Horray! We are going back to the old "Regimental" concept. "Unit Manning" is in. I am going to get Shinseki as my next Senator, replacing retiring Senator Daniel K. Inouye.
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Chief Hopes To Quicken Army's Shift
Goal Is to Improve Deployment Agility
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 3, 2003; Page A21
The new Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, plans to make major organizational changes designed to speed the pace of transformation and bring new capabilities envisioned by his predecessor much more quickly to troops in the field.
Brought back from retirement in August by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Schoomaker is backing changes in the way the nation's largest military service trains, equips and deploys its forces, hoping to make heavy Army divisions lighter and more adaptable in joint formations with the other services, senior Army officials said yesterday.
He has directed Army officers to begin reconfiguring divisions into smaller "modules" that can be mixed and matched in size depending upon their mission. Under the new structure, a division's three 5,500-soldier maneuver brigades would become five smaller, lighter and more specialized units.
In addition, Schoomaker has ordered his staff to begin "unit manning," in which troops in these smaller battle formations would train, exercise and fight together for years at a time, a move many Army reformers have long sought as a way to improve battlefield performance. Unit manning will replace the "individual replacement system" the Army has used since World War II in which individual soldiers are constantly rotated in and out of units.
"Gen. Schoomaker has basically said, 'Stop talking about running trials and tests and start implementing unit manning,' " said Lt. Gen. John M. Riggs, head of the Army's Objective Force Task Force.
The move to unit manning and the new division structure will begin with the 3rd Infantry Division, the unit that invaded Baghdad in April and only recently returned home to Fort Stewart, Ga., Army officials said. It will continue with the 101st Airborne Division, the next division scheduled to return from Iraq in March.
As both premier divisions regroup from fighting in Iraq, one senior Army official said, "let's take advantage of the turmoil, smartly, so we can make changes we know we should be making. And they're going to help inform the rest of the Army."
In taking the reins as Army chief from Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, a low-key officer who mapped out a comprehensive plan for "transforming" the Army but repeatedly clashed with Rumsfeld, Schoomaker decided the Army's institutional emphasis had shifted too much toward technology and the centerpiece of Shinseki's vision, the so-called Future Combat System, Army officials said.
While both the Army and Rumsfeld's office remain committed to developing the Future Combat System, a $14.9 billion program for building the next generation of land combat vehicles that will replace the 70-ton Abrams tank, Schoomaker believes it is time to reemphasize the human intangibles of combat, the official said.
"No soldier is unimportant on this battlefield," the senior Army official said. "I don't care if you're a well-digger in the reserves. You can see this environment we're trying to operate in. This is an all-encompassing combat zone."
Indeed, Schoomaker is keenly aware that he has taken control of an Army at war and needs to refocus Shinseki's long-range transformation vision so that immediate steps are taken to improve the fighting capabilities of forces in the field, Army officials said.
Thus, Army acquisition officials working on the Future Combat System have been instructed to use the program, in part, as a research and development test bed that can spin off technological innovation for use in the near-term by forces in the field.
More than a few analysts inside and outside the Army had forecast problems for Schoomaker, given the Army's frosty relationship with Rumsfeld and its institutional resistance to the kind of fundamental changes the strong-willed defense secretary desired to make the Army lighter and more deployable for the global war on terrorism.
The very fact that Rumsfeld had bypassed all of the service's existing four-star generals and picked a retiree to be chief, they said, showed how deeply dysfunctional the relationship had become and how little regard Rumsfeld had for the service's leadership.
His selection of a Special Operations commander -- Schoomaker commanded the elite Delta Force from 1994 to 1996 and the U.S. Special Operations Command from 1997 to 2000 -- was also bound to rankle those in the Army's main combat branches of infantry, armor, artillery and aviation, the analysts said.
But none of that came to pass, with the Army now seeming to close ranks around Schoomaker and his vision for change, most of those same analysts now acknowledge. Schoomaker's own forceful personality combining the charisma of a battlefield commander and the intellectual depth of a military scholar, has helped him win converts, they say.
So has his operating style: After his Senate confirmation, he spent all of two days in the Pentagon before he left on a whirlwind tour to visit the troops. The tour began at Fort Benning, Ga., and proceeded to Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Europe. No sooner had he returned to the Pentagon than he was off again, this time to South Korea, the Philippines, Japan and Alaska.
And after next week's Association of the U.S. Army convention in Washington, when he plans to publicly unveil his agenda for change, Schoomaker is planning yet another overseas tour to visit deployed units.
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