Losing Ground

t took the Army less than 100 hours to rout Iraqi forces from Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War eight years ago. To observers, it was a stunning display of the service's technological prowess and might; to Army leaders, it was a validation of the way the service equips its soldiers and trains them for war.

But the euphoria service leaders felt following Operation Desert Storm has long since dissipated. The Army's role in recent military operations, from Somalia to the Balkans, has shown that while the Army is well-suited for fighting a major ground war, it is too cumbersome and poorly structured for the operations many believe it is most likely to face in the future. In every operation since the Gulf War, the Army has had to create ad hoc units to handle the nontraditional missions that have become the norm.

The problem was highlighted in March, when it took the Army more than a month to cobble together and deploy a task force of 24 Apache attack helicopters and support units from Germany to Albania to support the NATO air campaign against Serbia. Even after the Apaches arrived in theater in April, their crews were not fully prepared for the mission. Two crewmen were killed and two aircraft crashed during the intensive training for operations in Kosovo. Ultimately, the Apaches, which are designed to team up with Army ground forces, were not used. They were deemed too vulnerable to enemy artillery without ground support, too lethal to be used in areas heavily populated with civilians and too difficult to integrate into an Air Force air campaign, says one Army officer familiar with the deployment.

"A lot of people in the Army would like to believe Kosovo is an anomaly," says the officer. "It's not. Desert Storm was the anomaly. We have to figure out how to do these operations better or we're going to have a hard time convincing lawmakers on Capitol Hill they should continue funding the Army at this level."

Michael Vickers, a former Army Special Forces officer and now director of strategic studies at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, agrees. "The general problem the Army has is that it's too bulky to be strategically relevant," he says.

In addition, the Army has failed to take into account basic changes in weapons systems and warfare, Vickers says. "A lot of what the heavy divisions do is being crowded out by advances in air power. Airplanes can't do everything, but they can do some things that you needed tanks and artillery to do in the past."

The Future Is Now

The Persian Gulf War was almost too good to be true, from a soldier's perspective. The enemy was organized and equipped to fight like the Soviet military (the template the U.S. military had been training against for 40 years); the terrain was open desert; the enemy's neighbors were allied with the United States; and, most importantly for the Army, the United States had five months to deploy its tanks and heavy artillery before the first shots were ever fired in combat.

Maj. Gen. Daniel Zanini, deputy chief of staff for combat developments at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va., says the Army is unlikely to face such an enemy again. "We do not envision a force taking us on like Saddam Hussein did in Desert Storm. That's not to say there won't be large standing armies and there won't be patterned offenses and there won't be solid doctrine that underpins all that," he says.

Future enemies, recognizing the United States' reluctance to jeopardize the lives of troops and civilians alike, will attempt to marginalize the Army's capabilities by operating among civilian populations in urban areas and resorting to terrorism and other indirect confrontations with U.S. military power, Zanini says.

"We need a force that can deal with those variables," he says.

But what Army leaders describe as the future is really the recent past, critics say, and the Army has been slow to adapt. In 1993, during the humanitarian relief operation in Somalia, 18 soldiers from among the Army's best-trained troops were killed and more than 70 wounded when they were pinned down for 21 hours by a shoeless, untrained enemy clan whose command and control system was word of mouth, and whose limited weapons were low-tech and third-rate by U.S. standards. Recent operations in Haiti, Rwanda and the Balkans have only posed more of the same, unconventional challenges, where combatants and civilians were virtually indistinguishable.

What the Army needs is a force very different from the one it has, says John Hillen, a combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War and now a member of the National Security Study Group. The bipartisan government commission-chaired by former senators Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H.-was formed earlier this year to conduct a comprehensive review of national security issues.

"The Army's not going to be in the game unless it can get a medium-weight force somewhere quickly," Hillen says. "It doesn't have the capability. And even if it did have the capability, it doesn't have the lift assets and the doctrine and the modus operandi to match that capability up with the means of getting it there."

The service's greatest liability today may be the very thing that contributed to its success in the Gulf War: its organizational structure. The Army's primary building blocks are its six heavy armored divisions and four light infantry divisions, each with 15,000 to 18,000 soldiers. While the light divisions can be deployed relatively quickly on short notice, they lack the firepower and protection necessary to face an armored force, such as the Serbian army in Kosovo. The heavy divisions, packed with 70-ton tanks, are more lethal than any force in the world, but they require months to deploy. The largest airlifter in the Air Force fleet, the aging C-5 Galaxy, can carry only two tanks at a time.

What's more, since the end of the Cold War, the heavy armored divisions have become 50 percent heavier, largely as a result of fielding improved weapons that were developed during the 1980s and came on line in the 1990s. "We've added more and heavier systems to divisions-such as artillery and helicopters and their associated support," says Vickers.

The result, he says, is a force that's lethal, but too heavy to respond in a meaningful way to the crises most likely to arise. Depending on where such a force is needed, it could take thousands of air sorties to ferry all the equipment, supplies, troops and support personnel necessary to keep a heavy division going. And that's if there's a sufficiently modern airfield nearby.

"The way the Army is organized right now, even if the tanks were only 30 tons and you could fit five on an aircraft, the Army is still configured organizationally to be cumbersome and unwieldy-where the big stuff can't operate unless it's all there," Hillen says.

Overweight and Slow

Army leaders concede the limitations of the current force. Just days after taking over as Army chief of staff in June, Gen. Eric Shinseki told service leaders the Army needed to accelerate its transformation into a more mobile force, capable of quickly responding to a greater range of threats.

To begin creating a more agile force, this spring the Army announced it would establish a headquarters staff for a "strike force"-a unit smaller and more versatile than a division that could be quickly deployed for a range of missions, from peacekeeping to urban warfare.

The headquarters, to be based at Fort Polk, La., will be staffed with about 300 personnel of various disciplines and eventually will draw on 5,000 to 7,000 troops from across the Army's active and reserve components, says Zanini. The smaller strike force headquarters-there are typically 1,500 people in a division headquarters-will be more flexible and trained to respond to everything from combat to humanitarian relief operations. The strike force itself will have heavy armor and light infantry capability, air defense and force protection assets as well as civil affairs teams and other specialized units for noncombat operations.

"We see it as deployable worldwide in about 96 hours-you name the environment," Zanini says. The strike force will be dependent on developing the right skills in the headquarters staff. To that end, the Army has established a task force at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., home of the Command and General Staff College, to develop a training program for the unit's leaders.

How the headquarters will be organized depends largely on Brig. Gen. James Dubik, who will take command of the headquarters later this summer. Dubik, currently an assistant division commander with the Texas-based 1st Cavalry Division now in Bosnia, is widely viewed in Army circles as an innovative thinker and a proponent of reform. Senior leaders who have been reluctant to change the Army too fast also trust Dubik. "A lot of thought was put into selecting the right person to lead this," says Zanini.

A cadre of top headquarters staff will begin training this summer, and the headquarters will be fully operational by the summer of 2000. But troops won't actually fill the ranks of the strike force until at least 2003, a fact that leaves some wondering how serious the Army really is about it.

"Establishing the strike force headquarters is a step in the right direction," says Hillen, but he worries that "this can be seen as a sop to the reformists without actually offering anything real." The Army's announcement of the plans to create the strike force headquarters unit was disappointing to many mid-career officers who were expecting the Army to turn the existing 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, based at Fort Polk, into an experimental force able to test new war-fighting concepts.

"The Army's putting the best face on it," says Vickers. "They rejected other proposals to actually develop lighter equip- ment and experiment with new forces over the next 10 years for budgetary reasons."

Zanini disagrees: "It was not a money issue. It was based upon an analysis that said the demand was for something other than what we thought we needed when we started out."

Army leaders decided it was more prudent to develop a flexible headquarters before putting together the strike force itself, Zanini says, after a review of recent operations showed that each had unique command and control requirements. The combination of forces pulled together for each mission was also unique, he adds.

It didn't make sense to develop the strike force before the Army had a more thorough understanding of how it would work, Zanini says. As for creating a medium-weight force: "The technology just isn't there right now."

Conflicting Priorities

Without more serious investment from the Army, the technology may never be there. Many officers are still rankled by the Army's decision in 1996 to cancel the Armored Gun System program on the eve of production. The lightweight weapon, which could be deployed quickly and dropped by parachute onto the battlefield, was to provide protection for light-infantry troops arriving in theater before tanks could. While not as lethal as the tanks and field artillery systems in the heavy divisions, it offered a significant improvement in light-infantry capability and was a step toward creating a medium-weight force.

Officially, the program was canceled for lack of funds, but many officers believe the Armored Gun System was shelved because it posed too great a threat to the status of the service's heavy forces. Regardless, in canceling the program the Army sent a clear message to the contractor community regarding its modernization priorities.

"If you want to see what's important to a bureaucracy, look at what it's spending its money on, not what it's saying," says Hillen. According to Army budget documents, the service will spend nearly half of its $9.7 billion procurement budget upgrading its current fleet of tanks, combat vehicles and helicopters, and developing the Crusader, a new heavy artillery system.

"Clearly, the Army's budget priorities are balanced in the direction of having marginally improved Desert Storm products," he says.

Balancing the budget at all has been a major concern for Army leaders. In the last 10 years, the Army's modernization budget, including funding for procurement, research and development, has fallen 47 percent. In 1985, when the Army had more than 780,000 soldiers on active duty, it spent about $21,000 per soldier on modernization. Today, with fewer than 470,000 soldiers, the Army spends about $12,500 per soldier on modernization. The precipitous drop in funding has left the Army with almost no money for new procurement and barely enough to replace aging trucks and upgrade existing equipment.

While Hillen and Vickers and active duty Army officers who spoke to Government Executive on background are clearly frustrated with what they term the Army's glacial pace of change, Army leaders say they are charting a deliberate course of evolutionary change, not revolutionary change.

For the last several years, the Army has been pursuing two programs aimed at reshaping the force. In the near term, under an experiment called Force XXI, the Army has begun revamping its heavy divisions and upgrading some equipment with advanced communications technology designed to improve both firepower and soldiers' ability to pinpoint the whereabouts of both friendly and enemy troops on the battlefield. Under a long-term program dubbed Army After Next, military planners are developing and testing new tactical concepts through advanced war games that could eventually influence how the Army is organized and equipped as far in the future as 2025.

Col. Joseph Rodriguez, assistant deputy chief of staff for doctrine at Training and Doctrine Command, says the strike force will serve as a bridge between the current, division-based force being upgraded under Force XXI and the future force anticipated by the Army After Next planners. Under Force XXI, "the equipment looks the same-we're just putting better technology on it so that we can think faster, make decisions faster and have better situational awareness on the battlefield. One of the goals of Army After Next is to take this great explosion in the information revolution and match it with physical agility," he says.

It's an ambitious goal. The Army wants its next-generation combat systems to be three times more effective and mobile than current systems, while requiring one-third the support. The service is looking for "leap-ahead" technologies that will enable creation of combat vehicles that are smaller, lighter and faster than the 42 miles per hour traveled by the 70-ton Abrams tank.

But given the current level of resources the Army is putting into research and development of such technologies, it will be hard-pressed to achieve its goals. While the Army says it is developing requirements for a future combat vehicle that would be a lighter, highly mobile, more lethal and survivable vehicle than any in the inventory today, it has not dedicated any of its $4.1 billion research and development budget specifically to such a program.

Paul Hoeper, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, told a Senate Armed Services Committee panel in April that the Army plans to begin program development in 2006, with fielding anticipated between 2015 and 2025. "We are committed to perform a system study that will lay the foundation for a demonstration program starting in 2002," Hoeper said.

Critics who contend the Army has not made future force requirements a high enough priority have a point, says Zanini, but, he adds, the Army has a $25 billion capital investment in the Abrams tank. "You can't throw that away," he says. "Nor do you want to throw that away, given the fact that there's nothing out there to replace it with. Under an approach it calls "selective modernization," the Army is upgrading only a portion of the armored force. As new technology is developed for a lighter combat vehicle, older equipment will be phased out.

"The Army gets criticized for being slow and unimaginative in the way it looks at the future," Zanini says. "I tend to be a little taken aback by that," he says, adding that the experiments the Army has done under Force XXI have led to concrete changes in the size and shape of the Army's divisions. As a result, he says, "our heavy forces are smaller and more lethal and they fight different than the forces they replaced."

A Hybrid Force

The Army's need to restructure is tempered by its primary mission: to fight and win wars. According to the national military strategy, the Army must be prepared to execute two major theater wars-for example, one in the Middle East and one on the Korean peninsula-nearly simultaneously. Such conflicts would likely require large, heavy ground forces to respond.

But much of what is driving the need for change falls outside the major-war rubric. Since the end of the Cold War, Army deployments have increased by more than 300 percent, says Army spokesman Maj. Scott Hays. Between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Army conducted 10 major deployments. Since then, it has conducted 33 major deployments.

In addition to deployments, the Army's ongoing commitments continue to sap resources that might otherwise be used for modernization and reorganization. In June, nearly 40,000 soldiers were deployed in 78 countries. Some were training, but most were involved in operations in the Balkans and the Middle East. The Army's new peacekeeping mission in Kosovo will only add to the burden. What's more, because of rotational requirements, force planners generally measure the personnel commitment as approximately three times more than the actual number of troops deployed.

Given the range of threats to which the Army will have to respond, from peacekeeping to all-out war, Rodriguez believes the Army of 2025 will be a hybrid of divisions, strike forces and perhaps other new types of units. "When we get out to 2025, I don't see an entire Army of Starship Troopers. I see an Army that is part new, part revolutionary, and part carryover of Force XXI systems."

Hillen, who has high praise for the Army After Next program, fears the Army's thinking is not bold enough. "They've got this crawl, walk, run philosophy: 'We're going to have an evolution, not a revolution.' But they don't understand that the process of evolution in a bureaucracy will just eat up all the resources they will need to change. By the time they're ready to change, not only will it be too late, but they might not have the wherewithal and the impetus to change at all."