The rush from readiness
The Army Times reports that the Army is accelerating their draw down by two years. It will result in the elimination of 10 more brigade combat teams (BCTs).
What was supposed to be a four-year process to cut the Army’s end strength by as many as 80,000 soldiers, inactivate 10 BCTs and reorganize the remaining BCTs will now be compressed into two years, officials said.
“The impact of sequestration in [fiscal 2013], coupled with the threat of continued sequestration levels of funding, is forcing the Army to implement significant reductions to end-strength, readiness and modernization in order to generate short-term cost savings,” Col. Daniel King, a spokesman for Forces Command, said in a statement. “We are accelerating the downsizing of the Army’s active component end-strength to 490K by FY15 instead of FY17. Additionally, we will maintain a certain number and mix of units at a higher level of readiness to meet contingency requirements.”
Do they realize that there’s still a war going on? I guess the hippies finally got their wish. I hope our future enemies take this into consideration when they attack us.
There’s a list of the BCTs to be eliminated at the Army Times link if you want to see if the unit you served with got the axe.
Category: Big Army
Yep – 2/3ID, the Spartans…
Why is DoD the only place Dems believe in austerity?
Yeah now that we’ve won the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who needs guys with tattoos hanging around collecting paychecks for nothing?
Let ’em hang around looking for work with the rest of the nation, and let’s make sure we f@ck them out of their benefits to keep the costs down as well.
Eventually it will make it easier to avoid conflicts in the future because the 99% of the population that doesn’t serve will get a good glimpse at how those who do serve get treated and will continue to avoid serving…we might get down to about .1% serving at some point in the near future. Then we can see what hollow promises will be made to future service men and women to entice them to give up a few precious years of their young lives to an ungrateful nation of selfish, self serving corrupt politicians only looking to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us.
Of course Veterans are gonna get screwed, we don’t buy into the DC Propaganda and vote democrap en mass like the welfare flunkies do, thus B. Hussein 0bama & Co. are going to punish us Chicago-style every chance they get!!
Marine Corps appears to be going below 174,000 too. They are going to cut everyone to the bone and then in the next national crisis, they will have to spend out the wazzoo to plus the force back up. Same old same old.
Meantime, hopefully any potential adversaries give us a head start to get our forces back up to speed so we can whip their asses.
But don’t worry, all the social engineering that is being done to the military will probably be the X factor that leads us to victory in the next war.
Good thing we had recover summer so there are plenty of jobs waiting for 80k more people entering the civilian workforce.
At least the Guard and Reserve recruiters will have an easier time because of it.
Glad to see the Joint Chiefs has the back of the country…
Looks like we’ll get a chance to see what our European counterparts have to deal with all the time – i.e. being in a military that is an unwanted stepchild of a government more interested in handing out goodie bags and interfering in people’s daily lives. 🙁
Honestly, I always thought it took a lot more dedication to be a soldier in the likes of the UK or France than in the US, just because in the US there are lots of “external” supports to serving in the military, while in Europe (from what I recall) there are very few.
Think about it: Every small town across the country has monuments, murals, and other commemorations that honor and support their military forces, from the 7 years war all the way up to the present day conflicts.
By contrast, the only such monuments I ever saw in Europe were pre-WWII, almost as if they were saying anybody who served in the military afterwards was not worth honoring or remembering. I think the liberals in government would love to see the US turn “European style” and the gutting of our military is one way to acheive that.
Jonn, the Army Times link requires a subscription. Could you post the units?
The affected BCTs are:
3rd BCT, 1st Armored Division, Fort Bliss, Texas
4th BCT, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.
4th BCT, 101st Airborne Division, Fort Campbell, Ky.
3rd BCT, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo.
3rd BCT, 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, N.Y.
4th BCT, 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas
3rd BCT, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Knox, Ky.
4th BCT, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan.
2nd BCT, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.
In addition to these 10 BCTs, which will be inactivated by the end of fiscal year 2017, the Army has already announced the inactivation of two BCTs in Germany — the 170th and 172nd BCTs.
hey the 56th BCT in the Texas NG is “reorganizing”. Maybe they’ll give us our f@#$king tanks back. Oh wait, they already gave them away to some 3rd world country as “military aid”…..
Interesting…the big question is, who does that leave? IIRC there were two BCTs at Carson, I guess this drops them back down to one (which is where they were from the late 90’s until they got plused-up for the Iraq war.) I’m guessing there will still be at least one Brigade at Lewis? The brigade cuts at Bragg and Campbell shouldn’t mean much since those divisions traditionally only had 3 brigades anyway and it looks like that’s what they’ll be going back to (the old “triangular division.”)
Is 2ID still headquartered in Korea or did they move the Division flag to Lewis?
Looks like the same units being cut that were announced a few months ago. That still doesn’t provide peace of mind to those affected by the cuts, who may lose their careers two years earlier than they thought. I’m paranoid about this whole process since it makes sense (from a budgetary standpoint) to include those like me in the second string of cuts. Rightfully, those with discipline problems or who fail to meet standards will be among the first out. Though everyone is focusing on tattoos and such I don’t see this affecting career Soldiers so much as it will affect potential recruits. Maybe there’s a chance that certain tattoos will preclude reenlistment, but committed Soldiers will probably not find themselves booted for such trivial things. There are many like me, however, who have rendered honorable service but whose own relative “fast-tracking” earlier in our careers could be our downfall. Notice that QSP does not affect E-5 SGTs regardless of their time in grade or service. Those E-5s meet their RCP at 15 years, but they can get promoted to SSG at 14 years and have little risk of being shown the door prior to putting in 20. If I don’t make the promotion list next year I’ll be just another of the thousands of tenured SSGs out there, with 7 years in grade but fewer than 13 in service. This puts some of us in unenviable positions, as we may be considered “stagnant” (despite good NCOERs and having served in SFC positions) and shown the door before meeting the 15-year requirement for TERP (early retirement). In other words, it may be considered okay to be a SSG with 18 years in service but only 4 in grade (and no service outside of their MOS), while it is unacceptable to be a SSG with 13 years in service but 7 or 8 in grade (despite specialty assignments and duty as an instructor or Recruiter). I’ll continue working on my education and formulating a backup plan. Unlike a majority of young SFCs and SSGs I know, I made the commitment to… Read more »
@13. Under the old QMP, E6 and higher records were culled once a year during the SFC board, whether the SSG in question was eligible for promotion or not. It seems that the QSP is following that same guideline.
There are those that think we can do our mission with only 35 SSN’s. Uh, hate to tell those folks, but you can barely handle ONE ocean on 35 boats, and the QDR makes it sound like that by 2020 we’ll be below even that.
We are so screwed.
Don’t see any cuts to 2ID or 25ID, so they’re keeping the SBCT’s.
If anything Ft. Lewis (JBLM) seems to be the only major installation that isn’t going to be seeing a draw down.
Oh and MMjr. 2ID HQ is still in Korea. In fact they just stood up 7ID as a non-deploying administrative HQ for the 5 SBCT’s at JBLM because of the issues that were happening since they had so many discipline issues.
Sandman: I believe 4th Stryker BCT at Lewis-McChord is part of 2ID, and is on the “hit list”. See Jonn Lilyea’s comment 10 above.
@12 @16 The entire 4th ID is at Carson, so this will leave them with 3 brigades. Every division became a 4-brigade unit over the last decade. The 4th Stryker Brigade here at Lewis is inactivating, but it will replace the 1st BDE, 4th ID at Carson swapping the tanks for Strykers. That will leave two Stryker brigades at Lewis. The activation of 7ID headquarters was mostly because I Corps wanted a buffer and to spread the pain around since they were overseeing 10 brigade-sized units at Lewis.
“Do they realize that there’s still a war going on?” Yes.
Do they care? No.
There are currently only three SBCTs at JBLM (2-2, 3-2, and 4-2); and 4-2 will be inactivating soon.
@18: I thought there were only 2 brigades of the 4th at Carson and that Div HQs was still at Hood? Guess I just got lost in that game of division “three card monte” that went on over the last 10-12 years.
My vague recollection after I retired in 2005 was that Hood deactivated the 2nd Armored (Hell on Wheels) and put 4th ID in their place (while keeping 1st Cav and keeping Hood as the only 2-division post in the Army.) Meanwhile, 4th ID which had been based at Carson since the end of the Vietnam war, moved its flag to Hood and kept one brigade at Carson along with the 3rd ACR which had moved up from Fort Bliss in Texas.
For a while my occasional trips to Carson (I live in Denver) would reveal soldiers walking around with 2ID “Indianhead” Patches but that only lasted a couple of years and after that, both brigades were 4th ID, I believe.
If there are 3 combat brigades at Lewis, then that’s one more than were there when I was stationed there in the late 80’s/early 90s. The 9th ID was in the process of shutting down and had only two combat brigades, both of which were pretty light (just a couple of infantry battalions in each brigade and I don’t remember seeing ANY tanks there during my time.)
Can someone refresh my memory (or point me to a link) about what divisions we still have? Off the top of my head I can think of:
1st Infantry (Riley)
2nd Infantry – ? Korea or Fort Lewis?
3rd Infantry (Stewart)
4th ID (Hood)
1st Cav (Hood)
1st Armored (Bliss – I think?)
10th Mountain (Drum)
25th (Schofield Barracks)
82nd Airborne (Bragg)
101st Air Assault (Campbell)
That’s our 10 divisions unless I missed one. I know there’s a brigade in Alaska and one at Benning (though IIRC the one at Benning is part of 3ID), beyond that I’m not sure.
I had somehow missed the 2ID SBCT in the list and I guess the 25ID units have rotated out now that they are stood up.
It has been a year or so since I was last up at Lewis, but it’s seemed to have been bursting at the seams (same as Carson for that matter) when I have been there.
@21 They changed everything during the war. 4ID moved up to Carson 5 years ago and 3rd ACR took its place at Hood (now 3rd SCR). I’m guessing they didn’t touch 25th ID because of the “Pacific Pivot.”
Here is a decent list of where everyone is at (including the upcoming drawdown).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_of_the_United_States_Army#Positioning_-_End_State
This reminds me of the 90s. When “we” reduced numbers by 40?%, but Slick Willy increased the optempo by 300%.
Oh and any reserve unit that doesn’t already have a recruitment action plan in place of some sort is well behind the 8-ball on this. These will be the years to get those guys pulled into reserve / NG units to bolster the numbers for the reserve units. Its still bullshit that we should have to kick so many to the curb, but its what happens when a democratic regime is in charge.
This escalation is a mistake, never mind announcing it. Big mistake, Big huge mistake.
Sorry guys, but your own CSA, SMA and all the other 2 Stars+ in the five sided wind tunnel screwed you over. I almost bet you a dollars to donuts that the guys who made this decision were the ones who hadn’t seen field time in over 20 yrs and they didn’t see where else to cut fat from, but from the front line units. Look around at your service and then look at what the USAF, USN and USMC did. Those services saw the night of long knives coming and started with the personnel cuts earlier. The chronic non-deployable personnel: The Sickbay Commandos, the heavy set kids, the boozers, the guys with a NJP to their records, the guys who had successfully 5-D (Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive, Dodge) their way out of an operational deploying command except for the need to collect that ticket punch to go on to some other billet within good old CONUS. The list is pretty long on reasons to reject folks and had been working their way around to it after the retreat east of the Suez was announced in 2009 at West Point by POTUS. The cuts started in 2010 and continued until recently. It sucked because there were guys who were good at their jobs and where shown the door because of a mistake years ago, just as there were guys that were horrid at their jobs where shown the door. A ton of talent left those services. Now its the Army’s turn to start the hard cuts. However, instead of cutting at the massive support tail of billets that a number of folks dive into and keep from going to the fun places like Korea or the a combat zone. Such as a massive TraCom/Base Support structure that the Army appear to maintain. That is where you need to make a business case for reduction and redistribution, not at the wholesale elimination of a BCT or ten. How many of those support jobs can be consolidated due to improved technology into a smaller force foot print? How many of those jobs… Read more »
Actually, I don’t see this as necessarily such a bad thing, reading the details, and the details from previous articles on changes to the force structure. A current Brigade Combat Team has a Special Troops Battalion, a Support Battalion, an artillery battalion, two maneuver battalions, and a recon squadron. When the ten brigades go away, that will eliminate 10 special troops battalions and ten support battalions–all overhead, in a tooth-to-tail context–while adding a third maneuver battalion and an engineer battalion to each of the remaining BCTs. So although the number of headquarters goes down, the combat power of the remaining brigades goes up (although essentially to what they were before the reorganization). It’s been a while, but if I recall correctly, the Army had 33 Brigades (including the Armored Cavalry Regiments) before the reorganization. At the end of this drawdown, we’ll have 32. So I don’t see it as quite the disaster the CSA and SMA portray it to be. Yes, the cuts of 80,000 troops is alarming. But don’t be fooled by the number of brigades “going away.” You have to count the number, and type, of battalions that are activated, inactivated, and reorganized as part of the shuffle. A fair number of those people are, I suspect, in combat support and combat service support specialties. And, although they don’t mention it in the article, there will also be a shuffling of battalion flags, as the Army works to maintain units on the active rolls. They did the same thing during the last drawdown. Scored the battalions, by a number of factors, including unit awards, medals of honor awarded to the units, campaign streamers, total time active, etc. Used a point system, and the battalions with the highest points remained in the inventory–so flags moved from post to post and battalions were redesignated, but the troops didn’t follow the flags. The one exception to the rule, I was told by buddies in the know, was the 10th Mountain Division. According to a strict point system, 24th ID should have remained on the books and 10th Mountain should have gone… Read more »