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thedrifter
02-11-04, 05:41 AM
Issue Date: February 16, 2004

More troops? No thanks.
End-strength boost not needed, commandant says

By Rick Maze
Times staff writer

The senior officers of the Army and Marine Corps managed to cut the legs out from under lawmakers seeking dramatic increases in the number of people on active duty.
The Army plans a temporary 30,000-soldier increase under existing emergency authority, and doesn’t want Congress to mandate a permanent increase, said Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff.

Marine Commandant Gen. Mike Hagee flatly said he has no desire or need for more Marines. “We do not need an end-strength increase,” he said.

Hagee noted that the 8 percent increase for the Army, Marine Corps and Air Force being discussed in Congress would not provide immediate relief from the operational pressures on the force. It would take four or five years before the addition of more people on active duty yielded more people who could deploy, and “it isn’t clear to me we would need them in four or five years,” he added.

Schoomaker and Hagee made their comments at a Jan. 28 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee focusing on troop rotations for Operation Iraqi Freedom. With 250,000 troops on the move between now and May — some of whom are returning to Iraq for a second tour — and mobilized reservists making up as much as 40 percent of the deployed force, some lawmakers are pushing to increase the number of people on active duty to reduce the strain.

“We need to increase our strength so we don’t break the force,” said Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who has been pressing for a bigger Army since 1995.

“We do not have enough troops to do everything we have to do at once,” said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., chief sponsor of a bill that would expand the active-duty force by 83,700 people over five years.

Tauscher said it seemed to her that Pentagon leaders are more worried about transforming the force than about the strain on troops and their families.

Supporters of a larger military are scrambling to convince colleagues to set aside money to pay for more troops, at a cost of about $1.5 billion a year for each 10,000 extra people. But the fact that the chiefs of the Army and Marine Corps — which are carrying the burden of providing ground troops in the war on terrorism and the extended Iraq mission — don’t support the idea makes selling the personnel increases difficult.

Schoomaker offered few details about how and when the 30,000 extra troops would be used, saying only that he had asked and received permission from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to exceed authorized personnel levels. The extra people will make it easier for the Army to carry out a proposed restructuring of its divisions while not losing the ability to handle current missions, he said.

When transformation is complete four or five years from now, another assessment can be made of whether the Army needs more people. “When we are done, we can determine if this is a spike or a plateau” in the demand for troops, he said.

The overall idea is to create a more modular force structure in which brigades could deploy without a division headquarters, giving the Army more flexibility in deciding what capabilities to deploy for specific missions, Schoomaker said.

The end result would be an Army of 48 active brigades, 15 more than today. Schoomaker said the extra people needed to man those brigades could come over time from shifting civilians or contractors into some jobs now filled by service members.

However, plans to increase the amount of time a soldier serves with a unit in order to reduce the number of reassignment moves and other personnel changes will, in time, provide those extra bodies without requiring a permanent increase in the number of people on active duty, he said.

“We should not make a commitment to permanent end-strength increases at this time,” he said, warning that having too many personnel could leave the Army burdened with heavy expenses and without enough money for training and modernization.

That was the Army’s problem in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “I am adamant that is not the way to go,” he said.

Simply adding people without changing the force structure, he said, “is like pouring a canteen of water into the sand.”

Hagee had similar comments. “I do not want to mortgage the future for a situation right now that I believe we can handle with the forces we have,” he said.“We are talking about a lot of time and a lot of people’s lives,” he said.


What do you think?
Does the Corps need more Marines to ease the burden caused by the current pace of operations?

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?f=0-MARINEPAPER-2621870.php


Sempers,

Roger
:marine:

P. M. SHEEHAN
02-11-04, 07:56 AM
I'm not the Commandant. Hagee must know what he's talking about....I hope. Remember the line "we keep heaven packed with fresh souls". Nomatter what happens to us, and the risks and casualties we take, the Marine Corps is the only branch of service that has a magical attraction . We are the only branch that makes and exceeds manpower quotas. For now, at least, we "don't have to sweat it".

MillRatUSMC
02-11-04, 08:03 AM
That why these Officers are in the position of authority.
To make the hard decisions, with an opened eye.
Not from a "Pork Barrel" point of view.
The American people owe a great deal to those now serving...

Semper Fidelis
Ricardo