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The new Army staff is audacious for sure, and I like some of their ideas (though I would not convert the entire Army into Units of Actions; only around 3/4's).
How do you think the Units of Actions will be organized in terms of infanty, armor, MP, MI, signal, arty, and CSS?
By Sean D. Naylor
Times staff writer
The Army will drastically redesign its active divisions, 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.
The brigades likely will be smaller than today’s, but might include division-level assets such as artillery and aviation forces. In theory, some combat power the smaller brigades lose will be offset by being connected in a digital network to other Army, joint and allied units. The Army wants the first of the redesigned brigades — called brigade “units of action” — ready to go within a year for possible deployment to Iraq.
The reorganization is part of a wide-reaching overhaul of the Army that has potential to significantly alter how the service recruits, trains, educates and equips soldiers.
Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army’s new chief of staff, is determined to change the service’s mind-set. Schoomaker “clearly espouses” the view that “what’s good for our nation is good for the Army,” as opposed to the notion that what is good for the Army must be good for the nation, said a senior Army Staff source in a Sept. 25 interview.
Schoomaker’s goal is to make the Army more “joint,” “expeditionary” and “modular,” three words that crop up repeatedly in several sets of Army briefing slides on the initiatives obtained by Army Times.
The slides contain proposals on how to change the Army. Schoomaker and officers who formed his transition team gathered the proposals in recent months during interviews with active and retired senior Army leaders. Based on this feedback, 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 is in charge of nine of the areas. The Army Staff in the Pentagon oversees the other six.
The slides, produced by TraDoc and the Army Staff, lay out a vision of an Army composed of 48 brigade units of action, filled with personnel through a unit-manning system and led by commanders steeped in joint doctrine. The units of action would be designed according to modular or plug-and-play principles, meaning they, or the companies and battalions they contain, could be mixed and matched according to mission requirements. They would operate on fixed training and “cyclical-readiness” lifecycles, meaning, at any one time, a percentage of the units of action would not be available for combat.
Army leaders stress that while the reorganization of the Army’s divisions and brigades will begin soon, other options listed on the slides are, for now, recommendations. However, they acknowledge that recommendations on the slides are being seriously considered.
Among proposals receiving consideration by senior Army leaders:
•Converting a heavy division to a light division.
•Reducing the aviation fleet from four airframes to two.
•Establishing “360-degree assessments” of officers, in which leaders are assessed not only by those above them in the chain of command, but also by their peers and those they lead.
•Reviewing whether the Army’s system of branches will remain relevant.
Although the initiatives are moving forward at Schoomaker’s direction, Army leaders are keen to dispel the notion that the new chief is the sole driving force.
“He wants us to focus on these areas because the Army is telling him, ‘Chief, this is where you need to put your energy,’” said a senior member of the Army Staff.
Some changes are necessary because the Army is at war, a circumstance not anticipated when Schoomaker’s predecessor, Gen. Eric Shinseki, initiated the service’s Transformation program in 1999.
Others, like unit manning — staffing and training units together for several years — and unit rotation, were already in the works and are receiving more emphasis.
In addition, some of the proposals — particularly the idea of designing the Army around its brigades rather than its divisions, and making its combat formations more modular, have been kicked around since the early or mid-1990s without decisive action to bring them into being.
“Everybody thinks the new chief has come in and all of a sudden we’re changing, we’re going off at a 90-degree [change of] direction,” the senior Army Staff officer said. “No, no. Some of it is a 20-degree change. Some of it might be a little bit more dramatic.”
Smaller, lethal brigades
One of the most dramatic changes surely is the reorganization of its fighting forces into units of action. Today, the service typically deploys forces in 2,500 to 4,200-soldier organizations it calls “brigade combat teams.” These consist of a ground-maneuver brigade (most divisions have three) augmented by other units, such as artillery battalions, which are controlled by the division commander.
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, 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 taking the manpower in each division and creating units of action that are smaller, but every bit as lethal as today’s brigade combat teams.
Senior Army leaders are not convinced brigade combat teams need to be as large as they are in order to accomplish the missions assigned by the regional combatant commanders, the four-star flag officers in charge of U.S. military operations in their huge regional commands.
As currently structured, when one of those commanders taps the Army to provide troops for a mission, the Army must deploy “a huge force to do a small task,” the officer said.
The Army’s goal is “smaller formations that still can do the task at hand, but you have more of them,” the senior Army Staff officer said. “What the chief is doing to [the force designers] is saying ‘OK, you’ve got three [brigades] now, I want five … You make it happen.’.”
A TraDoc task force assembled to draw up the redesign has drafted reorganizing principles for the redesigned brigades.
These principles, yet to be approved by the Army’s senior leaders, state that brigades must be capable of:
•Information superiority.
•Prompt and sustained land warfare.
•Precision engagement and attack.
•The control of people and territory.
•Flexible deployability.
The redesigned brigades must be more “joint,” meaning they must network with units from other services on the battlefield. “We do not want to have anything that cannot contribute to the joint fight,” the senior Army Staff officer said.
The guidance drawn up by the TraDoc task force:
•The redesigned brigades must enable the Army to increase the number of active-component brigades from 33 to 48 and Reserve-component brigades from 15 to 22.
•The brigade unit of action must have enough command and control capability to operate independently.
•Division headquarters will still exist, but as a command-and-control element only. All subordinate elements will be assigned or attached, not organic.
The only resource constraint being placed on the TRADOC design teams is that as they redesign a division, they cannot add to the number of soldiers it has. But there is no requirement to keep personnel doing the same jobs. So, for instance, if a design team thought there would be a smaller future requirement for air defense, it could take the 450 to 580 personnel spaces occupied by a division’s air-defense battalion and convert them to infantrymen to be spread around the units of action.
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.
“What are we doing in Iraq right now?” the senior Army Staff officer said. “We now have artillerymen who are acting as infantry. … We’ve got to have more boots on the ground.”
Overhauling divisions, aviation
Schoomaker’s order to TraDoc is to draw up a plan by January for the redesigned 3rd Infantry and 101st Airborne Divisions. The Army will begin reorganizing 3rd ID shortly thereafter.
“Sometime over the next three-plus months, beyond that timeline we should start to see the kind of movement in what is the restructuring of the division,” the senior Army Staff officer said.
In selecting the 3rd Infantry and 101st Airborne Divisions to be the first to convert to the new design, the Army is making a virtue of necessity. As the first two divisions to return from Iraq (the 3rd ID is already back, and the 101st is due to return around March), they would have to take some time to overhaul their equipment. They also must replace the soldiers who, having been stabilized in their positions for the course of the deployment, will leave as soon as the divisions return. The Army calls this process “resetting.”
“Instead of them resetting themselves how they were in the past, let’s go ahead and reorganize them into what are smaller, but just as lethal, maneuver elements,” the senior Army Staff officer said.
The Army leadership wants both divisions reorganized as quickly as possible so they can be returned to Afghanistan and Iraq, if required. There is no fixed timeline for the reorganization yet, but Army officials say it likely will finish within a year of starting.
“It’s going to be sooner rather than later,” the senior Army Staff officer said.
Service leaders anticipate that as other divisions rotate back through Afghanistan and Iraq, they will undergo similar reorganizations.
“We have an opportunity as we are resetting the force,” the senior Army Staff officer said. “Let’s not reset the force in the same way that it existed prior to [the deployments].”
The redesign of the 101st also will feed into another of Schoomaker’s focus areas: A review of Army aviation.
The aviation branch always has been regarded within the service as the poor cousin of the ground combat-arms branches — infantry, armor and field artillery. Aviation units are the most expensive to field and train in the Army, yet the service often has shown a reluctance to fully integrate them into training programs.
Most recently, the use of Apaches to conduct deep-strike missions was called into question after an attack by the 11th Aviation Regiment in Iraq was aborted when many of the regiment’s helicopters were damaged by ground fire. When U.S. forces crossed the Euphrates River and advanced on Baghdad, Army helicopters were kept west of the river for their own safety. This frustrated some ground commanders who wanted to use them in the fight against Iraqi forces defending the city.
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 the Army maximizes the potential of its aviation assets, he said.
One of the proposals under consideration as part of that review is reducing the conventional Army’s fleet of helicopters from four airframes to two. The Army flies two utility helicopters, the UH-60 Black Hawk and the CH-47 Chinook; an attack helicopter, the AH-64 Apache; and a scout helicopter, the OH-58 Kiowa, the armed variant of which is named the Kiowa Warrior.
The Comanche, a helicopter design of great promise that has languished in development since the early 1990s, is due to replace the Kiowa Warrior starting in 2009. But there is a significant overlap between the capabilities planned for the Comanche and those of the latest version of the Apache, called the Apache Longbow. Because the Apache already exists, a move to reduce airframes in the Army fleet could spell trouble for the Comanche program.
Rethinking the force mix
The urge to become more expeditionary also may alter the Army’s mix of light and heavy divisions.
The Army has six heavy divisions and four light divisions, a ratio some observers have criticized as too biased toward heavy units (armor and mechanized infantry), which take longer to deploy than their light-infantry counterparts.
One proposal contained in the slides is to cut a division’s worth of heavy forces from the active Army and replace it with an equivalent amount of light forces. The senior Army Staff officer said that proposal does not represent “a tasker” from Schoomaker to make the change. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the trend is toward lighter, more easily deployed forces.
“If you are trying to be expeditionary, you have to be able to get there fast, and one of the challenges with our heavy divisions has been to do what? Get there faster,” he said.
The Army was not setting numerical goals, but rather aiming to meet the needs of the military’s regional combatant commanders, the officer said.
“The chief is not saddling anybody with ‘six and four’ or ‘five and five,’.” he said. “But what he wants us to look at is where we can get to the fight as quickly as the combatant commander needs.”
However, another senior Army leader said he doubts the Army would replace a heavy division with a light division. “That’s one I’ve never heard of,” he said.
The ‘strategic pause’ ended 9/11
All this means the Army’s Transformation program will probably undergo some changes.
Since Schoomaker was confirmed, the Army quietly has dropped the terms it used to describe different components of the Army as the service transformed. Gone are:
•Legacy Force, the combat forces as they existed prior to Transformation, and consisting mostly of heavy divisions.
•Interim Force, the brigades equipped with the medium-weight Stryker wheeled armored vehicle.
•Objective Force, the Army of the future equipped with the Future Combat System, a family of vehicles that does not yet exist. The Army wants to begin fielding them in 2008.
Service officials use the term “Current Force” to refer to what used to be the Legacy and Interim Forces, while “Objective Force” has been replaced by “Future Force.”
There also has been a parallel decision to increase funding to the current force. This is a shift from the investment strategy the Army had taken since it started its Transformation program in 1999. That strategy held that the Army could afford to take a risk and minimize spending on upgrades to the Legacy Force so it could focus modernization dollars on the Interim and Objective Forces.
“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 Staff officer said. The Army planned to exploit that pause — a period of several years in which it did not expect to fight any major wars — to transform itself into a lighter, more lethal force organized around the perceived power of digital technology.
Then, two years into the Army’s Transformation program, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred, and the Army found itself in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“The strategic pause is over,” the senior Army Staff officer said. “We are now at war.”
As a result, the service must invest heavily in the forces it is deploying to fight that war.
“We are not going take risks while our troops are in combat,” another senior Army leader said.
But both leaders cautioned that observers should not conclude the Army is backing away from commitments to fund the Future Force in general, or the FCS program in particular.
“The Army is not abandoning the Future Combat System,” the senior Army Staff officer said. Some Pentagon sources have said the fielding of FCS is likely to be delayed by several years, but the senior Army Staff officer denied this.
“That is not true,” he said. “Hell no, we’re not doing that.”
Making soldiers Priority One
Schoomaker is placing the needs of the soldier at the top of his priority list, according to the slides and to the senior Army Staff officer.
“The soldier is now right up there at the top,” the senior Army Staff officer said. “And whatever we are doing is going to help showcase, embrace, train, equip [and] arm that soldier.”
No longer will soldiers headed to a combat zone receive different individual gear — weapons, optics, protective vests — based on whether they are assigned to a unit that traditionally receives the best equipment first.
“We’ve identified a list of key items and we’re going after those to put them in the hands of every soldier that deploys, whether the soldier happens to be a signal soldier or an infantry soldier, whether they’re later deploying, early deploying, active, Guard or Reserve,” a senior Army leader said. “The notions of later deploying and earlier deploying are no longer valid, given the fact that we’re fighting in two locations.”
Another part of the move to make life better for the soldier is a renewed effort to implement unit manning across the Army as fast as possible.
Unit manning is a way of manning the force in which soldiers would form into a unit, train, deploy, redeploy and stand down together. Under the Army’s personnel system, the individual replacement system, service rotates soldiers in and out of a unit on their own career cycles, with little attention paid to the needs of their units or their families.
“The chief’s real message was this: ‘I want stability and predictability for the Army soldier and his family.’.” Unit manning will help achieve that goal, the Army Staff officer said.
So the Army also will attempt to unit-man brigades as they reset upon their return from deployments and are reorganized into new brigade units of action, the senior Army Staff officer said.
Edited by - viperttb on Jan 21 2004 11:33 AM
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