Overhauling The U.S. Army
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The U.S. Army will drastically redesign its combat forces, starting next year with the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) and 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), to create more brigade-size units to rotate into combat zones.
These new "brigade units of action" will be smaller than today’s divisions, but might include division-level assets, such as artillery and aviation. In theory, they will gain back what they give up in size by connecting through digital networks to other Army, joint and allied units.
The Army wants the first of the brigades ready to deploy within a year, possibly to Iraq.
The division reorganization is part of a wider overhaul that will change the way the Army recruits, trains, educates and equips its soldiers.
Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army’s new chief of staff, wants to make the Army more joint, expeditionary and modular, said a senior Army Staff source in an interview Sept. 25, and he is determined to change the traditional Army mindset to achieve his goal.
Schoomaker and his transition team gathered the proposals in recent months, relying heavily on interviews with active and retired senior Army leaders. Schoomaker directed the Army’s other top generals to form task forces to concentrate on 15 "focus areas" he targeted for immediate action.
The task forces have names like "leader development and education," "unit manning," "Army Aviation" and "modularity."
Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) is in charge of nine of the areas. The Army Staff in the Pentagon oversees the other six.
The Proposals
Several sets of Army briefing slides on the initiatives lay out a vision of an Army composed of 48 brigade units of action, whose personnel are rotated unit-by-unit instead of individually, and whose commanders are steeped in joint doctrine. The slides, produced by TRADOC and the Army Staff, were obtained by Defense News.
The units of action would be designed so that they, their companies and battalions could be mixed and matched according to the needs of the mission, a concept called "modular" or "plug-and-play." They would operate on fixed training and "cyclical readiness" life cycles, meaning at any one time a certain percentage of the units of action would not be available for combat.
Many of the other options listed in the slides are, for now, still recommendations under serious consideration, Army leaders said. They include converting one heavy division to a light division and reducing the number of different types of aircraft from four to two.
Some changes are necessary because the Army is at war, a circumstance not anticipated when Schoomaker’s predecessor, Gen. Eric Shinseki, launched his transformation program in 1999. Others have been kicked around since the early or mid-1990s, such as building the Army’s fighting forces around brigades rather than divisions, and making Army combat formations more modular.
Reviewing Aviation
The redesign of the 101st will also feed into another of Schoomaker’s "focus areas": a complete soup-to-nuts review of Army aviation. An Army Staff slide on the aviation review notes that proposals from the field include "Review doctrine and organization for deep attacks," and, "Determine what current aviation functions can be accomplished by unmanned aerial vehicles."
But the senior Army Staff officer said the review should not be taken as a sign that the branch is in trouble. Service leaders just want to make sure that the Army is getting the most out of its aircraft and aircrews, he said.
One of the proposals is reducing the conventional Army’s fleet of helicopters from four different airframes to two. The Army now flies two utility helicopters, the UH-60 Black Hawk and the CH-47 Chinook, one attack helicopter, the AH-64 Apache, and one scout helicopter, the OH-58 Kiowa.
The Comanche, a helicopter design of great promise but which has languished in development since the very early 1990s, is due to replace the Kiowa Warrior starting in 2009. But some capabilities planned for the Comanche already exist in recent versions of the Apache, which could spell trouble for the Comanche program.
The urge to become more expeditionary may also alter the Army’s mix of four light and six heavy divisions. One proposal contained in the slides is to replace a division of active-duty heavy forces with lighter, faster-deploying forces.
"If you are trying to be expeditionary, you have to be able to get there fast," the senior Army staff officer said. "And one of the challenges with our heavy divisions has been to do what? Get there faster."
Another senior Army leader said he doubted that the Army would replace one of its heavy divisions with a light division. "That’s one I’ve never heard of," he said.
All this likely means more change for the Army’s transformation vision itself. Already, the nomenclature is changing. Pre-Schoomaker, the Army talked of its mostly-heavy Legacy Force, combat forces as they existed prior to transformation; its Interim Force, the brigades equipped with the medium-weight Stryker wheeled armored vehicle; and its Objective Force, which includes the Future Combat System (FCS) slated to arrive in 2008.
Service officials now say "Current Force" when they mean "Legacy and Interim Forces," while "Objective Force" has been replaced by "Future Force."
Funding Shifts
By any name, more money will now flow to existing forces, a shift from the old transformation plan, which held that the Army should cut back spending on current equipment and boost funding for future gear.
"When we started going down the road to Stryker and FCS, the assumption that was made was that we were at a strategic pause," the senior Army staffer said.
Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and orders to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. "The strategic pause is over," the senior Army Staffer said. "We are now at war."
As a result, the service must invest heavily in its deploying forces.
But both leaders said the Army is not backing away from its commitments to fund the Future Force in general, or the FCS program in particular. The senior Army Staff officer blasted speculation that the fielding of FCS is likely to be delayed by several years.
"That is not true," he said. "Hell no, we’re not doing that."
Senior Army leaders said it would be a mistake to see the Army’s procurement budget in zero-sum terms, in which any money spent on the current force is money taken from the future force. Substantial supplemental budgets will enable the Army to improve its current force without shorting the future force, they said.
"You can’t take a peacetime budget and expect to fight with half of the Army combat structure forward-deployed within the same top line," one senior general said. "The nation wouldn’t put their soldiers at risk like that, and they haven’t. Congress has been very good to us in taking care of soldiers with supplementals."
The Army is also merging its Future Force program officers with elements of TRADOC to create a "Futures Center."
Smaller, Lethal Brigades
Among the most dramatic changes is the introduction of the brigade unit of action. Today, the service typically deploys 2,500 to 4,200 troops at a time in brigade combat teams. Most divisions consist of three of these, augmented by other artillery battalions and other units. The Army has 33 brigade-size formations it can deploy in this fashion.
But operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans have stretched the Army so thin that when Lt. Gen. John Vines, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, recently requested one more Army battalion be deployed to that country, service leaders could not find one in the active force.
Schoomaker wants to ease the strain on the Army by creating units of action that are smaller but every bit as lethal as today’s brigade combat teams. As currently structured, the Army often must deploy "a huge force to do a small task" when the service receives a request for troops from a regional combatant commander, said the senior Army source.
A TRADOC task force has drafted reorganization principles, which await senior approval. Among them: The division will continue to exist only as a command-and-control element whose subordinate elements are assigned or attached. And the number of active component brigades ought to shrink from 33 to 48; reserve component brigades from 15 to 22.
Each brigade must be able to:
*Have enough command-and-control capability to operate independently.
*Establish and maintain information superiority.
*Conduct prompt and sustained land warfare.
*Engage and attack precisely.
*Control people and territory.
*Deploy flexibly.
The redesigned brigades must also be more joint — that is, networked with units from other services on the battlefield.
Today’s battlefields place a premium on infantry, and it is likely that the brigade units of action will need more infantry than today’s divisions have.
Schoomaker told TRADOC to draw up a plan by January for the redesigned 3rd Infantry and 101st Airborne Divisions. The 3rd ID is just back from Iraq, and the 101st is due to return around March. Both are due for a "reset period" in which personnel will be replaced and equipment overhauled.
Other divisions will likely undergo similar shifts as they rotate. |
