Rumsfeld Turns Eye To Future of Army

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Ralph Sierra <ralph.sierra () erols com>
Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2003 08:22:19 -0400
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Rumsfeld Turns Eye To Future of Army

"Rumsfeld's aides want to make the Army more "expeditionary," like the
Marines, who are based in the United States but rotate either abroad or on
ships without their families on six-month tours."

It'll be interesting to see whether Rumsfeld is any more successful than
Robert McNamara, who tried a similair plan in the early 1960's.

Ralph Sierra

"Rumsfeld Turns Eye To Future of Army"
Mobility, Cohesion Sought for Units

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 8, 2003; Page A12

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, buoyed by the war in Iraq, is
preparing to launch another campaign to change the organization and
structure of the U.S. Army in ways that could transform how the country's
largest military service fights in future conflicts.

After forcing the resignation of Army Secretary Thomas E. White in late
April and, in an unusual move, selecting Air Force Secretary James Roche to
replace him, Rumsfeld has said little publicly about how he intends to
reshape the Army or who he will select to replace Gen. Eric K. Shinseki as
its next chief of staff. Shinseki is set to retire on Wednesday.

But senior defense officials and military analysts close to the Pentagon
said Rumsfeld is considering ways to reorganize some or all of the service's
10 active duty divisions into smaller and more easily deployable "battle
groups." He has also begun to realign its reserve and active duty forces. He
is considering the withdrawal of thousands of Army forces from Germany. And
he is contemplating major changes to the Army's archaic personnel system.

Rumsfeld's agenda is ambitious, given the Army's tradition-bound reputation
and a resistance to change by many senior officers. But analysts said it is
even more remarkable given Rumsfeld's badly strained relationship with the
Army, which his advisers have criticized for being trapped by Cold War
doctrine based on a single adversary -- the Soviet Union -- and ill-equipped
for what he sees as a new strategic environment in which the United States
could find itself fighting small wars in distant corners of the globe.

The Army's recent defeat of Iraq's Republican Guard and the rapid seizure of
Baghdad has done little inside the Pentagon to bring the Army and Rumsfeld
closer together, given the level of mistrust both sides have built up over
the past two and a half years, according to Rumsfeld associates and Army
officers. Much of the distrust, both sides agree, stems from strained
personal relations between Rumsfeld and Shinseki.

Shinseki's supporters inside and outside the Army say they are puzzled by
the divide because both men have, to a great degree, defined their tenures
by their commitment to "transforming" the military.

Rumsfeld's agenda includes an extensive review of Shinseki's
"transformation" plan, which is designed to make the Army lighter and more
deployable over the next decade, beginning this fall with the activation of
the first medium-weight Stryker Brigade Combat Team, defense officials said.

But more than anything else, they said, he will be trying to foster
"cultural" change to reward risk-taking and encourage innovation so that
Army forces can become more deployable through new organizational concepts,
well in advance of new, lighter combat vehicles now on the drawing board.

"An Army division contains elements and capabilities designed in 1942 to
sustain large linear formations for months and months of warfare," one
official said. "But we're not going to fight wars on the scale of World War
II."

By far the most dramatic change being contemplated by Rumsfeld's inner
circle is a move from large, heavy, slow-moving divisions -- 15,000 to
20,000 troops -- to smaller, more mobile units known as "battle groups."
These would be organized to perform discrete combat missions such as
airborne assaults, helicopter attacks, armed reconnaissance or advanced
logistics support. They also would be built to achieve another Rumsfeld
objective -- allowing the Army, Air Force, Marines and Navy to fight
together more effectively.

As described in a forthcoming book by Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, these
5,000-troop battle groups could be deployed much more quickly, without a
division's huge headquarters staff, and more seamlessly mesh into a new
joint force headquarters -- made up of officers from the Army, Air Force,
Marines and Navy -- under development by the U.S. Joint Forces Command in
Norfolk. Instead of relying on 10 active duty divisions, this more modular
Army would enable commanders to pick from 30 or more battle groups, a dozen
of which could be kept on alert for quick deployment.

Retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, who heads Rumsfeld's newly created
Office of Force Transformation, said he has concerns about the "viability"
of divisions as organizational units. In order to bring significant combat
power to the battlefield, Cebrowski said, the Army now often has to employ
an entire division, because most smaller units are not configured to be
self-sustaining and require division assets for command and logistics
support.

The creation of smaller battle groups, officials said, adds pressure to
scrap the Army's personnel system in favor of one designed to keep units
together for as long as three years at a time. Officials said this would
improve combat skills through better cohesion, discipline and technical
proficiency on the battlefield.

The current system, designed after World War II to enable the Army to
rapidly mobilize for a possible World War III, uses frequent individual
transfers of soldiers and officers to ensure that all of them possess at
least fundamental armor, artillery, infantry, intelligence and logistics
skills. They are, in essence, treated as replacement parts in a vast
machine.

Rumsfeld and proponents of his agenda in the Army such as Maj. Donald
Vandergriff, an author who teaches Reserve Officers' Training Corps students
at Georgetown University, favor what they call a "unit manning" system under
which entire units, not individuals, are trained collectively and remain
together for three years at a time.

"The Army does not know what effective, cohesive units look like,"
Vandergriff said. "There is a constant dribble in and out of individuals,
and that unit is not able to move beyond the basic level of collective
skills, unless it's like the 3rd Infantry Division, where peacetime
individual practices have been waived in order to go to de facto wartime
unit manning."

The Army has created a Unit Manning Task Force to study the issue and plans
to go to a unit manning system for training its third medium-weight unit,
the Stryker Brigade Combat Team, which is built around a new eight-wheeled
combat vehicle called the Stryker. But the defense official on Rumsfeld's
staff questioned whether the Army was committed to unit manning across the
entire service. "Nobody likes to go through that pain of change," the
official said.

Advocates of unit manning say it should also improve soldiers' family lives
and enhance retention, since transfers would be greatly reduced by keeping
units together for three years at a time. This becomes increasingly
important as Rumsfeld assesses the military's deployment overseas.

Among the bigger changes is a Rumsfeld proposal to withdraw some or most of
the Army's 60,000 soldiers in Germany. Although down from the 300,000-plus
U.S. troops in Germany at the height of the Cold War, the Army has based
troops in the country since the end of World War II.

Rumsfeld's aides want to make the Army more "expeditionary," like the
Marines, who are based in the United States but rotate either abroad or on
ships without their families on six-month tours. In pulling troops out of
Germany, this could be done by returning them to home bases in the United
States and then rotating them through "forward operating locations" in
countries such as Bulgaria and Romania in Eastern Europe.

The final major change Rumsfeld is contemplating involves realigning forces
between active and the National Guard and reserves. In the early 1970s, as
the Vietnam War was ending, Army officials placed critical combat support
units -- the majority of all civil affairs, military police, medical and
psychological operations units -- in the guard and reserve. The idea was to
prevent the president from taking the country to war, as had been done in
Vietnam, without taking the political risk that comes from mobilizing
reserve forces, a move that involves thousands of communities in the
conflict.

But the Army now finds itself over-relying on the guard and reserve through
frequent mobilizations, having fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the
past two years. The Army will begin converting thousands of slots in the
active duty force to civil affairs, special operations and psychological
operations positions under next year's budget, which begins Oct. 1,
according to John D. Winkler, deputy assistant secretary of defense for
reserve affairs.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29510-2003Jun7.html




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