Bigger Army - Same Size

The Dignified Rant (sorry, no permalinks) notes this StrategyPage article (look at the February 12 entry) I somehow missed.

February 12, 2004: The U.S. Army wants to spend $20 billion over the next seven years to create a force of 42-48 active duty combat brigades (from the current force of 33), and increasing the number of National Guard combat brigades from 15 to 22. In addition, many unneeded field artillery, air defense, engineer, armor and ordnance battalions will be disbanded while increasing the number of military police, transportation, petroleum and water distribution, civil affairs, psychological operations and biological warfare detection units. The new combat brigades would be smaller than the current ones (two combat battalions each versus three) and have more support units attached to enable the brigades to operate independently. The current 33 brigades include 11 light infantry, 17 heavy mech infantry and armor, 5 Stryker brigades) will be turned into 15 infantry brigades, 22 armored brigades and five Stryker brigades. The new armor brigades will combine tanks and mech infantry by having four companies (two tank and two mech infantry) per each of its two battalions. The armor brigade would also have a recon battalion. The exact details of the reorganization are still being worked out. For example, the fourth and fifth brigades in divisions would use the current headquarters of the aviation and engineer brigades to form headquarters.

It's certainly an interesting proposal. Combined with the intent of reorganizing units to serve together longer (can't find the link), it allows the US to deploy more of the combat power we need for the kind of war we're fighting now, while not increasing the size of the Army in terms of end strength.

I might have to take back some of my prior comments on the size of the military. It appears that SecDef Rumsfeld might actually succeed at engineering a qualitative reorganization within the current authorized end strength numbers.

This has some interesting implications that need to be explored. We'll have less artillery in the field. In modern warfare, artillery has been the most effective battlefield killer, hands down. On the other hand, artillery (especially self-propelled units) require a huge logistical tail. If we can use aircraft to largely replace artillery, and the Iraq war shows that this is to some extent possible, and integrate other artillery directly into the front-line combat units, it means that we can repurpose some of these combat support units (we'll still need some - there will be a continuing need for some artillery into the future). Certainly, one can make the that having an air-defense capability in the military is currently not necessary. It is appearing more and more as if helicopters are going to prove to be too vulnerable to use unsupported, meaning that we'll have to use them strictly as part combined arms operations (a lesson we also learned with tanks, decades ago). The combination of these reductions means we can have more combat troops on the ground, but only if we can compel the Air Force leadership to put a lot of effort and focus into close air support. That means that we'll have to look at dropping either JSF or (more likely) the less-useful F22 Raptor, and using the savings to procure a replacement for the A-10 - a dedicated CAS aircraft.

Another consequence of this will be that there will be no possibility of fighting with a conscripted Army. If we want to institute the draft, we'll have to build a completely new Army (except for the tail end) with a different doctrine and TO&E from the regular forces. We simply couldn't maintain a draft Army long enough to train them to the requisite standards for the kind of warfare that would be undertaken by these smaller brigades.

A third consequence would be that this organization should be capable of sustaining a Middle Eastern war (same or slightly smaller size than Iraq) every other year, with a full-scale occupation ongoing at the same time, pretty much indefinitely. This implies that we expect to be turning countries back to largely local control in each case within a two-year time frame. If we were to perform an invasion every third year, we could likely sustain two occupations in varying stages.

If we can pull off a further transformation, and move a lot of the current administrative tasks off to civilian contractors, or simply reduce the overhead (easier said than done), we might be able to build a large enough force to have a pair of full-scale, ongoing occupations and still fight a war. It won't be easy, but it might be possible.

UPDATE: Here is the missing link on the Army's attempt to keep units together longer.

UPDATE: The Dignified Rant now has permalinks, sort of. But they're not retroactive (at least not yet).

Posted by Jeff at February 16, 2004 08:06 PM | Link Cosmos