WASHINGTON, - Gen. George W. Casey Jr., said the next big push for
the Army will not be organizational, but institutional.
"We will be adapting all of our Army units to support an Army on a rotational
cycle like the Navy and Marine Corps," he said here yesterday during a
Defense Writers' Group breakfast. "Before 2001, we were largely a
garrison-based Army that lived to train, and the Guard and Reserve were a
strategic reserve to be called on only for the Big One."
But this decade has seen a huge change, he said. This is exemplified by the
fact that half the soldiers in the Army National Guard and Army Reserve are
combat veterans and those units are fully incorporated into the rotational
model.
"We're going back, and we're looking at each of the warfighting functions,"
he said. "We're looking at the mix of our force that's available, the design
of the forces and whether we have the right active component/reserve
component mix in those functional areas. This is continuous."
The Army will continue to work with the effects of the reorganization. "We
converted all 300-plus brigades in the Army to a modular configuration," he
said. "That's a lot of change. You don't undertake something that sweeping
without having these effects."
Modularity is designed to allow the Army to put together divisional force
packages to meet the needs of the commander on the ground, he said. A
division may have four infantry brigades, but the mission it goes on may
require a mix of two infantry brigades, a Stryker brigade and a heavy
brigade.
Casey said that on the combat service support side of modularization, the
service did go too far.
"We have de-aggregated our combat service support units to the point that it
makes it very difficult for the battalion commanders to control those small
units," he said. "We've got to go back and reactivate that."
A reporter asked the chief if the Army - even with plus-ups - is big enough.
"We're not big enough today to meet the demands at a sustainable deployment
regime," Casey replied.
The Army today has moved from a deployment cycle of one year deployed to one
year at home station, to one year deployed to about 18 months home. "That's
not good enough to get the force where it needs to be," he said.
As the drawdown continues in Iraq, the force will be large enough to meet a
sustained demand of one corps, five divisions, 20 brigade combat teams and
about 90,000 enabling forces - a total of about 160,000, the chief said. "We
can do that on a sustained level of one year out, two years back," he said.
The dwell time is important. "We just recently finished a study that told us
what we intuitively knew: that it takes two to three years to fully recover
from a one year combat deployment - it just does," Casey said.
"I believe two years at home is an interim step," he said. "We ultimately
have to get to one and three, not one and two. As demand continues to come
down I think we can get there."