and we’re now fighting different sorts of enemies. It’s very ground intensive, it’s very demanding on the Army, probably more so than say the Navy or the Air Force. And the share that each service has of the defense pie should change correspondingly.
Do you agree with that?
A: I agree with it and I think it’s happening. If you take a look at the President’s budget that went over, I think Congress put another $1.5 billion on top of that, on what we requested. As Chief of Staff of the Army I look at the practical perspective. If you take a look at the percentage of the supplemental that we get, we get the lion’s share of the supplemental and that has raised our buying power. It goes right back to the discussion we were just having, the kinds of things Gen. Yakovak talked about. Of the $25 billion supplemental, the bridge supplemental was a little better than $16 billion, it belongs to the Army.
We received $40 to $45 billion in supplemental funding. So in real terms OSD has, in fact, weighted us to do that.
Now we’ve also looked inside of ourselves. I think you can see where we’ve divested ourselves of a bunch of things and we’ve been successful in being able to reprogram that money with the support of Congress and the administration, An example is Comanche. $14.6 billion. That was a huge plus.
It’s a little bit about how can we be smarter knowing what we know now that we didn’t know in previous years and focus what we have now and how are we leveraging this window of opportunity that we have. And as we go forward, as we go through subsequent builds, it’s our job to make the case for what we need to sustain what it is we’re building.
It wasn’t that long ago there were people talking about reducing the Army by two divisions. You don’t hear that kind of conversation any more. In fact, we’re growing it. We will complete, by ‘06, growing the Army by ten more brigades. In anybody’s view, that’s better than three divisions. And if we don’t take the off-ramp at the end of ’06, and go on through ‘07 and build an additional five brigades, that’s going to be 15 brigades more. That’s almost five divisions worth of maneuver forces.
I think it’s real important to keep this in context. Nothing stays the same. We know things today we didn’t know before.
It doesn’t mean the people before were wrong. It means the situation’s changed and we’re into it and we’re getting the support to do this transformation and adapt the way we need to.
Are there challenges? Sure. And I anticipate that. Do I think we’ll never be challenged again in the future? Of course we’re going to be. It’s always going to be hard to do everything we need to do. Take a look at the things we’ve advanced in terms of not only our warfighting capability but our support to soldiers and their families. Take a look at the incentives and compensation kinds of things that have occurred. Take a look at things like our [privatized] housing. This new build has raised the cap so we’re going to be able to go on and do additional installations with super housing for our people which have huge implications for retention and really support the kinds of things that we want to do to compensate soldiers and their families in the way that they should be in terms of quality of life.
If you take a look at the global force posturing in [the Base Realignment and Closing process] and how all that may play out, the opportunities are potentially exciting. So it’s constantly changing terrain and we are posturing ourselves. We have to have our feet up under us maintain our ability to be agile and be able to take advantage of things as we go forward as opposed to being kind of stretched out.
So I think we’ve accomplished a lot over the last year or 15 months. It encourages me about what we’re going to be able to do in the future.
That’s a long answer to your question. I think we are garnering an increased percentage of the resources available to us in recognition, rightfully so, of the contribution the Army’s being asked to make in the war on terrorism.
Q: The conventional wisdom holds that in Vietnam, the third tour broke the back of the NCO corps. When NCOs were asked to go back a third tour, those who were still alive, that sort of crushed the NCO corps and it took until the 1980s to really rebuild it again.
Right now, you’ve got troops coming back from rotation. Some of them aren’t even back home with their families for a year and they’re being asked to turn around and go back out for another year. I spoke to an officer two days ago who had recently returned from a deployment. He’s at a post where there’s a unit deploying now. He’s not going with it, but he told me flat out that he thought this was breaking the Army.
I talked to, frankly, a Bush appointee in the Pentagon who told me we’re breaking the Army.
How long can the Army keep this pace up before it breaks?
A: First of all, I don’t like to make comparisons with Vietnam because I don’t think there is a direct analogy. But I think the point is that we have to be very concerned and very cognizant of what the short, medium and long-range impacts of this level of operation are. And I’ll go back and tell you that it goes right back into the discussion we’ve already had about growing the Army and about how important it is to grow an increased number of deployable elements. Because as you grow and have available to you more deployable elements, you can increase the dwell time.
We’re working very hard to look for the point in time in which we can do two things. One of them is increase the dwell time between deployments, and the second thing is to look at the earliest possible opportunity to reduce the length of deployments that we have. All of us understand that a year is a lot to ask of people in combat and all of us would like to see us go to either nine months or six months or something in between.
We’re looking very hard at how we can do that. But we have to continue to operate. We don’t have choices on that. So everything we’re doing and why the speed of this transformation is so important is because it directly answers the question and relieves the stress.
On the other hand, take a look at the success that we’ve had in units that are going back. We continue to enjoy a great deal of commitment from these wonderful soldiers and their families. The soldiers are re-enlisting at what I consider to be phenomenal rates, making these increased goals that we’ve set. This isn’t the same as it was last year. We’re actually recruiting more and we’re retaining more. I think it’s an extraordinary testament to the dedication of our folks.
I understand that every individual has an opinion on this and everybody has a personal situation that is slightly different than the next person’s. I appreciate the fact that there are people who have less tolerance than others for this level of operation and we’re all concerned about that. But I’m a long way from saying we’re breaking the Army. In fact, I think what we’re doing is seeing a great resilience in our Army and we’re seeing its ability to adapt. We’re seeing that we are transforming it. The result of this transformation should be a relief of the kind of stresses that you’re talking about.
Q: What warning signs do you look for? I mean how do you know when the Army’s breaking? What do you try to keep —
A: What do you think breaking the Army —
Q: I’d say several things. When you can’t retain experience in the NCO corps and the sort of captain to major level.
A: I agree with that.
Q: It doesn’t matter how many enthusiastic kids you recruit. If you don’t have combat experienced, high quality NCOs to teach them, obviously recruiting is an issue. I would say if the institutional base of the Army starts to become hollowed out. Already the doctrine writing, you’re now creating units for which there is no doctrine.
A: The units are writing the doctrine.
Q: I heard units are being given Australian manuals and they stamp U.S. Army on them and that was briefed down at the Infantry Center for the motorized infantry units that are being created now.
I suppose those are some of the things that I would consider.
A: First of all, I agree with you. One of the metrics is retention. Right now we are retaining experience in large numbers. We cannot take that for granted. We’re going to have to continue to work to not only relieve the stress but adequately compensate people and provide incentive for people to stay. We are seeing the recruiting numbers right now. We can’t take that for granted. We’re going to have to continue to work it.
We are writing the future doctrine through our activities right now. You say we’re taking a manual and stamping it. Listen, anything that works is useable.
It’s not doctrine until we are comfortable that that’s what it is. Unfortunately in the past, because we were in a Cold War that lasted 50 years, we had this notion that doctrine is somehow rather static. It’s not. It’s dynamic and it needs to be dynamic to do what we do.
So our lessons learned are in the overwhelming number of combat veterans we’re putting back on the platform and in drill sergeant positions, in NCO academies, and in [the Training and Doctrine Command]. We are growing TRADOC to a greater degree. I’m committed to have TRADOC full.
Before this war ever happened TRADOC was where we were taking all the risk. TRADOC was hollowed out long before this. It’s fuller now than it was and it will be more full in the future. TRADOC is hugely important. We’ve created a Futures Center down there in TRADOC. We’ve increased the number of recruiters on the street. We’re increasing, in every respect, the things that we need to do there and there will always be an appetite for more.
But if you want to measure TRADOC, take a look at it two years ago and take a look at it today and I think you’ll see a different dynamic. I think some of the things are in fact the kind of metrics, and right now that’s what we’re tracking and looking at.
I also say there are things like measuring the effectiveness of our organizations that we have in combat right now. Look at the excellence that is being portrayed every day, displayed every day, in those formations. Look at the young company commanders who are not only fighting every day but are building cities and towns. Look at the intelligence and the agility and the adaptability of these great people and the dedication they have.
And when I visit hospitals, I still have soldiers tell me, “All I want to do is get back with my unit. How about my buddies? Where are they?” Some of them are down the hall. So there’s a spirit. That’s what goes back to the Warrior Ethos. The fact that the warrior ethos says we’ll always place the mission first, we’ll never accept defeat, we’ll never quit, and we’ll never leave a fallen comrade. That’s alive and well and growing all the time.
Are you going to be able to go out and find a captain who’s had enough? Of course you are. Are you going to go out and find a major?
But you know something, if you had gone back two or three years ago and you took a look at the numbers that were captains and majors and colonels and sergeants in those days who also had had enough, they weren’t anywhere near the level of stress that we have today.
I think about this all the time and we talk about it. When do you know you’re breaking the Army? What we’ve done with the Army is shaken it up and dumped the things out on the floor. We’re reforming and transforming, and demonstrating real operational and tactical excellence on the battlefield in a way that our Army hasn’t done in a long time.
I’m optimistic, not pessimistic about it. And having said all of that, I do not want to take any of this great service for granted. I’m so proud of our soldiers and leaders and everybody who’s supporting this effort. We’re doing things that we couldn’t even dream about doing before in terms of excellence.
Go to the combat training centers and look at what we’ve done out there. Look at the energy that’s out there and the confidence of those people who are leaving the training centers. Look at how we’ve taken the battle command training program and the energy that’s gone into that and the excellence that’s coming out of it — the way we are energizing the school system to take advantage of this great combat experience.
I’ve asked them to interview the soldiers in the hospital beds, learn from what happened to them and let’s get it into the system. The feedback loops from the battlefield that in some cases are 24 hours from the time that an incident happens. We’re replicating it in the Combat Training Center. The combat experience we have on the platforms, the way the discussions now go in the school, in the classroom, where they’re challenging doctrine and writing doctrine, where they’re talking about it, sharing the experiences and the tactics, techniques and procedures is pretty exciting.
We have an Army here that understands it has a responsibility to serve the nation, performing its core function which is land combat. I define that land combat much broader than just the fight. I’m talking about all of the other things that are associated with stability and support operations and counter-insurgency operations and all the other kinds of things that we’re doing. And I think the nation ought to be very proud of them.
Q: Are we winning in Iraq?
A: What’s winning?
Q: You tell me.
A: Well, I like the idea that if you ask me about Afghanistan, the fact that we just had elections is a major path towards victory and I think we’re on a similar path in Iraq.
When I was last over there I visited where we’re training Iraqi forces, police forces, infrastructure protection forces, national guard, intervention forces, and the Iraqi army. And they’re fighting now and we’re integrated with them. We have a dialogue going on about what democracy means in Iraq, and the Iraqis are taking hold of this and putting a face on it. You see in Fallujah where there are now people pushing foreign fighters out and doing things. So my view is we’re making progress.
It’s tough. You can’t just grab hold of one piece of it and say that represents the whole. You have to look at the whole thing. But the people who are most deeply engaged in it, and I talk to Gen. [George W.] Casey all the time and Gen . [Thomas F.] Metz and the others that are over there, are definitely successful in the battlefield sense. They feel in some places more than others optimistic and good about the kinds of things they see coming together. I think they are also very, very realistic about some of the challenges we have to face.
But I think we are on a path. In January the elections are there, and the kinds of things are happening. We’re not to the point where we are in Afghanistan right now, but I believe we’re on the road.
Q: You obviously have very close contacts with the folks who are over there making sort of the tactical operational decisions, and you also obviously play a role in strategic discussions in this building. How much of the strategy and operational approach in Iraq is driven by domestic politics in the United States?
A: I have seen no evidence of in the discussions that I’ve had with folks. Obviously everybody is very aware that the strategic environment is fraught with politics, not only domestic but coalition politics, international politics, and all the rest of it. It would be foolish to say that people are operating totally devoid of being influenced at all. But I have never seen any evidence that what is happening on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan at the operational and theater strategic level there is being improperly influenced in any way.
But I think that’s all in the eye of the beholder and you’ve been around here long enough to understand how that works.
Q: You came into this job from a largely and recent special operations background. You had I think one tour in a conventional unit in the last 20 years. What advantages and disadvantages does that background in the SOF world that you sort of matured inbring to the job of Chief of Staff of the Army, and how you relate to the other senior leaders in the Army?
A: You’re right that I spent a lot of time in SOF, but you also have to remember that you’re saying 20 years. I was an assistant division commander in the 1st Cav Division. I spent time as a brigadier in this building down in DCSOPS. As an Army component commander for Special Operations Command as a three star I played in both the big Army and in the SOCOM world. And of course I come originally from a background as a cavalryman.
I’m a general and I’ve been a general since ’91 or ’92. So I’ve had better than a decade’s worth of kind of a different view of things.
But if you were to ask me what it is it about SOF that I think is relevant to what we’re doing, transforming and all the rest of it, I’ll tell you that SOF is inherently joint. And not only from a resourcing perspective but from the operational/tactical perspective you see a real mature joint interdependence that goes on within SOF. Army Special Operations Forces operate in very integral ways with Air Force Special Operations Forces and Navy Special Warfare Forces and with conventional forces. And one of the things that I see that SOF is bringing into this is that we have perhaps the closest integration of special operations and conventional forces that I’ve ever seen in my time going on right now. It is excellent and it’s getting even better.
So I think that jointness and the value of mature, well trained, smart people — well trained, smart people enabled by real technologies, is powerful. Those are the kind of things that we’re looking at.
Another thing I’d tell you is that the Army is demonstrating the warrior ethos in spades. But the SOF community has long demonstrated this. This is the expeditionary focus — in other words the ability to be very agile in a strategic sense as well as operational. Operating from very bare bones kinds of places in rapid succession and for a variety, in developing the situation is an important one.
The ability of SOF to leverage intelligence and how integral intelligence is to the kind of operations we have is becoming increasingly better in a conventional sense.
One of the things that we leveraged from SOF the equipping soldiers in a much more rapid and appropriate way.
We also see is how important it is to be able to operate in non-contiguous space and in decentralized ways. Entrusting junior leaders to make mature judgments and to operate off of intent is much like what we’ve long done in SOF.
There’s a plethora of things where you see SOF and the conventional community growing together. I’m very comfortable having grown up in that, and I think it’s the way to go.
Q: I talked to a few people about this issue, especially yourself and Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody both having special ops backgrounds and how unusual it is historically to have two guys with those backgrounds running the Army and what impact that has on the Army and almost all the comments were positive, and a lot of them key on some of the things you said, that neither of you have much patience for the bureaucracy and you want to drive things through faster.
One general told me he’s made all of us feel like special operators. But the one not necessarily negative but sort of not wholeheartedly positive comment that I got from a guy who otherwise was very high on it related to what he thought was your tendency to keep information very close-hold, play your cards close to your chest was the way he put it.
And his interpretation of that was that it was a function of your SOF background. He said if you look at the SOF world, especially the black SOF world, that’s a world in which guys at the same rank don’t discuss information with each other unless on a need to know basis, often. He thought some of that carried over. How would you respond to that?
A: I’ll take that as counseling.
I try not to play that way. But, I grew up in a place that when someone went away and was on a mission and returned, you never asked him where he’d been. That is not something that I would like to carry over into the Army. It’s necessary in that kind of a community but it certainly is not a tendency that I want to carry over here, and quite frankly that’s a little surprising.
In every organization there are things that the senior leaders need to discuss in confidence until we arrive at decisions so that we don’t have people preempting our opportunities. Sometimes you have to be able to think out loud with a small group of people to set things.
I think we’ve operated in a very empowering way here. The feedback I get from people is that they feel empowered. I rely on the staff principals here. I don’t have a small group of kabala people here who grade everyone’s papers. We deal directly with the leadership and we engage ideas very broadly. But that’s interesting. Again, I’ll take it as counseling and I’ll work on it to get better.
Q: You mentioned earlier that the leadership was working as hard as possible, I got the impression to try to as quickly as possible shift to shorter tours, shorter deployments, six to nine months. I was wondering if you could flesh that out in any more detail. Is there a decision point coming up? How do you balance the human benefit of that to the soldier, hey you get to go home faster, see his family and so forth, and with the operational requirement to not have every six months the newbys coming on board and not know what’s going on.
A: That’s a great question, so we have to think through all of that. What we’re into here is not a sprint but a marathon.
What we need to do is think in terms of the longevity and the overall health of the force and our ability to sustain this level of operation. If we continue to be successful and we raise more Iraqi security forces, we can decrease our load over there that the Army is contributing. You have to remember that we are reenlisting a lot of people and an increasing number of our people now have a lot of experience over there. I would say the learning curve is going to be considerably shorter as we look at it. But I’m interested in finding the proper balance, and it may not apply across the whole force. We may have a construct where certain aspects of the force provide the continuity. A headquarters, for instance, may end up providing more continuity as we take a look at what kind of force we can rotate at what frequency and while we maintain the continuity of operations.
I’m making no promises because we don’t know what we don’t know, yet we go ahead. But I do want to communicate that this is on our mind and that we’re working hard to look at the possibilities and what we might be able to do. We want to do it in a way that doesn’t create short term gain for long term pain or disadvantage. We are actively looking at that, and we realize it because, ideally, when we get our force put together, we’d like our reserve component forces in cycle, a five to six years term, so that we get a deployment in five or six years. And what we’d like to do with our full time force, our active force, is to have them in about a three year term, with a deployment, and a three year term, and have a predictable amount available to us.
Not that we would always deploy them when they became available, but we’ll know what was available, and we’ll have them ready. The soldiers will have some predictability in terms of what they’re doing. That’s what we’re moving toward.
But it all has to do with our ability to rapidly generate additional brigades and support units of action, and to get ourselves into a position to have cycles that allows us more predictability.
Q: So is there a decision point coming up? Have you decided, say, mid-January we decide whether or not we go into nine months or six months or stay at a year.
A: No, I wouldn’t put it that strongly. There may be a post-election in Iraq and it will become obvious we can start doing that. The theater is constantly regulating what flows and what goes. We’re looking at opportunities to provide some relief and to increase the flow time that we have.
But, we have to answer the mail to the operational commander. All of them right now are saying that they are moving in a direction in which they would like to reduce the number of brigades that we have committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It may have to spike for the election, it may not. We just don’t know. We are is prepared to do whatever it is we’re called on to do and we have to plan for all these different contingencies.
The good news is, I believe, that we’re going to see our way through to be able to do that. That’s the whole point of Transformation.
Q: Do you mind if I ask one quick question?
A: Go ahead.
Q: If I can sneak this in real quick at the end. … The Institute for Defense Analysis Report on FCS which just went to the Hill yesterday talks a bit about that the Army should trust but verify, using a Reagan term, blind management of the program. Do you have any reservations on the LSI construct or perhaps on Boeing management?
A: No. We’ve asked IDA to do a number of looks in different kinds of things. The Acting Secretary of the Army, Les Brownlee, asked for this and I sat in on the back briefs. The last one I got was a report that they were pretty positive about the way that was working. We’re going to continue to look at it and measure what we’re doing.
This is a new construct. It’s a very, very complex program. So we’re very interested in making sure that the integrity of the program in every sense of the word is there and that we maintain it. And I mean that in the sense of making sure that it is cohesive and focused and being measured correctly and producing what it is that we want.
Unless you know something I don’t know, the last one I saw was the one the Secretary asked for to take a look at LSI and the way it was being managed, and it was pretty favorable and encouraging.
It doesn’t mean we distrust anybody, it means I think this is an extraordinarily complex thing and we can’t afford to have our eyes closed if it goes off track. We don’t have the time to fool with that. I think everybody’s committed, to include the LSI to deliver. |
