The Army’s immediate priority is to ensure soldiers in Afghanistan and those units next to deploy are trained, equipped and ready, as non-deploying units will bear the brunt of constrained resources, a group of generals told the House Armed Services Committee panel on Readiness yesterday.
Combat readiness is “absolutely guaranteed” for units deploying to Afghanistan, Homeland Defense units, Korean forward deployed units, the global response force and other combatant command contingency response forces, said Lt. Gen. James Huggins, deputy chief of staff, G-3/5/7.
However, that leaves curtailed training for 78 percent of non-deploying or non-forward stationed units.
Thus, there are training shortfalls for critical specialties, including aviation, intelligence and engineering, he added. “Our inability to train non-deploying units will degrade our units’ readiness posture and reduce the progressive build of unit capability to meet early FY ’14 missions, emerging requirements and timelines associated with Combatant Commander war plans.”
The ramp to regain readiness is long but not very steep because it takes time to regain that readiness, Huggins said. “You can lose readiness very, very quickly.”
Responding to Ranking Member Rep. Madeleine Bordallo’s (D-Guam) concerns about how the Army knew when its forces were not ready, Lt. Gen. Raymond Mason, deputy chief of staff, G-4, said “we’re beginning to see a downtick” in non-deployed force readiness.
Mason described it this way: “Readiness is one of those things that all of a sudden drops off a cliff.” The Army looks at readiness almost every day, he added.
Brig. Gen. Walter Fountain, acting deputy director, Army National Guard, said the lack of funds that has led to cancelled training and canceled deployments is of concern.
“A force that is poorly trained and seldom used will be unable to respond with the efficacy the nation expects when called upon for the next war, contingency or disaster,” Fountain said in prepared remarks.
How does he know when the Guard has reached degraded readiness? “[It has] already been reached in collective training,” he said. And while the National Guard will always respond to the mission, “the response could be slow.”
The money squeeze could lead to squandering the hard-earned use of the National Guard and Reserve as part of the active operational force, and push it back to its previous status as a strategic reserve.
“The reality is that the readiness as developed over the last 12 years is perishable,” Maj. Gen. Luis Visot, deputy commanding general-Operations Army Reserve, told Rep. Steve Palazzo (R-Miss.).
“I don’t think the nation can afford to give away that investment,” Visot said.
The message to the panel from Visot and Fountain was that if training and readiness erode, it undermines the ability of the Guard and Reserve to respond rapidly to problems at home and abroad.
“Now is not the time to put the Army National Guard back on the shelf and return to a strategic reserve,” Fountain said. The Guard is a low cost, high impact investment for national defense, and to do that “would be to buy high and sell low,” he added