Force generation requires four R's
By Col. Randy Pullen
November 1, 2005
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Nov. 1, 2005) – An all-star panel discussed the Army’s evolving force-generation system last month and the four R’s that it addresses: rebalancing, resetting, recapitalizing and redeploying.
Gen. Dan McNeill, commanding general of Forces Command, led the panel on Army Force Generation, commonly called ARFORGEN, at the Association of the United States Army’s Annual Meeting Oct. 4.
Explaining the genesis for the Army’s restructuring, McNeill said that the Army’s leadership had recognized early that the War on Terrorism would last a long time and that the 33 brigades the Army had Sept. 12, 2001, would not be enough to wage that war.
Resetting comes first
The Army is taking its existing formations, pulling them apart into pieces and then putting them back together in a new way, McNeill said, thus creating more formations which are also more powerful.
“We started with the 3rd Infantry Division,” he said, "then continued doing this with the 101st Airborne Division, the 4th Infantry Division and the 10th Mountain Division.”
Along with the flexibility that comes with having modular units and more of them, ARFORGEN also entails a sequential approach to readiness that synchronizes unit capabilities and readiness reporting with equipping and resourcing strategies, McNeill said. He said this improves predictability for commanders, Soldiers and their families.
Three force pools for all components
The ARFORGEN system places units in one of three force pools:
• an initial Reset/Train pool for units redeploying from long operations;
• a Ready pool that includes modular units assessed as “ready” to conduct mission preparation and training;
• and an Available pool that includes modular units assessed as “available” to conduct missions in support of any regional combatant commander or serve as rapidly deployable contingency forces.
If required, units in the Ready pool can be resourced and committed to meet surge operational needs, McNeill said.
“Everybody fits into one of these pools,” said McNeill.
All active- and reserve-component units pass through the Available pool under this cyclical approach, McNeill said. Active units are in the one-year window of the Available pool every three years, Army Reserve units are available every five years and Army National Guard units are available every six years.
McNeill said he envisioned having 12-16 active brigade combat teams and three to four National Guard BCTs in the Available pool.
“The process has to result in relevant output: trained and ready forces that could do the job,” McNeill said.
AMC has field support brigades
Following McNeill on the panel, Gen. Benjamin Griffin, the commanding general of Army Materiel Command, said that AMC’s mission was to support the force and to support ARFORGEN through its seven life-cycle management subordinate commands.
Griffin said that AMC had increased its presence and ability to support Soldiers around the world by its Army Field Support Brigades located in Iraq, Korea, Europe, Fort Bragg, Fort Hood and Fort Lewis and with its Army Field Support Battalion in Afghanistan. These units are able to provide immediate logistics support to joint forces whenever and wherever needed.
“The joint warfighter is priority number one,” Griffin said.
ARFORGEN to change Army education
Gen. William Wallace, until recently commanding general of the Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and now the chief of Training and Doctrine Command, said that ARFORGEN would necessitate changes to training and leader development, causing a profound impact on the institutional Army.
Changes he said were taking place include:
• more distance learning classes
• increasing the number of training cycles per year
• reducing the length of NCO courses
• and eliminating the Combined Arms Services Staff School.
“The institutional Army is in this fight, too,” Wallace said, adding that the new brigade-centric Army called for a brigade-centric training strategy as well.
Wallace said the bottom line was that Army needs a near-continuous output of trained leaders and trained Soldiers from TRADOC.
USAR no longer `force in reserve’
The chief of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, said that today’s Army Reserve was no longer the balanced, just-in-case force that it had been years ago when it mirrored the Army and Army National Guard in its makeup of units and capabilities.
“We’ve gone from a force in reserve to a complementary, skill-rich force of specialists,” Helmly said.
To successfully meet the necessities of the events-based ARFORGEN model, Helmly said that the mobilization process had to be smoothed out by being decentralized.
Additionally, the Army Reserve’s current overstructure burden needed to be resolved through the development of a Trainees, Transients, Holdees and Students account. This TTHS account would manage Soldiers currently on a unit’s rolls but not able to deploy, thereby providing a more accurate picture of a unit’s go-to-war strength.
When fully implemented, this system would significantly reduce the amount of cross-leveling of Soldiers required for a deploying unit, taking it to the easily-managed cross-leveling of those Soldiers with last-minute problems, such as a broken ankle, Helmly said.
Guard must balance force structure
The director of the Army National Guard, Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn, echoed Helmly’s concerns on reducing cross-leveling and solving the imbalance in authorized strength and force structure. He saw great benefits from the ARFORGEN system in addressing these issues.
“We are 100 percent behind ARFORGEN,” Vaughn said.
Vaughn said the Army National Guard must be a full-spectrum force, with modernized combat support and combat service support. Although there will be some specialized forces, the focus will be on the 34 modular brigade combat teams.
McNeill wrapped up the panel by saying that the ARFORGEN process would be value added to the Army, giving improved predictability of available forces and decreasing the joint force commander’s uncertainty whether or not needed units will be ready when called upon.
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