On U.S. Army / Marine Corps End-Strength

[SWJED]

Several items concerning ground troop numbers...

21 September Los Angeles Times - Deployment Math Tests the Military by Peter Spiegel and Julian Barnes.

As prospects fade for U.S. force reductions in Iraq, Army and Marine commanders have been stepping up their warnings that the pace of troop deployments is increasingly straining the military and threatening to cause long-term damage.

According to Pentagon officials, senior officers in the Army and Marine Corps in recent weeks have begun warning that without a reduction in Iraq, the present schedule of combat tours would be difficult to sustain without an increase in the number of forces.

Army officials had been counting on a gradual drawdown in Iraq starting later this year and accelerating over the following 12 months...

One senior Pentagon official involved in long-term planning said the concerns had reached such a level that top Army leaders broached the issue of changing deployment rules to allow for more frequent call-ups of National Guard and Reserve units to relieve pressure on the active duty Army...

22 September New York Times - Strained, Army Looks to Guard for More Relief by Thom Shanker and Michael Gordon.

Strains on the Army from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become so severe that Army officials say they may be forced to make greater use of the National Guard to provide enough troops for overseas deployments.

Senior Army officers have discussed that analysis — and described the possible need to use more members of the National Guard — with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s senior adviser on personnel, David S. C. Chu, according to Pentagon officials.

While no decision has been made to mobilize more Guard forces, and may not need to be before midterm elections, the prospect presents the Bush administration with a politically vexing problem: how, without expanding the Army, to balance the pressing need for troops in the field against promises to limit overseas deployments for the Guard...

2 October edition of the Weekly Standard - More Troops by Frederick Kagan and William Kristol.

You can hardly read a story about Iraq these days without seeing an Army or Marine officer say he doesn't have enough troops to accomplish his mission. Senior officers respond that this is what junior commanders always say. That's not quite true. Commanders in charge of secondary missions often ask for more resources than they need, not recognizing their missions are less vital. But the calls for more troops in Iraq come from soldiers training Iraqis, from soldiers trying to secure Baghdad, from soldiers in Anbar. If all of these are secondary missions, where's the main effort? The truth is there are not enough ground forces in Iraq, and military officers are finally saying so in public.

The administration could respond to this obvious fact by sending more troops. Rather than do that, some military and civilian leaders are spinning: There are no more troops to send, they say. In fact, some military leaders say we won't be able to sustain even the current levels--as CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid has said we must--without risking grave damage to the military.

To those who warn that Iraq is "breaking the Army," we would respond that losing in Iraq will increase the burden on the military over the coming decades rather than decreasing it. Nothing breaks a military like losing.

But there's an even more important point here. If it were, in fact, true that there is not a single additional soldier to send to Iraq, then the United States would be facing the gravest
national security crisis since Pearl Harbor. For this would mean that there is not a single soldier available to be sent anywhere: Iran, North Korea, Somalia, Lebanon, or wherever the next crisis arises. It would mean that the president has no strategic options at all involving the use of ground forces. And this would be an open invitation to our enemies to take advantage of our weakness...

22 September Thomas P.M. Barnett web log - When you can't give up the political past, you start mortgaging your security future.

Rumsfeld's Pentagon doesn't want to admit it needs a bigger Army for several reasons, but here are the worst:

1) No one wants to admit the "transformed" force can't do it all, but the reality is, we transformed the Leviathan plenty (USAF, USN and the air community in general) while beggaring the SysAdmin (USA, USMC, SOF and ground forces in general). So to this administration, biggering the Army feels like failure.

2) No one wants to admit things are going poorly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

3) To shift resources from the Air Force and Navy to the Marines and Army suggests admitting that the Long War has become the main force sizer, and that means giving up on the high-end, platform-rationalizing scenarios associated with China. The Pentagon hawks, the Neocons in general, and Rummy in particular still want to hold onto this past, despite how it beggars our real security future. Naturally, the military-industrial complex wants to keep China as well, and so you see many references in their press to the "failure" of transformation, as defined by "light and lethal" (If we can't defeat an insurgency with light and lethal, how can we defeat China!). Here's a good example of this logic, replete with sideswipes at me...

[streiff]

Barnett really misses the issue.

When Dr. David Chu was ASD (PA&E) under Bush41 I was an action officer in the Pentagon. He made an interesting observation: "Without a Soviet Union there is no logical floor to Army endstrength."

The USSR had maintained stability of the Regular Army at a number colloquially referred to as "781K". A minimum of 781,000 troops were required to meet our NATO obligation of 10/10, ten American divisions in 10 days. This is what was the models said was needed to stop the Warsaw Pact. From that calculation, based largely on the rail capacity in Poland, East Germany, and the Western military districts of the USSR and the inventory of rolling stock in the Warsaw Pact, we ended up with 4 2/3 heavy divisions in Germany and POMCUS for the remainder.

That hasn't changed.

Absent a significant enemy there is no defensible floor for Army endstrength. The Pentagon is reluctant, and rightfully so, to press for a significant expansion.

In the short run you have to raid tactical units for more recruiters, for drill sergeants, for instructors, etc. This means less capable deploying units. We've divested ourselves of a lot of training facilities. It will take lots of time and money to get back to the capacity we had in 1990 with a much smaller number of installations because an expanded Army has to be quartered somewhere and it has to train when not deployed.

So without some degree of political guarantee that we won't find another "Peace Dividend" there is really little to no constituency within the institutional Army to expand in anything but the most gradual way.

[SWJED]

Josh comments on The Adventures of Chester blog - The Irrational Tenth.

Belmont Club notes a sort of ongoing conversation taking place in many circles about the war and the size of the force necessary to best prosecute it.

At that time [2003] there was very little appreciation of what was really required to defeat the enemy. The Democrats were arguing for police action through multilateral alliances. Or for large half-million man troop deployments in Iraq. And the Conservatives thought that major combat operations were over in Iraq. But in truth, no one was asking the right questions. As one Marine Colonel (the reference to which I can't find at the moment) argued, more men of the wrong kind would have converted Iraq into a mud-trodden disaster. John Kerry understands this, and calls for more Special Forces to be used. But where to get them?

Where to get them indeed. This is the type of conversation in which someone quickly chimes in, "Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics." And they'd be right in a sense, because figuring out what kinds of forces are necessary when and where is a sort of strategic issue. Figuring out where to find them and then supplying them is more of a logistical problem, since it deals with the whole panoply of issues that entail the forming and manning of a certain kind of force...

[Tom Odom]

Originally Posted by streiff

Barnett really misses the issue.

When Dr. David Chu was ASD (PA&E) under Bush41 I was an action officer in the Pentagon. He made an interesting observation: "Without a Soviet Union there is no logical floor to Army endstrength."

The USSR had maintained stability of the Regular Army at a number colloquially referred to as "781K". A minimum of 781,000 troops were required to meet our NATO obligation of 10/10, ten American divisions in 10 days. This is what was the models said was needed to stop the Warsaw Pact. From that calculation, based largely on the rail capacity in Poland, East Germany, and the Western military districts of the USSR and the inventory of rolling stock in the Warsaw Pact, we ended up with 4 2/3 heavy divisions in Germany and POMCUS for the remainder.

That hasn't changed.

Absent a significant enemy there is no defensible floor for Army endstrength. The Pentagon is reluctant, and rightfully so, to press for a significant expansion.

In the short run you have to raid tactical units for more recruiters, for drill sergeants, for instructors, etc. This means less capable deploying units. We've divested ourselves of a lot of training facilities. It will take lots of time and money to get back to the capacity we had in 1990 with a much smaller number of installations because an expanded Army has to be quartered somewhere and it has to train when not deployed.

So without some degree of political guarantee that we won't find another "Peace Dividend" there is really little to no constituency within the institutional Army to expand in anything but the most gradual way.

I would say you could have made all those points with some validity in 2001 perhaps in 2002. In 2006, they don't fly. There is a justifiable "floor" for Army end strength, it is called proven OPTEMPO and 5 years into GWOT I believe we--the US--could have arrived at a need for more troops at least by 2004. Had we done so, we could have added end strength needed now.

The other weakness in the argument then and now is that it basically says "we cannot get beyond Cold War paradigms." I believe there are any number of senior officers retired and active who could do so. In that regard, look at GEN Shinseki's remarks on retirement about matching force strength to strategy.

I would say Barnet is pretty accurate.

Best

Tom

[selil]

You don't have to be a general or secretary of defense to know that you have a continuing project to manage and sustain over time. Along the way you'll have productions losses, retention losses, and a variety of other factors effecting the human resource equation. Including the possible substantive changes in market and yield requirements. You staff for the most probable solution that balances the critical and credible risks. It would seem that an Army would need to staff based on a worse case scenario and in this case that was not done. I'm not a general or an officer but I'm sure that there are doctrines or procedures for figuring this kind of hazard out and mitigating it. Where is that information and why isn't it used?