Donald J. Devine

August 1, 2005

Military Overhaul Milestone

In recent testimony before the House Armed Services Committee

U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard A. Cody called the management reforms now taking place in his service “the most significant change of your Army since 1939.”

As a result of initiatives begun by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld even before 9/11 to revamp its structure from fighting the old Cold War, U.S. military forces have been undergoing massive change. The terrorist attacks placed these reforms higher on the agenda and required adjustments to the plans for unconventional warfare but they only made transformation more urgent.

Nowhere has the change been ggreater or more difficult to integrate into its management philosophy than in the Army, where it involved transforming its heavy-division structure into a more mobile, brigade-oriented force equipped with the Stryker armored vehicles. Gen. Cody said 43 of these new modular brigades were in various stages of being constituted or deployed. The Army's first modular brigade, from the 3rd Infantry Division, was now posted to Iraq, while the 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain divisions were in the process of being transformed.

The Army now has 300,000 soldiers overseas in 120 countries, including 116,000 soldiers in Iraq and 14,000 in Afghanistan. The 30,000 additional troops Congress insisted be added to Army ranks have been integrated into the force and will make change easier. Yet, the large commitment of troops overseas has brought an unprecedented activation of the National Guard and reserves, which today constitute 60 percent of active military forces. That imbalance, the general said, is causing planners to “pull out their hair” but nonetheless recommitted the Army to transformation even with its “stress on the force.”

To affect the change, the active duty Army has been reducing its logistics, field artillery, air defense, engineer and armor units, while increasing the numbers of low-density, high-demand support troops, such as military police, intelligence, civil affairs and psychological operations to round out its new brigade-structured units. "We've been able to change 40,000 slots in two and a half years while we've been at war to make these new formations," he concluded.

The Navy has been active too. Its chief Adm. Vern Clark told a Senate committee that the sea service has maintained 20,000 sailors a day as part of carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf region, has flown 3,000 air sorties and delivered over a hundred thousand pounds of ordnance in Iraq, and has kept more than 2,000 ships at sea to deter, to delay and to disrupt the movement of terrorists. There were more than 7,000 sailors on the ground in the Middle East to include SEALS, medical corpsmen operating with the Marines, Seabees and hundreds of support personnel in Iraq and the region. At the same time, it has focused on transformation, including the difficult task of eliminating one carrier group.

The Air Force has had more difficulty with transformation because of it has the “oldest fleet ever” that is fully deployed and highly reliant on reserve forces. Gen. John Jumper testified a day earlier that the service continues to transform to the Air Expeditionary Force concept but "We now have 270,000 out of 360,000 active duty members in the AEF deployment cycle” plus 2,000 airmen working on the ground in Iraq. “The Air Force reserve components are playing huge roles in the worldwide operations. About 55 percent of our 170,000 airlift sorties and our 36,000 air refueling sorties last year -- more than half of those were flown by Air Force -- are Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve,"

Yet, he said, the Air Force is also looking to the future and transformation. Unmanned aerial vehicles, the FA-22 Raptor and the Joint Strike Fighter, better worldwide command and control systems and integrating information and intelligence seamlessly across the command spectrum are all programs that will make the Air Force effective for the future.

Retired Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, director of DoD's Office of Force Transformation, emphasized the importance of the revised Unified Command Plan and “significant “changes effected in all of the military departments. He praised the personnel effects, especially the “very large number of NCOs and junior and mid-grade officers who have combat experience" under the new transformational doctrine. "That changes the force," he explained, noting that a large majority of all service members have been involved in transformation. He pointed to the Army and Marine Corps as having "a very robust way of capturing these attitudes, turning them back into the training for the forces that are going to deploy again."

As Adm. Cebrowski emphasized, transformation has taken hold across the Defense Department and "will be with us a very, very long time." The military is now on the road to transformation and the nation cannot be anything but better for it.