ARMY AL&T
Soldiers can expect to have two years at home after a year deployed.
• Organizational change—“Between the modularization of the Army and the rebalancing of skills away from Cold War skills over the last seven years, we have fielded a fundamen- tally different Army … much more suited to the challenges of the 21st century,” Casey said.
• The Army Force Generation (ARFORGEN) concept—While it was impossible to adhere to while the Army was deploying 150,000 to 160,000 Soldiers one year out and one year back, as of FY12 the Army will be able to execute ARFORGEN at a sustainable pace and tempo.
• Strategic flexibility—As a result of all the other achievements, Soldiers are now able to train for conflicts other than Iraq and Afghanistan.
Challenges Ahead The Army is poised to take on the current transition and sustain its new- found balance even without growth in its budget, Casey said. “We’re not in a bad place,” he said. However, he noted, “the war is not over.”
“We know the budget has to come down, we know we need to be more efficient in how we execute, but we have to be very, very careful that we don’t inadvertently hollow out the force as we’re trying to reduce the resources,” Casey said.
As Casey sees it, the challenges of the next decade, which he acknowledged may sometimes be conflicting priorities, include maintaining the combat edge of the current Army, reconstituting the force, and dealing with the impacts of a decade of war. “Think about it.
We’ve lost over 4,000 Soldiers,” Casey said. “They’ve left over 20,000 family members. We’ve had over 25,000 Soldiers wounded, over 8,000 of them badly enough to require long- term care. We’ve had over 100,000 Soldiers since the beginning of the war diagnosed with traumatic brain injury; fortunately, over 90 percent of those are mild to moderate. We’ve had over 40,000 Soldiers since the beginning of the war diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. We’ve processed over 30,000 Soldiers through our Warrior Transition Units. We cannot take our eye off of the ball in terms of commitment to continue to support those who have been affected by this war.”
Fiscal Realities The Army has found the efficien- cies and reductions that Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates called for in
I want every soldier in the world to say, ‘Hell, no, I don’t want to fight the Americans. It’s a losing battle.’
2010 without having to reduce force structure until 2015, Casey said. Gates set a goal of 2-3 percent net annual growth in warfighting capabilities with- out a commensurate budget increase.
Acquisition plays a major role in those efficiencies, Casey said. “We have to be hugely efficient to get the most value out of our acquisition dollars.” The recently completed Acquisition Study, for which an implementation plan is expected to be delivered late this summer, will help provide a road map for “how to make our requirements and processes more collaborative and more resource-informed … how to better manage risk, and … how to better grow our acquisition resources,” Casey said.
It is a paradox, Casey said, that while the Army’s acquisition core competen- cies suffered atrophy over the past 20 years, “we’ve got the best-equipped Army we’ve had in decades ... What we have to be careful of is that a series of incremental cuts doesn’t put us in the position, eight to 10 years from now, where we turn around and say, ‘What the heck happened?’ ”
APRIL –JUNE 2011 49
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