It's great that the Army is finally stepping up and talking to its other "master": Congress. With Rumsfeld gone, Congress out of Republican control, the Army is reasserting itself.
Ann Scott Typon wrote the following today in the Washington Post:
Warning that the active-duty Army "will break" under the strain of today's war-zone rotations, the nation's top Army general yesterday called for expanding the force by 7,000 or more soldiers a year and lifting Pentagon restrictions on involuntary call-ups of Army National Guard and Army Reserve troops.
Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, issued his most dire assessment yet of the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the nation's main ground force. At one point, he banged his hand on a House committee-room table, saying the continuation of today's Pentagon policies is "not right."
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"The Army is incapable of generating and sustaining the required forces to wage the global war on terror . . . without its components -- active, Guard and reserve -- surging together," Schoomaker said in testimony before the congressionally created Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.
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The Army estimates that every 10,000 additional soldiers will cost about $1.2 billion a year, up from $700 million in 2001 in part because of increased enlistment bonuses and other incentives. The Army will have to "gain additional resources to support that strategy," Schoomaker acknowledged.
The point about increased recruiting costs is critical. While, as Armchair Generalist notes, the blinder-wearing right focusing on DoD facts that recruiting numbers are being met or even exceeded, deeper analysis shows something else and even indicates significant problems. The quality of recruits are falling, quite simply. Necessary increases in enlistment incentives and re-enlistment bonuses are not simply to meet private sector competition, which requires higher-caliber personnel than the bulk of current Army recruits coming in now, but rather indicate deeper problems that will haunt us through the long term. What does it say about motivation when recruits cost nearly twice as much today as five years ago when the "Long War" began?
On the need to upsize and restructure:
...Army Reserve units now must take an average of 62 percent of their soldiers for deployments from other units, compared with 6 percent in 2002 and 39 percent in 2003, according to the Army data. In one transportation company, only seven of 170 soldiers were eligible to deploy. The other 163 came from 65 other units in 49 locations, said the commission chairman, retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold L. Punaro, who quoted a Marine Reserve officer as calling the policy "evil."
"Military necessity dictates that we deploy organized, trained, equipped cohesive units -- and you don't do that by pick-up teams," said Schoomaker...
The problems of assembling units ad hoc, in an era when when unit cohesion and professionalism is utmost importance, we find money and manpower to be low on the list of priorities. This appears to be changing now.
The Rumsfeldian vision of the DoD has done more than create a possibly terminal problem in Iraq, but the outgoing SecDef set a depressing trajectory that will take time, more money, and a strong political will to correct.
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