Analysts question upsizing Army, Corps

Analysts question upsizing Army, Corps
By John T. Bennett - jbennett@militarytimes.com
Posted : April 23, 2007

The Bush administration’s plan to add 92,000 soldiers and Marines to the active-duty force is aimed primarily at preparing to fight another lengthy irregular war, with units rotating into the theater and training indigenous militaries to carry out missions on their own turf, the Pentagon’s top policy deputy said.

“The need to move from a force that is garrisoned forward for highly kinetic, major combat operations to one that has more of its mass back in the United States — but rotates forward — is something that we see in the future,” said Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy.

Henry’s comments offer a rare look into Pentagon thinking about how those new troops will be used, and how lessons from rolling rotations of units into the Iraq theater are making their way into the military’s force-planning strategy.

The concept “of prolonged, irregular campaigns — whatever the level of combat intensity or security cooperation it might be — does appear to be out there in the future,” Henry said.

U.S. defense leaders also believe forces will be called more often to train indigenous militaries in strategic hot spots.

“The need for the United States, on a cooperative level, to work with a larger number of partners and to work with them in their countries, we see as something that will be out there in the future,” Henry said April 6. “[An expanded] ground force supports that capability.”

The White House announced the buildup in January amid political pressure to swell the force as the longer-than-anticipated post-combat phase of the Iraq war stressed the Army and Marine Corps.

Some former defense officials and military experts have questioned the wisdom of swelling the force and say the White House has failed to adequately explain how it foresees using the added troops.

Until last year, the Defense Department built its force structure around the “1-4-2-1 concept,” named for its major tenets:

• Defend U.S. soil.

• Fight aggression through forward deployments to places such as Europe, Northeast Asia, the East Asian littoral and Middle East/Southwest Asia.

• Fight two major conventional combat operations at nearly the same time.

• Rapidly win one of those conventional fights.

But the Pentagon scrapped that concept when officials crafted the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review.

“Under the new construct, the U.S. military is sized and shaped for three main types of missions: homeland defense, the war on terrorism/irregular warfare, and conventional campaigns,” Mich�le Flournoy, a senior adviser in the International Security Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a spring 2006 assessment of the QDR strategy.

“In each case, U.S. forces must be able to meet the peacetime or steady-state requirements associated with a given set of operations, to surge for crisis operations, and to maintain a rotation base adequate to sustain longer operations over time.”

Said Henry: “We moved from the concept of being able to engage in two nearly simultaneous, large conventional campaigns to saying one could be irregular and could be prolonged. And that’s obviously what we’re experiencing right now.”

But some observers say it is unlikely that the U.S. military might find itself in another — to use Henry’s description — “prolonged, irregular” fight.

“I just don’t see a country out there where we’d try this again,” said Gordon Adams, a Clinton administration official in the Office of Management and Budget, referring to Iraq.

Ellie