End strength cuts seen as inevitable
Army Could Shed Up To 15 BCTs In Push To Meet Budget Savings Goal
Inside the Army - 08/29/2011
The Army has offered to cut up to 15 brigade combat teams to meet defense savings goals negotiated by the White House and Congress, Inside the Army has learned.
The proposal, briefed to the high-level Deputy's Advisory Working Group in recent weeks, offers a range of cuts in personnel that could bring the number of active-duty BCTs from 45 down to 30 in the most extreme case, according to an official familiar with the deliberations.
A plan to reorganize the Army's premiere fighting formations has been in the works for some time. Then-Training and Doctrine Command Chief Gen. Martin Dempsey last year ordered an exploration of the effects that a plus-up of maneuver forces in BCTs would bring. The force-design move, as envisioned then, was expected to reduce the total number of BCTs by 10, but increase their size and fighting capability.
Dempsey became Army chief of staff in the spring. President Obama selected him to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff only weeks after taking the Army job.
The goal of fewer but bigger and more fighting-capable BCTs still holds as the number of reductions possible is now pegged at 15, according to the official. While planning continues toward $350 billion in savings over a decade, the possibility of even greater cuts has created a sense of uneasiness. "If sequestration comes into play, who knows what the number is," said the official, referring to an automatic reduction of hundreds of billions of dollars in security-related spending that would take effect if Congress is unable to pass new saving proposals produced by a bipartisan debt "super committee."
The Army proposal leaves intact the service's 28 Reserve-Component BCTs, according to the official. The units are less expensive than their active-duty counterparts; tweaking their numbers is considered politically sensitive, and their capabilities are needed by governors to deal with domestic crises, the official said.
An Army spokeswoman did not return a request for comment on the service's BCT plans by press time (Aug. 26).
While the expectation among defense insiders has been that the Army's response to the nation's fiscal woes would involve reducing end strength (beyond reversing temporary increases and a cut of 27,000 already planned), the matter has so far been discussed only behind closed doors.
Army Chief Information Officer Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence, in a teleconference with reporters last week, noted "directions" from Defense Department leaders to that effect. "We . . . anticipate, based on the reduced budget, depending on how reduced the budget is -- then we're probably talking taking forces out of the inventory," she said. "I think we can say with pretty high confidence that there'll be forces taken out of the inventory. We just don't know how many at this time."
The number of Army BCTs is a fundamental yardstick in a defense-wide strategy for the employment of land power. Internally, the figure is tied into the Army Force Generation concept and equipping strategies, and it plays a role in the tempo of unit rotations in and out of war zones during extended conflicts.
From an operational perspective, fewer BCTs would mean the Army "can't be in as many places; they can't be in as many cities at the same time, because they won't have the headquarters to control independent operations," the service official said. But the goal is to retain sufficient combat power for a "big fight" as well as a set of smaller fights in which units would need to operate independently, the official added.
Some analysts see the appetite for long ground engagements, like Iraq or Afghanistan, waning among administration officials and the public. Inside the Army reported last month that Joint Staff officials readying their annual Operational Availability study had been instructed to identify force cuts that could be made under the assumption that the U.S. military would no longer take up the hugely expensive mission of rebuilding wartorn nations (ITA, July 7, p1).
Brigade combat teams are the Army's response to demands for a more nimble organization than a division-centered force could offer. The service had 33 BCTs when the reorganization, known as modularity, began in 2003. -- Sebastian Sprenger