By Ann Roosevelt
Three weeks into the job as the 37th Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey offered some insight into how he’s approaching what the service should be after Iraq and Afghanistan wind down and even further out in 2020.
This examination is not unlike the work done before his becoming chief of staff at Army Training and Doctrine Command, an intellectual center that prepares the force for an uncertain future.
Setting the framework initially are nine focus areas, Dempsey said yesterday at the Association of the United States Army Institute For Land Warfare breakfast.
The focus areas, first unveiled just days after Dempsey became chief of staff, are: the nation, the joint fight, the profession, the Army family, leader development, mission command, the squad, the human dimension and 21st century training.
“By about the Army birthday [June] I hope to publish a pamphlet–it’ll probably be called something pithy like the ‘Chief of Staff of the Army’s Intent’ –and it will…establish an intellectual framework that will allow me to express my intent from a broad statement of the role of the Army,” he said.
The idea is to answer the question many have: what happens to the Army after Iraq and Afghanistan?
Beyond that, will the Army of 2020 be different than the Army of 2011? “I hope so,” Dempsey said. That Army would face changes in the environment, technology and, potentially, resources.
It seems there are two choices, he said, a reformed Army or a transformed Army, and the service is looking into both.
The reformed Army would be smaller than the current force, and “we decide that the capabilities we produce for the nation will be about the same, but we’ll just have less of it” because the service will have to manage with the amount of time soldiers spend at home and deployed, he said.
A transformed Army would look somewhat similar to that of 2011, due primarily to enduring requirements, principally the need to win the nations wars. Such a transformed Army must “map itself” toward the four “P’s” of the Quadrennial Defense Review: Prepare, Prevent, Prevail and Preserve, “notably against the Prevent and Prevail,” Dempsey said.
“We will present alternatives through the Secretary of the Army to the Secretary of Defense and I’d really like to get ahead of this effort to change the resourcing basis because what we really should be thinking about now is what is the Army of 2020,” he said. This thinking implies concentrating on what that force needs to provide to the nation for the joint fight, what capabilities and structures it needs, and how to make it versatile, he said.
Senior military and civilians are collaboratively examining the questions. The findings will migrate to focus areas, “so I can bundle initiatives under focus areas and make sense of them, and help people understand how we deliver something called the Human Dimension, for example,” Dempsey said.
There is work going on some initiatives Dempsey gave staff that “will nest under those focus areas so we can actually deliver them.”
The top focus area is the nation, a natural area of focus as it is Dempsey’s four years as chief of staff that will build the Army of 2020.
“We will turn in [Program Objective Memorandum] POM ’13-’17, ’14-’18, ’15-’19, ’16-’20,” he said. And deliver a deliberately built Army. Thus, he needs a clear understanding of what the nation needs.
“It’s all about what the nation needs,” he said. “The other aspect of this is giving the nation the most options possible.” And, while the Army is closely connected to the nation in part because the service is in conflict–now the service has to look at how that support changes once conflict diminishes. That support can’t be taken for granted, Dempsey said.