Posted on 03/15/2004 6:04:33 AM PST by walden
New Army Brigade Plan is Dangerous
Following his unprecedented and premature retirement of 47 U.S. Army generals and with his installation of hand-picked replacements to lead the U.S. Army nearly completed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is on the verge of moving full bore to begin implementing long-planned reforms, including the complete elimination of the Army's division-based force structure.
Rumsfeld and his hand-picked replacement as Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, plan to replace it with a force structure based on dismounted infantry-centric mini-brigade units consisting of about 1,800 men - each of which will be more optimized to fight small wars, but less suited to fighting major conflicts. These new mini-brigades will reportedly consist of only two battalions each down from the four battalions of today's combat brigades.
Schoomaker recently announced his plan to immediately begin implementing this reformed structure with the 101st Air Assault Division and the 3rd Infantry Division, both of which have just returned to the United States following a long-term deployment in Iraq.
Five mini-brigade size units will be derived from each of the two divisions, which will then be ready for action about a year from now, presumably for redeployment to Iraq. These mini-brigades will have a smaller complement of men and fighting vehicles than current brigade combat teams, but will also have limited integrated artillery and aviation assets as divisions do today on a much larger scale.
The divisions themselves will become similar to Army corps headquarters, which are little more than command-and-control units for attached subordinate elements. Once the reorganization of these two divisions is complete, Schoomaker will then report back to Rumsfeld with a recommendation on the future size of the Army. The presumption is that he will recommend a substantial reduction to the Army's end-strength.
At the annual Association of the United States Army conference last month, top Army officials including Schoomaker confirmed plans to disband all of the Army's heavy divisions and discard its tanks and tracked vehicles by 2025, without which the United States cannot fight or win major wars.
Schoomaker is also reportedly considering "transforming" in the near term one of the Army's existing six heavy divisions into a light infantry division by removing all of its tanks and tracked vehicle assets. This particular change will provide more optimized units for ongoing occupation and peacemaking duties in Iraq.
Given that the 3rd Infantry division, a heavy division, is already slated to undergo a major reorganization, it may well be the division selected for transformation from a heavy mechanized force to a light unarmored infantry force. These plans seem to indicate that the Army leadership does not anticipate that major conflicts such as the recent U.S. invasion of Iraq will be waged in the foreseeable future, and that Operations Other Than War (OOTW) such as U.N. peacemaking missions and occupation duties will remain the primary focus of the U.S. Army.
Perhaps the new Army leaders agree with Secretary Rumsfeld that all future wars the U.S. military fights will be small wars like Afghanistan, requiring no more than 50,000 special forces and light infantry troops supported by airpower. However, if history teaches us anything, it is that the United States will fight a major war that it did not plan on fighting sometime in the next decade or two. That being the case, any transformation effort that does not recognize that fact and disarms the Army of the weapons that it needs to fight and win major conflicts will inevitably result in the unnecessary deaths of countless thousands of American soldiers in the future.
Army generals successfully defended the Army's force structure from a two-division cut contemplated by Rumsfeld during the 2001 Quadrennial Review process, but it is doubtful that they will continue to resist such cuts for long in opposition to the autocratic Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld is accustomed to getting his own way and sometimes even resorts to firing those who disagree with him on matters of principle as in the case of former Secretary of the Army Thomas White.
The elimination of the Army's divisions would provide Rumsfeld with cover for his longtime plan to slash tens of thousands of troops from the service's payrolls, despite the fact that the Army remains severely overextended in Iraq. It has been unable to sustain the current level of deployments, forcing the call-up of tens of thousands of Army reservists and National Guard troops to fill the gap.
As recently as last year, Rumsfeld and his top confidante for transformation issues, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Steven Cambone, were reported to be continuing to plan to reduce the number of Army divisions from ten to as few as six, for a reduction of up to 40 percent. Under that earlier scenario, the few remaining Army divisions would then be transformed into an all-wheeled force of motorized light infantry brigades without the tanks or tracked vehicles necessary to fight and win major conflicts.
Dispensing with the division structure altogether and replacing the Army's current thirty-three brigades with forty-eight much smaller regiment-sized units, each with fifty-five percent less personnel than modern-day brigades, would allow Rumsfeld to conceal many of his planned Army personnel reductions as part of the transformation to a brigade-focused structure. Rumsfeld may even find a way to bypass the congressional authorization necessary to approve his planned force reductions.
There is another reason behind Rumsfeld's plan to eliminate the Army's divisions. Since the Vietnam War, the Army's mobilization plan has ensured that the Army would have to rely upon reserve and National Guard units in any major or protracted conflict. This policy, devised by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams, was intended to prevent the U.S. Army from being used in no-win wars in the future without a highly-publicized mobilization of reservists and Guardsmen.
That decades-old policy is causing the Bush administration headaches as reservists and their families complain about being sent to Iraq for twelve to eighteen months at a time, creating potential political problems for the president's re-election campaign.
While restructuring the Army will take several years to fully implement, it will make it easier for future presidents to bog down the U.S. Army in future no-win wars - like the one now being waged in Iraq - without the necessity of widespread public support.
David T. Pyne, president of the Center for the National Security Interest, a national security think-tank in Arlington, Va., has joined DefenseWatch as a Contributing Editor. He can be reached at pyne@national-security.org. ©2003 DefenseWatch. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
The Future Combat System will be a revolutionary system providing greater mobility while achieving an overall system weight approaching 40 tons (<50 tons desired).
Take a look at the Korean terrain and tell me that airpower is gonna win it.
I know the terrain well. Explain to me whether an Abrahams or FCS would perform better in the restrictive terrain of Korea.
Air power did not prove decisive in Bosnia, in large part because of the terrain.
Bosnia and Korea share the same terrain?
This kind of mentality has been in vogue over the last few years with various op-ed writers in "conservative" newspapers. One such person that comes to mind is Philip Gold.
You mean Shoomaker? That's ridiculous.
1. Former armor officer who thinks that tanks rule, infantry drools.
2. Former FReeper "eightwing2" who, prior to the War in Iraq, bragged about his extremely high security clearance and position in the Army Secretariat as he flamed anyone who supported going to war against Iraq--including, incidentally, several of his bosses.
He' more than right: he's absolutely right. Anybody with soldiering experience and has been following the Iraqi Operation knows we need more not less heavy mech. Just go ask those that are fighting if they if they'd rather be in Bradleys and M1s or HUMVEES.
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