By Jen DiMascio
The Army’s chief of staff has asked the service to look at the possibility of resetting units within six months of their return from deployment.
Currently the process takes “too long,” according to Lt. Gen. James Thurman, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations G-3.
The basic idea is that a unit returning from theater would have six months to spend with family, while the Army would spend the time resetting the unit’s equipment. After that six-month period, the unit would be prepared for collective training for the rest of its time between deployments. Army reserve units would work on a longer time line, resetting in two years.
The order was an outgrowth of Chief of Staff George Casey’s tour of Army units across the force, said Maj. Gen. Richard Formica, director of force management.
The service will begin with a “rock drill” to look at how the Army could make the change and follow that with a pilot program with units returning from the war this winter, senior service officials said during an Institute for Land Warfare panel discussion at the Association of the United States Army conference. Senior leaders then will decide how to implement the program. The process could take two years.
Lt. Gen. Stephen Speakes, the deputy chief of staff G-8, is handling the equipment piece of that equation and looking at how to adjust the service’s overall investment plan to execute the strategy. The rock drill will help determine if the service needs to ask for more funding to shorten the reset time line, he said.
Implementation could take up to two years, Formica said.
In addition, the Army is seeking to increase soldiers’ time between deployments.
“Right now units are deploying with the 15 months boots on the ground to 12 months dwell. So we need to reverse that,” Thurman said adding Casey has told him to make the switch by 2009.
During the discussion, Speakes reiterated a point the Army has made for several years–that the service will need $13 billion to $14 billion per year to reset equipment and need that level of investment for two to three years after the conflict in Iraq ends.
The service was able to succeed this year in resetting 91 aircraft, 724 tanks, 1,184 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 21,707 tactical wheeled vehicles because it received the money on time, he said.
Timely funding of the supplemental for fiscal year 2008 is required up front for the Army to achieve that again, Speakes said.
The service currently has funding to run for the next 60 to 90 days, but that situation is not ideal, the three-star said.
“We need the full amount and we need it at the start of the year in order to replicate the success we had last year,” he said. “The longer we go, the more we’re going to make contingency management decisions and diminish our confidence that we can execute the mission.”