Army to reactivate 7th Infantry Division
Greg sends us a link to the report that the Secretary of the Army announced that the 7th Infantry Division will be reactivated at Joint Base Lewis McChord;
The soon-to-be reactivated division will encompass 2nd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division; 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division; 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division; 17th Fires Brigade and 16th Combat Aviation Brigade, for a total of some 17,000 Soldiers. But as a nondeployable headquarters, the new division headquarters and its estimated 250 personnel will primarily focus on making sure soldiers are properly trained and equipped, and that order and discipline is maintained in its subordinate brigades.
“When you have the number of soldiers, the number of civilian personnel, the number of other service components in one location as they do here at JBLM, (having) eyes on those units … is enormously important,” McHugh said.
McHugh denied that the decision to create a division on the installation came in response to recent incidents involving soldiers from the base, emphasizing that the plan to station a division headquarters on the installation has been in progress for some time. He defended the base, saying it faces the same challenges as other similar installations.
Greg says, and I agree that it’s just a way to keep some of the general officers and colonels around when the axe falls later this year. I’m just now catching up with what units are at what base and now the shuffling begins again.
The 7th Infantry Division is scheduled for activation on Oct. 1 of this year, and a commander is expected to be announced in a few weeks. Personnel will begin arriving in early summer.
The ass-kissing and sucking up will begin this weekend.
Category: Military issues
The only upside to this is that possibly….just possibly, the BDE’s on Lewis will stop being treated like abused orphans. I was there from ’99 to ’02 in one of the previous BDE’s and the lack of a layer between our unit and I Corps, was contentious at times.
The funny thing is…7ID was already re-activated in 2006 along with 24 ID, and subsequently redesignated 1stArmy Division West and East respectively.
2nd Infantry consists of 1st Brigade in Korea and 2nd, 3rd and 4th Brigades, 2nd Combat Aviation Brigade and 210th Fires Brigade.
With this stand up of 7th Infantry Division the 2nd Infantry will now consist of 1st Brigade in Korea, a CAB and Fires Brigade in Lewis.
WTF? Might as well reflag the 1st Brigade the 170th and case the 2nds Colors.
I wonder if they’ll bring back the Manchus and other regiments from the Fort Ord days or keep the designations from the brigades as they are now.
@4 – I don’t think there’s any plans to reorganize the existing BDE’s stationed there.
But the again, I remember back in the late 80’s – mid 90’s, they seemed change unit patches every few months, or so it seemed.
Perhaps that was a Tillicum employment plan for the sew shops.
Here is Camp Roberts in California, once the largest training base in the world as 16 million Americans geared up to fight fascism and communism, sitting idle and rotting into the ground from lack of use.
Nearly 50,000 acres fully capable of handling any artillery, tank, mortar, and small arms. Rail yard, major highway, small airfield that can be easily extended.
The 7th ID came here regularly from Ft Ord, because they could no longer fire cannon, were extremely limited on mortar ranges, and had to shut down machine gun ranges when Laguna Seca had a race.
So here we have a Post that could, with enough infrastructure repair, immediately house 35,000 personnel.
But noooooooooo. The Pentagon would rather waste another opportunity to establish an active Division post in California.
@6 – Look on the bright side, Ord is going tp become a national monument.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/20/BAVN1O6SL3.DTL#ixzz1shtSQVZT
BTW, Camp Bob was about to fall apart the last time I was there…..has it gotten any better?
So the message is that the Amry needs fewer NCOs but more Field Grade officers and Generals?
@6.
Was at Camp Roberts for a month back in 2009 and it was a wreck.
It is obvious that the California Guard (who ‘own’ it now) are trying to put some money into saving the place and making it a useful training area, similar to what Mississippi has done with Camp Shelby, but who knows how much of that is going to happen with the smaller training budgets.
Moving units-NO! Shell game-Yes! Ass kissing and sucking up… of course… but the knives in the backs… that will be the real show! Seen it done for years and years.
Bingo! just another 2 banger slot and excess staff and trappings. meanwhile lets cut Veterans medical benefits
I still can’t figure it out…why the Army will “close up” one unit and open another…then re-open the unit they closed up. The NatGuard seems to do this ever few years. In CA we had 2 Mess Kit Repair BNs. Each had some companies in Nor Cal and in So Cal and when they had events, soldiers would have to drive across the state to go to some clusterfuck. So, they thought it’d be great to move one entire BN to the south and the other up north….really the only reason they did this was so a kissass LTC could have his first command and not have to drive 8 hours to training drills.
Camp Roberts? It’s still there?? Lived there as a wee tot. We even had an aeroplane (J-3) there. Wonder if the runway remains.
/diversion for fond memory moment
CI- In NYARNG they disbanded the 1/101 Cav that had been in Staten Island since WWI and reflagged it up near Buffalo as an RSTA,disbanded the 1/210 AR also and made all the 19K requal as signal or fwd spt. Now, the 42nd Inf Div (Mech) has not one tank assigned nor any tank crewman MOS and the put a Light Infantry Brigade( 27th )in its place.
Brilliant, aint it?
I don’t underatand all this “reflagging” shit.. Let’s just go back to the Cold War model, when they pretty much kept entire divisions at the same posts, to avoid confusion (or from what I’ve heard). Enough of this breaking up divisions and deploying brigades to other states and countries crap..
@SSG Medzyk: Yes, I was with 3/27 IN at Ord from 88 to 92. We went to Camp Roberts a sum total of once in all that time. We couldn’t even dig a cathole due to post regs. We spent most of our field time at FT Hunter-Liggett.
Maybe now the Institute of Heraldry will finally make the 7th CSIB like they said they would almost two years ago. Since the division hasn’t been around since about 1994 so I can understand why they haven’t. Of course though they’ve created a couple of Vietnam War unit CSIB’s. That’s so much closer in time to the War on Terror than Operation Just Cause was….
Yes, Roberts is seemingly falling down. Well, nothing seemingly about it, half the barracks in the cantonment area actually ARE falling down.
Roberts is still owned by the Federal side, the state is only a caretaker with full use status. Anything built, repaired, or established on post must first go through a lot of federal red tape, then almost as much state red tape. Then the enviro-tards get their chance at stopping training (we have an endangered blue-belly lizard, that does not have a blue belly). Enviro has isolated hundreds of acres for the sake of the “endangered” San Joaquin Kit Fox. The wonder of that is, the San Joaquin is hundreds of miles away, indeed making the fox rather scarce in the Salinas valley.
Regardless, if the Pentagon would dump the needed cash into the post, it could once again become the premier training facility on the west coast.
Trent, you may have come down but once, but thousands of your fellow Lightfighters came many times.
I had a brush of an experience with the 7th Division headquarters a few years back when they were assigned to Fort Carson. Went into division headquarters, roamed the halls and couldn’t find a soul who seemed to know what the purpose of their existence was. Supposedly they had a division surgeon but after three hours or so of searching for what I finally realized must be a fictitious address, I gave up.
They were a ghost outfit.
Was the Army keeping this paper division in the wings to be implemented in just such a situation as this?
“The Pentagon would rather waste another opportunity to establish an active Division post in California.”
The Pentagon has been very clearly told that California doesn’t WANT the military there, aside from the San Diego Fleet Concentration Area & the High Desert USAF bases.
Remember when the Cold War ended, and Babs Boxer made noises about a peace dividend? The Navy closed Mare Island, Treasure Island, Alameda, and the rest of the Bay Area base facilities with almost indecent haste, and Babs threw a world-class hissy fit.
My deployment in 2000 to Kuwait with the 41st EIB (C/2-162INF) was patched under 7th ID. We did our pre-deployment training at Ft Carson and came back through there at the end.
#15 I don’t think the 42nd Infantry Division is Mech anymore. At least not the 50th brigade in NJ isn’t, they converted to light a few years ago.
The big problem with this is there is simply no need for another Division headquarters to be stood up. That’s at least three more redundant Flag officers added that are unneeded. The three 2nd Infantry Brigades will be reflagged, they will still be part of that Division not the 7th. Right now that Headquarters is still in Korea managing a single brigade, why? It should be sent back to Lewis where the majority of it’s combat power resides. The heavy brigade left in Korea should be reflagged out of the 2nd ID.
Was at Ft. Ord from 90-92 5/21 Inf and never saw Camp Roberts once but spent plenty of time at Hunter Ligget. Was also up at Ft. Lewis from 94-95 with 2/9 Manchus 7th. ID. They blew the battalion apart and a company went to Gitmo for 6 months and another company went to Saudi Arabia for six months. I left in the summer of 95 and as far as i knew there was no plans to deactivate the 7th. Heard later they did. Hope they are still a light division when they do start back up. This is probably due to the military reorganizing in the pacific region. Let the 2nd ID be responsible for Korea again as a full unit.
I was a student at POM in 87-88 and used to visit some folks over at Ord – still remember the anti-Honduras crowd protesting outside the main gate. Guess that told DA what CA thought of the Army :).
I was at Fort Ord in 1980-82, 1984-1986, and 1989-1993. Spent many of FTXs at Roberts and Hunter-ligget, and numerous NTC, JRTC, rotations. For me it was a sad day when they closed the Fort down,and moved to Lewis. Would have liked to had retired out at Fort Ord. “Keep up the Fire”
well im deployed right now and i think the units are staying the same i have some people telling me that wel stay second id but that dont make no sense then i have some people saying that since it changes while were over here wel have a choice in 2 deployment patches to wear
Hey, i like knowing my old 7th would be back but not at the expense of others. Any 91-94 3/9 manchus out there? Mac McClelland
I was in a mortar platoon at Ft. Ord (Planet Ord) from 1987-1992. There was only one thing more miserable than being soaked to the bone doing PT in the early morning fog or sweating your way through a 25 mile road march at Ft. Ord, and that was spending 2 weeks in the field at Hunter Liggett then going straight to Camp Roberts and spending a week sweating your ass off on a firing range blowing up tumbleweeds and prairie dog mounds all day, and freezing what’s left of your ass off pulling guard half the night fighting off the packs of trash hunting Racoons.
Anyone that thinks that Camp Roberts would be a decent place to be stationed is nuts. That place is good for nothing except testing a soldiers patience and his ability to fight off boredom. If you ask me they should start testing nuclear weapons there, then turn it into a prison camp for
Al Qaeda. Not necessarily in that order!