Army's growth plans may not be enough, secretary says

Army Secretary Pete Geren warned Tuesday that current efforts to grow the size of the Army by 74,000 soldiers may not be adequate if current operational pressures on the service continue.

During a speech at the Center for National Policy, Geren placed "right-sizing" the heavily deployed Army at the top of his list of challenges.

"Either grow the Army or shrink the demand for its services," he said.

The Army is enlarging its active-duty force by 65,000 soldiers and its National Guard and Reserve units by another 9,000 troops. The service expects to complete those efforts by 2010.

Geren said he believed that if the Army continues its pace of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the service will have to add even more troops -- an expensive proposition for a service that spends more than half of its annual budget on personnel.

The Army has 251,000 soldiers deployed to nearly 80 countries. Overall, the service has 693,000 active-duty personnel, a figure that includes mobilized members of the Guard and Reserve.

The former member of the House Armed Services Committee said he and his House colleagues who agreed to decrease the size of the Army by 40 percent during the 1990s "got it wrong."

Meanwhile, acquisition -- particularly during wartime -- remains an issue for the force, Geren said. While rapid fielding initiatives have helped speed equipment to deployed units, the Army secretary stressed that "well-intentioned but slow and cumbersome bureaucratic processes" still delay the procurement of some urgently needed technologies.

"In time of war, we may have to accept more risk on the acquisition side, including sometimes an 80 percent solution to buy down the life-and-death risk on the battlefield," he said.