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thedrifter
06-14-03, 10:29 PM
Mapping out the future of EUCOM


By Jon R. Anderson, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Sunday, June 15, 2003


In the four months since Marine Gen. James L. Jones took over the job as commander of the U.S. European Command, he has been blasting away at a military mind-set that he says has not changed with the times.

With marching orders handed directly from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Jones has been crafting a plan to transform the map of U.S. forces in Europe.

“We need to get out of the Cold War-defense-of-Europe mentality,” Jones, the first Marine tapped to lead the Army- and Air Force-dominated formations in Europe, told Stars and Stripes in an April 3 interview.

“We’re in the process of looking at whether our presence — such as it is — is adequate for the job and where is it that we might wish to move in the near future,” he said.

Specifically, Jones wants to consolidate old bases in Europe to cut down on maintenance costs while opening forward outposts designed to tap into better training opportunities and to get closer to potential threats.

If approved by Rumsfeld, Jones’ plan would bring about the most radical changes to forces in Europe since the Iron Curtain collapsed and units that had held the line against the Warsaw Pact suddenly found themselves marching off to a war with Iraq. And just as after the first Gulf War, some of the victors this time around could come home to closing bases and disappearing units.

But this time there also coule be significant movements in new directions.

Jones’ campaign can be summed up as spearheads along three major fronts:

• A shift west — Moving thousands of troops back to the United States and closing dozens of installations in Germany and England, Jones hopes to consolidate forces on a few remaining “Main Operating Bases” in Western Europe.

• A shift east — Opening “Forward Operating Bases” in Eastern Europe, Jones wants to begin rotating forces from the remaining bases in Western Europe — and from the United States — into new spartan sites designed to maximize training opportunities while getting closer to potential hot spots.

• A shift south — Jones thinks Africa has been ignored for too long. As part of his plan, “Forward Operating Sites” will soon dot the continent, enabling U.S. forces to go after terrorist networks and drug runners.

To make it happen, Jones must fight those within the Army and Air Force who worry that his plan would stretch U.S. forces too thin, throw mud in the face of tried and true allies, and rely too heavily on concepts that have proved problematic in the past. Among the most worrisome for many is the emphasis on rotational forces.

Among detractors are rank-and-file troops who fear that Jones’ plans for rotational forces would leave wives and children behind and would strip away one of the biggest benefits of military life: a chance for troops to live and travel with their families overseas.

“Units in the Army have been run hard since the fall of the Iron Curtain,” recently retired Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, who turned over command of U.S. Army Europe in December, told congressional leaders during testimony Feb. 26. “It is relatively easy to find field grade officers and senior NCOs (noncommissioned officers) with three to five tours in harm’s way. Child and spouses bore much of the strain of that pace. Many would see moving to a rotational structure and its obvious implications as a breach of faith.

“The impact on morale,” Meigs said, “would be devastating.”

Staff Sgt. Daniel Hubbard, a Germany-based soldier now deployed to Iraq, has been a soldier for 15 years, 12 of them in Germany. Hubbard met his German wife during an assignment and is taking advantage of the accompanied tour as long as possible so she can be close to her family before the couple retires in the United States in five years.

“I’d rather overseas rotations be accompanied tours,” the 34-year-old soldier said. “Quite a few people in my unit really like to travel and see everything.”

Despite the concerns, Jones is not stopping with U.S. forces. As NATO’s supreme allied commander, he says the alliance itself must transform and evolve.

“NATO is at the crossroads,” said Jones, explaining that the alliance “has shown the political will to expand, but the military capability that underpins the alliance still needs to change. This is really the start of an important period of time.”

For NATO and the U.S. forces in Europe, he said, that means getting smaller, spending money more wisely and looking in new directions to tackle new threats.

Over the next four days, Stars and Stripes will bring together Jones’ vision for the future of EUCOM, along with some of the debate over his plan. The series is based on interviews with Jones as well as with congressional and military leaders whom he has briefed. It also is based on public comments Jones has made and on interviews with his top deputies and aides.

What’s in a name?

Jones hints that even the name of his command may be due for an overhaul.

“The very title ‘U.S. European Command’ is now something of a misnomer and no longer representative of the vastness of our area of operations,” Jones writes in his 2003 Posture Statement, submitted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on May 3.

EUCOM covers an area more than 14 times the size of the continental United States. It stretches from Norway’s fjords in the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of the African continent, across the Atlantic from Greenland to the mountainous “stans” of Central Asia, and along the entire breadth of Russia.

Within that basket are 93 countries, including two of the remaining six nations accused of being state sponsors of terrorism — Libya and Syria. Like Iraq, recently scratched from the list, two more — Iran and Sudan — border EUCOM’s area of responsibility.

Covering this area is a force of about 109,000 U.S. troops, only 8.4 percent of the active-duty ranks worldwide. The majority of those troops are stationed within EUCOM’s basing axis of England, Germany and Italy, but they are spread out over nearly 500 installations.

Jones has already announced his intention to cut about 20 percent of those facilities, and he has tasked local service chiefs to look for even deeper cuts as a way to save cash.

“Inadequate resources provided for the infrastructure, since 1989, have resulted in 19,090 of our 32,100 government quarters being defined as being ‘inadequate,’” Jones wrote in his posture statement. “Rather than invest significant sums of money into facilities, some of which may not be necessary to meet our future basing needs … we can seize the moment to apply new metrics of transformation to determine how best to spend, and where to spend, our resources.”

Broad reach

In the early 1990s, Jones served as one of the top operations officers in EUCOM under Army Gen. George Joulwan.

“We had been looking at how to reconfigure EUCOM since 1994,” Joulwan said.

Even as the last units from the massive Cold War drawdown were being cut from his rolls, Joulwan said, he found his remaining units stretched all over the map.

“We were up to our eyebrows in Bosnia, Rwanda, Liberia and northern Iraq,” Joulwan told Stars and Stripes in an interview in May. “The question quickly became, ‘How do you structure yourself for that?’”

Since the collapse of the Cold War and the single-minded focus on protecting the Fulda Gap, EUCOM officials say U.S. forces in the region have found themselves embroiled in more than 75 major operations.

While many, such as evacuating Americans from Liberia in 1991, were short-fuse ops, others such as Balkans peacekeeping duties — which began in Macedonia in 1994 under Jones’ leadership — continue to this day.

“As those crises developed, we were always getting hung up on what bases and sites we could use to get there — our strategic reach,” Joulwan said.

continued....on link........

http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=16070


Sempers,

Roger