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NYTimes.com Article: New Chief Sets Out to Redesign a Stretched-Thin Army
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Jan 30, 2004 15:30 PST
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This article from NYTimes.com
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New Chief Sets Out to Redesign a Stretched-Thin Army
January 28, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
FORT IRWIN, Calif., Jan. 22 - Just six months after his
recall from retirement to be the Army's top officer, Gen.
Peter J. Schoomaker has moved rapidly to refashion the
nation's oldest and largest armed service at its moment of
greatest challenge since at least the Vietnam War.
He inherited leadership of the Army when its relations with
the Pentagon's civilian leadership were at a low. And with
Army forces stretched, some say to the breaking point, the
new chief of staff has opened several initiatives to
reconfigure the service to handle old combat missions and
new duties, like the long-term stability missions in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
There is no argument that the Army is operating under
stress. Eight of its 10 active-duty divisions are moving in
or out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and almost 165,000 members
of the Army National Guard and Reserve are now called up
for missions there or in the broader campaign against
terror - assignments that have turned out to be far longer
than many citizen-soldiers thought they had signed up for.
But General Schoomaker said in an interview that his goal
remained reorganizing his service to be faster to the fight
and more lethal, without taking the expensive step of
asking for a larger Army.
Instead, he ordered the Third Infantry Division, victorious
in the swift capture of Baghdad, to create itself anew. The
goal is fielding four or five redesigned brigades, each as
capable as any of the current three and easier to deploy as
individual units or with other services in a larger team.
He is considering plans to trim artillery units and
reassign soldiers to military police, civil affairs and
engineering units. Those tasks are critical to the kind of
security and stability missions the Army is conducting
today.
General Schoomaker (pronounced SKOO-maker) wants soldiers
and officers to stop moving from base to base every 24
months. If assignments were extended to three or more
years, he says, combat units would have stronger cohesion,
thousands of additional troops would be available at any
time, the Army could save money - and families would
achieve their dream of more predictability.
"These are bars I've set," General Schoomaker said during a
two-day inspection of a huge desert war game here. "This is
the challenge."
A great challenge faces General Schoomaker, too, answering
questions from members of Congress and, quietly, from some
in the ranks who say the Army is too small for its current
missions. The service is deeply committed to Iraq and
Afghanistan, and in recent days began the largest troop
rotation since World War II, moving almost a
quarter-million soldiers in and out of those two countries.
As part of his new duties, General Schoomaker is repairing
ties with the Pentagon's civilian leaders. Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his inner circle clashed
over canceled artillery systems and troop strength for Iraq
with Thomas E. White, who was pushed from his post as Army
secretary, and the previous Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric
K. Shinseki, now retired.
General Schoomaker is gracious in discussing General
Shinseki, the officer he succeeded. "When history is
written, he will come forward as having made great
contributions to the Army," General Schoomaker said. But a
clear sign of a new, more cordial relationship arrived in
person here on Thursday.
A Black Hawk helicopter landed just beyond a mock village
where mock insurgents battled real mechanized infantry and
Special Forces, and out of the sandstorm spiraling from
beneath the rotors stepped Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy
defense secretary, making his own inspection of the war
game.
Although Mr. Wolfowitz and General Schoomaker had separate
schedules already packed to the minute, the two huddled
atop a wind-sliced ridge at the National Training Center
for nearly an hour. They spent their time in animated
discussion about the future of the Army, and the importance
of these exercises that pit the Army, Navy, Air Force and
Marines in joint war games against human and computerized
foes maneuvering in new and unexpected ways.
In recent days, General Schoomaker has begun publicly
describing his plans for the Army. It is an unusual step
into the spotlight for an officer who spent most of his
career in the secret world of Special Operations, a member
of elite counterterrorism squads and rising to chief of the
military's all-service Special Operations Command. (The
general said he had to reschedule his own wedding day
because his unit was ordered into isolation in advance of
the April 1980 mission to rescue American hostages in Iran,
which ended in failure.)
Today, with 31 years of military service under his belt,
his mottos come as metaphors, and they have to do with
applying creative, even unconventional thinking to problems
facing the Army and the nation.
He recalled playing football at the University of Wyoming,
and described how the huddle had been devised to make sure
everybody knew the play as they headed toward the line of
scrimmage.
"But what makes a great team is what happens after the ball
is snapped," he said. "Can you find the opportunity within
the chaos? Because you can't organize the chaos of the
battlefield."
Pressed on whether the Army must grow, General Schoomaker
said he was not yet convinced that he needed to take the
expensive step of requesting more troops, unless his
analysis concluded that the current tempo was not a
temporary spike, but a butte or even a plateau.
In the meantime, he already freed up soldiers for fighting
by moving 5,000 jobs performed by troops over to civilians,
a trend he hopes to expand this year. And he is looking at
ways to rewrite Army rules on changing assignments.
About 63,000 Army personnel are in motion between posts at
any one time, at a cost of about $1 billion. While 40
percent of those are soldiers and officers entering service
or retiring, thousands of others would be available more
often if asked to remain longer at each assignment.
The idea has caused some grumbling, especially among
midlevel officers who fear that the slower turnover among
commanders - a natural expectation if extending time in
each position - means fewer opportunities to move up.
"Not if we increase the number of brigades and battalions,"
General Schoomaker responded. He has challenged the Army to
add perhaps 15 active-duty brigades to the current 33,
organized into 10 divisions.
Since returning to duty, General Schoomaker signed up for a
steady schedule of troop visits, one bringing him here to
the Southern California desert and a huge training
exercise.
Just after dawn, long before the sun made good on its
promise to warm these Mojave badlands that look like
Afghanistan or Iraq, General Schoomaker was crossing
through wadis and cresting ridges, his Humvee spinning
small tornadoes from the cold desert floor.
Or maybe it was the general himself kicking up all the
dust.
In talks with generals and G.I.s, his questions were the
same: Are you comfortable with the plan? Are you reaching
far enough? Does the exercise challenge you beyond your
expectations?
"You're not learning unless you're operating in the zone of
discomfort," General Schoomaker said, and he handed out
specialized dog tags he had stamped out for the troops,
each bearing the imprint, WARRIOR ETHOS.
The warrior ethos, General Schoomaker concluded, "is a
mind-set of commitment."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/28/national/28ARMY.html?ex=1076505417&ei=1&en=bdff0f0e610ddcc4
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