U.S. struggling to find replacement troops

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - The Pentagon is scrambling to find enough fresh troops to begin an orderly rotation program that would bring home some of the 147,000 soldiers spread thinly across troubled Iraq.

With the new commanding general of U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, confirming what others in the Defense Department had been reluctant to admit - that United States forces face an increasingly deadly guerrilla war - the question of relief and rotation for weary GIs moved to the front burner.

The easiest fix would be for the 14,000 foreign forces, mostly British, already in Iraq to be augmented by thousands more allied soldiers. But negotiations to internationalize the occupation have been slow and difficult.

Defense officials noted the difficulties by citing Hungary's offer to send a truck battalion with no trucks. Presumably the American military would have to supply the trucks for the Hungarians to drive.

The need for replacement troops is putting great strain on both the active and reserve forces already stretched thin meeting obligations in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan, South Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Sinai - and a brigade-sized force of up to 5,000 troops expected to be deployed to peacekeeping duties in Liberia.

With only ten active duty divisions the 480,000-man U.S. Army has been stretched almost to the breaking point by the Iraq deployments. While Defense Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld and his top civilian aides have talked in the past of chopping another two divisions out of that Army, some in Congress have begun urging an increase in the active Army by as much as 25 percent.

Outgoing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, in his retirement speech last month, warned against loading 12 divisions worth of tasks on a 10-division Army. Last February Shinseki got in trouble with Rumsfeld for predicting before a Congressional committee that securing postwar Iraq might require more than 200,000 American soldiers.

Even more stressful have been the unprecedented demands placed on America's citizen-soldiers, the troops in the 900,000-strong Reserve and National Guard, over 200,000 of whom are on active duty. Some of them have been called up for more than a year already, placing great financial strains on their families and in many cases putting their civilian careers and businesses in jeopardy.

The likelihood of more Reserve and Guard call-ups for Iraq comes even as Rumsfeld has ordered an urgent study and the drafting of plans by month's end for a sweeping restructuring of those part-time forces that would shift a great deal of the burden back into the active military.

Pentagon officials said Rumsfeld's objective in rebalancing the Reserves and Guard is to ensure that every time the United States takes action in the world it does not automatically mean the call-up of large numbers of Reservists and Guard troops.

After the searing experience of Vietnam, Pentagon officials like former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger took pains to guarantee that all of America would have a stake in future combat operations by putting such crucially needed units as the military police, air refueling tanker pilots and civil-military affairs specialists into the Reserve and Guard. Then, the theory went, almost every community in the nation would have to make a contribution to any war.

The CentCom commander says he is working to establish a one-year tour of duty in Iraq and to ensure that those troops who had been there the longest would be the first to rotate home.

That would be the U.S. Army's 15,000-man 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division, which spearheaded the 19-day drive to Baghdad. One brigade of that division has been in Kuwait and Iraq for nearly a year.

Pentagon officials said even more National Guard and Reserve troops may have to be called up for deployment to Iraq. Elements of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division at Ft. Hood, Texas, and the 25th Infantry Division based in Hawaii are likewise under consideration for deployment to Iraq.

Although top Defense Department officials had hoped that the numbers of U.S. troops required to secure Iraq would be swiftly declining to below 100,000 by now, this has not happened and does appear likely to happen with the confirmation that mid-level Baath Party die-hards and disgruntled Iraqi soldiers are organizing and conducting more sophisticated guerrilla operations against American soldiers.

Perhaps the most telling comment of all this past week came in a photograph circulating on the Internet which shows an Army truck roaring down a dusty Iraq road, obviously driven by a disgruntled Reservist, with a placard in the front window saying: "One weekend a month my a--."

This article reflects the real problem we face, one that is a large elephant standing in the living room and no one wants to admitt it's presence: the US Army is too small and overtasked. Sure, GEN Abazaid said there are soldiers available, but what else would you expect him to say? That there are not?

The reality is that we don't have enough units in Iraq to maintain stability, while manning all the other places the US Army has to maintain a presence. And this doesn't even address the issue of rotating the 3rd ID and the USMC out and sending other units into Iraq.

However, the worst problem is that there exists every possibility that we might have to fight a war with N Korea in the near future. The problem with that is there is no way we have the conventional forces, US Army and USMC, to prosecute such a campaign and win outright. Thus all the diplomacy.

What we need to do is immediately begin the process of adding 4 more divisions: probably two heavy and two light. They might be need down the road.

I think you are on to something. The Guard is already running SFOR and is about to take over KFOR. I'm sure the active army would like to get out of Afganistan as soon as they can...it was tying up the 82nd and now the 10th MT. I'd look for a couple (or three) of those Army Guard "E Brigade's" to get a call shortly.
One might argue that the "streched too thin" argument is a canard: For example, over 50% of all the tank Battalions in the army are in the ARNG. Not one of them has been activated to do anything remotely close to their wartime mission, yet.
The army is on the horns of a classic dilemna with regard to ARNG combat forces: One the one hand, if a ARNG unit deploys and does well (there are already Guard Infantry units in Baghdad, but the Army doesn't make that known), then Congress might ask the reason why we have all these expensive Active units sitting around, when an ARNG unit can be trained up and deployed in the same amount of time (the 3rd ID didn't just roll in from Stewart and hit the berm...they had months to train in Kuwait).
However, the second horn might be worse...if that same Guard unit gets ripped apart in combat, congress will certainly ask the reason why the Active army did not prepare the Guard unit adequately...
Now that I think about it, perhaps it really IS all about the money and saving active duty Divisions...
regards,

The real problem is that Clinton cut the military in half.

STATE OF MILITARY PREPAREDNESS IN AMERICA
http://www.house.gov/hunter/stm4-def.htm

April 23, 1998

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, we are getting closer and closer to the anniversary of the invasion of South Korea, and I reflected back the other day when I was at my aunt and uncle's house in Fort Worth, Texas, because on one of their dressers they have a photograph of a young marine; his name was Son Stilwell, a Marine Lieutenant killed in Korea, one of the 50,000-some casualties KIA that we suffered in that conflict.

I reflected on that this pending anniversary. We are on the eve of when I listened to our Secretary of Defense and President Clinton's defense leaders as they presented a declining defense budget to the U.S. Congress. The situation, I think, is a lot like it was in those days in 1950 before that June invasion. To set the stage, Mr. Speaker, we have come down, we have slashed defense and cut down on our forces dramatically since Desert Storm. We have cut from 18 Army divisions that we had in 1991 to only 10 today. That is, incidentally and coincidentally, the same number of Army divisions we had when Korea was invaded.

We have gone from 24 to only 13 fighter air wings, so we have cut our air power almost in half under the Clinton Administration. And we have cut our naval vessels from 546 to 333, about a 40 percent cut in naval vessels.

Now, the theme in 1950 and the reason that so many defense leaders from then Lewis Johnson, then Secretary of Defense, right on down, the theme that they propounded as they presented this declining defense budget to the U.S. Congress, and said that it was adequate, was that somehow we were the dominating nation of the world with respect to high-tech, and nobody would mess with us. Of course, we had at that time the nuclear weapon. Nobody else presumably had that until a few years later.

Yet we were shocked in June when the North Koreans invaded South Korea and almost pushed the South Korean forces and the Americans that tried to stem the tide into the sea. We tried to hold them up at the Osan Pass, the 25th Infantry Division that we flew in, MacArthur flew in from Japan, was cut to ribbons. The commander, General Dean was, in fact, captured by North Korean forces.

We held the Pusan Peninsula by our toenails and finally started to push it up to the northern part of the peninsula. Then, interestingly, the theme that the leaders had that nobody would mess with us because we had the high technology and the nuclear weapon was further devastated when the Communist Chinese invaded South Korea.

The point isn't that we are any dumber than we were in 1950 and/or maybe we were dumber than we are now, and maybe we have leaders today that know something those people didn't know. My point is that the events of the world are unpredictable and that we today are taking a high level of risk by dramatically cutting our defenses.

The American people need to know that. They need to know that the massive savings, so-called savings that President Clinton is showing the world proudly and showing the American people proudly, the millions of dollars that he has pulled out of programs, have primarily been pulled out of national security.

We have dramatically cut back our national security. And we do not know what this world is going to bring us. I am reminded of the fact that when we had our assembled intelligence apparatus and our intelligence leaders in front of us, and we asked them a few simple questions, such as which of you predicted the Falklands war, none of them could raise their hands. When we asked which of you predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union, that was in all the papers. None of them could raise their hands.

And when we asked them which of you predicted the invasion of Kuwait, one of them actually said before or after the armored columns started moving? We said, no; before the armored columns started moving. None of them had predicted the invasion of Kuwait. It is not that they are not smart, it is not that they don't have a lot of resources at their disposal. The facts are that unexpected things happen in this world.

We are still living in a very unstable world, and we have a declining military to face that unstable world with. One reason we were able to bring home to the American people so many of the soldiers and sailors and marines who went over to Desert Storm, and the reason we didn't have to fill up those 40,000 body bags we took with us in fighting the fourth largest army in the world, was because we were so strong we won the war decisively in a very short period of time with very limited American casualties.

Mr. Speaker, we are taking a big chance today, because under the Clinton Administration's leadership, we have cut our military almost in half. If the balloon goes up today, we cannot win a Desert Storm war as decisively as we did just a few years ago.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.