Posted on 01/25/2006 7:11:03 AM PST by snowrip
Updated: 08:27 AM EST Deployments Stretching Army, Study Finds By ROBERT BURNS, AP
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WASHINGTON (Jan. 25) - Stretched by frequent troop rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has become a "thin green line" that could snap unless relief comes soon, according to a study for the Pentagon.
Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon's decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.
As evidence, Krepinevich points to the Army's 2005 recruiting slump -- missing its recruiting goal for the first time since 1999 -- and its decision to offer much bigger enlistment bonuses and other incentives.
"You really begin to wonder just how much stress and strain there is on the Army, how much longer it can continue," he said in an interview. He added that the Army is still a highly effective fighting force and is implementing a plan that will expand the number of combat brigades available for rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 136-page report represents a more sobering picture of the Army's condition than military officials offer in public. While not released publicly, a copy of the report was provided in response to an Associated Press inquiry.
Illustrating his level of concern about strain on the Army, Krepinevich titled one of his report's chapters, "The Thin Green Line."
He wrote that the Army is "in a race against time" to adjust to the demands of war "or risk `breaking' the force in the form of a catastrophic decline" in recruitment and re-enlistment.
Col. Lewis Boone, spokesman for Army Forces Command, which is responsible for providing troops to war commanders, said it would be "a very extreme characterization" to call the Army broken. He said his organization has been able to fulfill every request for troops that it has received from field commanders.
The Krepinevich assessment is the latest in the debate over whether the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have worn out the Army, how the strains can be eased and whether the U.S. military is too burdened to defeat other threats.
Rep. John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat and Vietnam veteran, created a political storm last fall when he called for an early exit from Iraq, arguing that the Army was "broken, worn out" and fueling the insurgency by its mere presence. Administration officials have hotly contested that view.
George Joulwan, a retired four-star Army general and former NATO commander, agrees the Army is stretched thin.
"Whether they're broken or not, I think I would say if we don't change the way we're doing business, they're in danger of being fractured and broken, and I would agree with that," Joulwan told CNN last month.
Krepinevich did not conclude that U.S. forces should quit Iraq now, but said it may be possible to reduce troop levels below 100,000 by the end of the year. There now are about 136,000, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.
For an Army of about 500,000 soldiers -- not counting the thousands of National Guard and Reserve soldiers now on active duty -- the commitment of 100,000 or so to Iraq might not seem an excessive burden. But because the war has lasted longer than expected, the Army has had to regularly rotate fresh units in while maintaining its normal training efforts and reorganizing the force from top to bottom.
Krepinevich's analysis, while consistent with the conclusions of some outside the Bush administration, is in stark contrast with the public statements of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and senior Army officials.
Army Secretary Francis Harvey, for example, opened a Pentagon news conference last week by denying the Army was in trouble. "Today's Army is the most capable, best-trained, best-equipped and most experienced force our nation has fielded in well over a decade," he said, adding that recruiting has picked up.
Rumsfeld has argued that the experience of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has made the Army stronger, not weaker.
"The Army is probably as strong and capable as it ever has been in the history of this country," he said in an appearance at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington on Dec. 5. "They are more experienced, more capable, better equipped than ever before."
Krepinevich said in the interview that he understands why Pentagon officials do not state publicly that they are being forced to reduce troop levels in Iraq because of stress on the Army. "That gives too much encouragement to the enemy," he said, even if a number of signs, such as a recruiting slump, point in that direction.
Krepinevich is executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit policy research institute.
He said he concluded that even Army leaders are not sure how much longer they can keep up the unusually high pace of combat tours in Iraq before they trigger an institutional crisis. Some major Army divisions are serving their second yearlong tours in Iraq, and some smaller units have served three times.
Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the private Brookings Institution, said in a recent interview that "it's a judgment call" whether the risk of breaking the Army is great enough to warrant expanding its size.
"I say yes. But it's a judgment call, because so far the Army isn't broken," O'Hanlon said.
Or....we don't NEED to break the back of the insurgency. We just need enough well-trained Iraqi troops to take up the fight.
Sheesh. If the obvious was a snake it'd have two fangs in his behind.
Study: Army Stretched to Breaking Point
My response on that thread:
So...call in the Marines, LOL! I get so sick of this gloom and doom "Army did not meet it's recruiting goals" crap. They exceeded retention goals (107%) and in fiscal 2005, fell only 8 percent short of the annual recruiting goal. The Navy, the Marine Corps and the Air Force all exceeded their goals.
"The Army is probably as strong and capable as it ever has been in the history of this country," he said in an appearance at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington on Dec. 5. "They are more experienced, more capable, better equipped than ever before."
Yes, they are, but there just aren't enough of them.
If it were a basketball team, it would be like going into a five-game series with only the five best players in the NFL, and nobody on the bench.
People don't seem to understand that you need redundancy down to the level of the private E-2 trigger puller, or the seaman apprentice standing deck watches on an oiler, just to be able to pull them off the line for a while.
One of the stupidest things we've done in decades, right behind putting so many women in the military, was turning "decompression billets" into civilan jobs.
Where does your fighting man go to decompress now, Mizzzzzzz Congresswoman? And who are you going to send up to the line in his place? Farging maroons.
Or reinstitute the draft and send 500K draftees to Iraq. Draft one million more and the invasion of Iran will become possible.
Sorry, I searched News/Activism under "Army" and didn't come up with anything.
"The Krepinevich assessment is the latest in the debate over whether the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have worn out the Army, how the strains can be eased and whether the U.S. military is too burdened to defeat other threats."
This guy is such a hand-wringer. Want to fix the Army? Quit your bitching! Get the military focus back on the business of war, rather than making it a labratory for political correctness. Get rid of women in combat brigades, make the physical training what it used to be (instead of the mixed-gender crap it is now), and pass legislation which forbids any politician from interfering with combat operations (i.e. POW internment). A bonus would be booting the press corps out of the front lines as well.
I can't help wondering how the war on terror would be turning out, were Ronald Reagan in charge.
More doom and gloom from the AP.We're losing!!Rationale,keep pounding the American public with negative articles on Iraq and eventually the American public will demand we exit from Iraq(sound familiar?).Do these nitwits have credibility with anyone besides liberals?It has certainly been a difficult road in Iraq,but we and the Iraqi's are winning the war against terrorism in the ME.
The issue, as always, is that Bill Clinton cut the army from 18 divisions down to 10 divisions. The Army IS the "hold the ground" service, so its numbers must be more than the other services.
Unfortunately for the nation, once they cut that 1/3+ from the defense budget (remember the so-called 'peace dividend'), they proceede to spend it in other areas so that it could never be easily recaptured by DoD.
Now we have Rumsfeld trying to turn 10 divisions and a training/staffing base into additional brigades from the same numbers. This will NOT change the number of deployments these guys would see. Normally, many of them would see a field assignment and then follow that with some kind of training assignment. Since the training assignments are going away, we're simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The answer is to cut the budget in other areas, and restore that money to DoD and increase the number of divisions back up to 18....the number LONG RECOGNIZED as necessary for fighting 2 full scale wars simultaneously (which is now obvious.)
Just because the news is bad and does not fit into what you believe does not make it wrong, any more than good news is seen as correct.
Yes the Iraqi Army is taking on more aspects of the war, but that does not mean it is plain sailing from here on in.
There are so many aspects that go wrong. And as every freeper with military experience and those of you who run businesses or in management you have to always factor in worse case scenarios.
Yes, cut Medicare, Medicaid, VA and Social Security benefits. Then the invasion of Iran will be possible. Extra $400B a year will do.
Cut wherever the 'peace dividend' got spent....that might not have been VA, SS, MCare & MAid.
Personally, I would like to see us add 4 more active duty Army divisions, 2 more Marine Division and a whole butt load more SOF forces. They are moving that way but it takes time and money to get there.
The danger of this "stretch to the breaking point" talk is, like the rabid defeatism of the American Left and our Junk Journalists, it encourages foes like NK or Iran to make massive miscalculations that WILL lead to war! Reagan once said some thing like this ....OF the 4 wars that have broken out in my lifetime, NONE where started because the USA was too strong militarily.
It is always better for us if our foes OVERESTIMATE our abilities.
Given the rabidly stupid things Iran is currently doing, it seems obvious that they have seriously miscalculated the offensive power of the USA. They really believe we are militarily and politically bogged down in Iraq. Iran may be making one of the greatest strategic blunders ever made by any nation.
Problem is some of our people will have to die in teaching them the error of their ways. I personally would rather avoid paying that price if possible.
In all previous wars, such as the Civil War, WWI and WWII, there was basically no such thing as rotation out of the war. Troops stayed in the field until they were wounded, killed, captured or won.
The idea of rotation after one year surfaced in VietNam and we all know how well that worked. It took months to adjust to the conditions and learn the ropes and by the time a soldier became anything but a 'cherry' most were looking for the big bird ride to home.
Maybe it's time to increase the size of the Army, but we also should remove troops from areas in Europe where they have been stationed since WWII.
And the 30,000 that are in Korea are inadequate for any job other than a sacrificial 'tripwire' against the numerically superior N. Koreans. We need to rethink that strategy, remove the troops from harm's way and tell N. Korea we'll go nuclear on them if they cross the line.
Again, sorry for the duplicate post; I searched and nothing came up.
I agree with the fact that this piece was written by a pantywaisted handwringer of a dem hack... lookat the words he continually uses: "stressed", "strain", "too burdened"... Waaah!
I do however recognize that we are down from 18 divisions (1992) to 10 divisions due to cuts made by the Clinton administration, in its infinite wisdom. Clinton effectively destroyed one of the cornerstones of US military policy for over half a century: being able to fight a war on two fronts at once.
I've been waiting since the 2000 election for our president to expand our military, even in the face of the MSM and the politically correct idea of a "peace dividend" ... You would think that with a war on, control of both the House and Senate, and the China issue, he would have grown a pair by now.
It is because the war in Vietnam lasted long. In the long lasting war you have to have rotation! How long the same soldiers should stay? 5 years? 10 years? Or 30? Or until they die of old age?
>>>Reagan once said some thing like this ....OF the 4 wars that have broken out in my lifetime, NONE where started because the USA was too strong militarily.<<<
My point exactly; however, I believe it is better to BE strong than to APPEAR strong.
Single-year rotation in Southeast Asia didn't work as well because of the fact that new troops took a while to learn the ropes of warfare in the jungle.
In the ancient Roman army enlistments were for 20 years and the soldier went with his unit to the far-flung outposts on the frontier for the entire time of his enlistment. No R&R back home and no rotation unless they were able to go back for a triumphal parade in honor of their victories.
In fact, many soldiers did wind up living and dying at their posts, spending their lives there. So it can be done. I'm not recommending lifetime posts because we shouldn't have long-term world-wide committments.
PS. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese didn't get rotated home either.
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