Vice chief reports Army status at Defense Forum
By Sgt. Reeba Critser
September 21, 2004
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Sept. 21, 2004) - Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard A. Cody told members of Congress and their staff Sept. 17 that the Army is transforming itself while fighting the War on Terrorism.
"We have a window of opportunity while this great Army's in motion and while we're learning and fighting this Global War on Terrorism to get the Army right," Cody said at the Defense Forum Foundation on Capitol Hill. "Not only for the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, but for the future."
The largest movement of forces in the Army since World War II occurred about four or five months ago, Cody said. Eight-and-a-half divisions and 244,000 Soldiers were moved in about 95 days.
"Any army in the world can reset itself," Cody said. "Any army in the world can transform itself. Any army can deploy to a theater and sustain itself. But to do it all at once at the level we're doing it at, is a significant challenge. But we have to. We need to maintain this momentum."
Cody said the strategic goals for the Army are to give a relevant and ready force for combatant commanders; to win the Global War on Terrorism and transform the Army simultaneously.
"Since the Gulf War, there's been a shift in the world, in the type of threats," our nation faces, Cody said. "Yet we had not moved to come out of the Cold War formation in our Army. We were tank heavy, we were infantry light. There were a lot of high-demand, low-density specialty units in our organizations."
In addition, with new threats rising, the Army had to change to meet commander's requirements to fight those threats, he said.
One of the benefits of transforming the Army is to enable more joint and expeditionary capabilities, Cody said.
"We are not competing with the Marines," Cody said. "But in this world we live in, we have to be more responsive, more deployable, more agile, more adaptable and much more joint. And that's what we're changing the Cold War Army to.
"Every day in Iraq, our combat service support is getting engaged as much as our infantry patrols," he said. "There are no rear areas anymore. It's a 360-degree battle space. That tells us we need to look at our organization and how we man, equip and train our combat support and combat service support."
Another program of importance in the Army is the Army Campaign plan, Cody said, which will synchronize the Army's many transformation initiatives over the next five to six years.
"[The Army Campaign Plan] will focus us on winning this fight, transforming the Army and sustaining and preserving the all-volunteer forces - active, Guard and Reserve," Cody said.
Cody shared the current force statistics. Roughly 22,000 Soldiers today are on active duty in the U.S. in support of homeland defense. About 37,000 Army Reserve and 81,000 National Guard troops are currently on active duty supporting various missions, including Operation Iraqi and Enduring Freedom. All together, almost 275,000 Soldiers are deployed in more than 120 countries today.
Cody also spoke about the biggest threat to ground forces in Iraq today -- improvised explosive devices.
"They (the enemy) don't care about collateral damage," he said. "In fact, they're killing more Iraqi citizens than American Soldiers. Every Soldier going into theater is trained on how to look for these devices (IEDs), how to report them and the reconnaissance required. Every time an IED goes off, within 24 hours we get forensics on it, see what we did right, and what might have been wrong. If our patrols didn't do the right thing, we look at it, we study it and we immediately put it into our training at the National Training Center (Fort Irwin, Calif.) and the Joint Readiness Training Center (Fort Polk, La.) to train the next units going in. I'll be honest with you, technology will not solve it all."
The Army must take a holistic approach to the threat, he said.
"We want to go after the people who are funding it. We want to go after the people who are recruiting these guys. We want to go after the people who are emplacing them. And we want to go after the source and supply across the board. That's the type of approach we're taking," Cody said.
"We're going to deal with this type of terrorist weapon for a long time," Cody said. "We're learning it.
"The good news is all the protective equipment we're giving our Soldiers are saving their lives," Cody said. "The bad news is we have a lot of amputees from these devices. This great country can do great things and we're looking for every edge we can to defeat it. And to keep it (terrorism) off our shores."
The Defense Forum Foundation, at which Cody spoke, was founded in 1987 to provide education programs on defense, national security, foreign policy and human rights issues, specifically for the benefit of the U.S. Congress.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
