It seems apparent that U.S. ground forces are finding it very difficult to maintain the current pace of overseas deployments and combat operations. Well thought out deployment plans are fraying at their edges; the Army is now making frequent changes to deployment schedules in order to maintain troop levels in Iraq...
Secretary Rumsfeld, an avowed Transformationist, continues to resist any permanent additions of conventional ground combat formations in the U.S. military. As a Transformationist, he believes that technology, air power, and local proxies will substitute for U.S. infantrymen and armored vehicles. And he believes that this moment is the last peak in the demand for conventional Army and Marine Corps battalions. Mr. Rumsfeld is expecting a reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq, perhaps starting next spring. Recruiting and building more battalions at this moment only will result in these units uselessly taking up barracks space, while also absorbing funding that could better be spent on transformational technology like FCS...
Now the decision point is the spring of 2007. If Mr. Rumsfeld’s gamble succeeds, that is, if he can reduce, say by mid-2008, the U.S. commitment to Iraq from today’s 15 brigades to 5, then the Army and Marine Corps’s current rotation crisis will have passed. The Future Combat System will be on its way, resulting, in the hopes of Mr. Rumsfeld and the Army leadership, in a far more useful, deployable, expeditionary, and sustainable Army. Mr. Rumsfeld and the Army will have avoided a dramatic lowering of the standards for soldiers and avoided creating useless old battalions, sinkholes, in their views, of wasted money.
Mr. Rumsfeld’s gamble could fail. All of the previous targets for reducing the U.S. ground commitment to Iraq have failed – there is no reason to assume the spring 2007 target will fare any differently. Should the gamble fail, the Army and the Marine Corps will be forced to maintain their frenetic rotation schedules. But we should expect that the brigades so rotated will be missing more and more of their most experienced leaders and will be going back into battle with less and less essential training. The effects of these trends would then show up on Iraq’s streets and in Afghanistan’s mountains.
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