Army drawing down too fast?
Chief Tango sends us a link to the Army Times which quotes Lieutenant General James McConville, the Army’s G-1 guy who thinks that maybe the Army is down-sizing a little too quickly;
“We are very concerned that because of the strategic considerations, we may be driving very close to the curve as we move forward,” said Lt. Gen. James McConville, the service’s chief personnel officer (G-1), in an interview with Army Times.
The budget picture remains unclear at the same time the service is ramping up global missions. This has led to uncertainties relating to the future size of the Army, and as a result, McConville cannot accurately project how many soldiers will be forced out of service by the retention boards that will meet in 2015.
In terms of planning for the drawdown, McConville said, “we made some assumptions in 2012 regarding what the environment was going to be today,” but that picture has changed with what we are seeing with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Russian incursion in Ukraine and the Ebola outbreak in Africa.”
According to Robert Burns, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Especially when those men are short-sighted and have no plans related to the world’s realities. The Clinton Administration realized the same thing in the 1990s. At least when they drew down the force in 1993, folks left the service with a good taste in the mouths, and some even went back in when the Clinton Administration realized they had drawn down too fast and too much. Good luck trying to get this last bunch to come back in.
Of course, in all of it’s wisdom, the Army is driving ahead;
For now, the coming year is projected to look much like 2014. There will be a series of retention screenings, force-outs and reduced promotions as the Army drives toward an end strength of 490,000 soldiers by Sept. 30, the end of fiscal 2015, according to the senior Pentagon officials who oversee personnel policies. Fiscal 2014 ended with 508,000 soldiers in the active component.
The accession missions of 57,000 enlisted soldiers and 4,100 officers for this year are designed to support a much smaller Army, but the service will have to work aggressively to retain those soldiers as they move through their career timelines.
Yeah, it’ll be the next President’s problem.
Category: Big Army
“but the service will have to work aggressively to retain those soldiers as they move through their career timelines.”
Easy, peasey – lower the standards. Back to the “70’s!
First time I’ve ever heard of LTG Obvious. CPT Obvious must have gotten promoted.
Of course he was promoted. His thoughts are in line with the Administration….lol.
Not sure that’s the case with LTG Obvious at present, Ex-344MP. Raising the BS flag doesn’t seem to be something the current
Imperial regimeAdministration particularly likes to see among it’s subordinates – even when it’s both necessary and true.LTG Obvious must be very close to retirement. Probably a lot closer this week than he was before he went rouge and spoke truth to power.
“rouge” => rogue.
Sorry. The grammernazi in me just couldn’t leave that alone.
McConville was the CO at Ft. Campbell. I’ve heard both very good and very bad about him. Considering his current post, I’m guessing the accusations of his being a political animal may have some merit. Considering what he is quoted as saying, some of the good I’ve heard about him may have merit as well.
The problem is, they are also kicking people out without as much “thought” to it as they should have. These QMP/QSPs that they are doing haven’t been done in over a decade and in 2014, they’ve just started them back up.
So what does that mean? You have “experts” that don’t know how these are supposed to work. They give boards instructions to the effect of “well, we have to reduce the force, so you know what that means….” and end up telling quality people they need to leave.
Some will call shenanigans and throw back, but most will not and not understand that they can fight back. Even the fact that they are telling deployed personnel they are getting kicked after they get home is the kind of bullshit that a BEAN COUNTER does who doesn’t have humanity to say “wait a minute, this is wrong. Let’s figure out what we can do instead of this.”
I’m guessing there’s also no common sense check on these. No one saying, “Okay, they had this one bad evaluation, does that really mean they aren’t a benefit to the Army anymore?”
In April 2014 they had McHugh sign a memo taking the gloves off and basically stating, “Well, if we FEEL like kicking you out, we’ll do it.”
And again, at least in the 90s they offered a severance check to guys getting out. Now they are just saying, “Thanks for your service, now fuck off.”
Lastly, how many GO’s and CSMs that work for GO’s are they telling to get out? (I’m sure I know, it is less than 1)
Eric: the 1990s were a historical aberration when it came to force reduction and cushioning the impact thereof. The folks caught up in the post-Vietnam drawdown did not receive the VSIP and/or TERA options. Pretty sure the same is true for post-World War II and post-Korea as well.
Seperation Pay in the 90’s was not guarenteed. Officers had to have 4 years time in service. In Jan 92, YG 88 1LTs had 3 1/2 years. Thanks for your service but you have 100 days to find a new job. Thank God I had prior service time.
Yeah, sorry. Don’t take my statement to mean it was “easy” in the 90s. I was experiencing the 40% cut and 300% optempo myself because we got that much busier. Didn’t mean to make it seem so rosy.
Didn’t take it that way, Eric. My only point was that what’s happening today is in some ways more the historical norm, and that the 1990s was an aberration. Historically, during a postwar drawdown it’s been more like, “Here’s your severance (if you’re even that lucky); have a nice life, and shut the door firmly behind you on the way out.”
…Of course it’s too fast. It’s always too fast, and too far, but we always have other priorities. Until the morning that we have to send two unarmed airplanes to ram an airliner, or a platoon is outnumbered and outgunned someplace they never should have been.
Then people want to know why we didn’t see it coming.
Mike
Like the last drawdown, kicking out a lot of good ones and keeping the “Toxic Tammys”.
Today’s senior leadership (term used loosely) are the ones remaining from that last drawdown who in my opinion should have been the ones to leave instead.
Saw this coming almost 20 years ago.
I got out in 92 during the Clinton Hack jobs. Did the VSI thing. They soon figured out they screwed up and changed all the Rules. Went back in via Reserve then Guard and back on Title 10, hit 18 years active and they had to keep me till retirement. I do have to pay back the VSI so a portion of my retirement goes to that, I guess they only changed the rules to suit the Army. Anyway this time around looks like it will be a friggin mess, way too much going on for draw downs.
Okay, I’m just going to throw this in, because the guy who wrote this has a 97% accuracy in making forecasts in financial markets and in mundane (world in general) events.
“Just like the financial markets, people are in a time of flux. They want change, and they themselves are changing their positions. If the cosmos says anything right now, change is coming. It is going to be a wild and exciting time for the next five months. And then all the experimentation of the last seven years ends. A semblance of normalcy begins to return. Common sense with a longer-term approach towards solving problems becomes vogue once again. People start working on creative solutions rather than courting destructive divisions. Polarization starts to give way to unification. It may take a while to sink in, but a new era is coming….’
Note that he says we’ll have another 5 months of nonsense and then this asinine crap we’ve been through for the past 7 years ENDS.
It is already starting in small ways, such as NY state and NYC imposing mandatory quarantines, and NJ doing the same, while bodaprez is whining about that.
At some point, the asinine practices inflicted on the military as social experiments will be seen for what they are: useless wastes of time that serve no purpose other than sucking up money that could have been put to better use.
If a drawdown included better use of resources, e.g., improving target practice and bumping up training level expectations, and making the most of the remaining personnel, I’d have no objection. But this actually looks like an excuse to get rid of anyone who objects to the PC experiments, and/or anyone who is at the halfway mark toward retirement.
In regard to reviews (used to call them quarterly marks), if they are politically motivated and written up that way to keep certain people and get rid of others, they are suspect. They should be reviewed by a neutral third party. I would question the decision to ditch someone with a good record over what is literally nothing.
Normally, Ex-PH2, I’d agree with you. But I remember hearing much the same about the Clinton-era changes that were similarly thought to be BS by most military professionals. It’s been close to 20 years now, and those have yet to be revoked; rather, they’re now entrenched organizational behavior. The recent changes are merely logical extensions of changes begun during the Clinton era.
At this point, I fear it may take literally losing a war to force the changes required. Arguably, it did once before (Vietnam).
Give it a chance, Hondo. When that guy I quoted uses the term ‘common sense’, he’s pretty literal about it.
And have a little faith the it might actually happen.
Spoiled brats cannot have their way forever, you know.
I have to add this here.
The military has an unhealthy obsession with sex and sexuality. It was that way in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was in the Navy, and it does not appear to have changed one bit, other than an increase in the level of obsession.
In fact, some of those who fussed the most about how detrimental homosexuality was to the military were the most guilty of it. It was, in fact, a haven for it in many ways.
While you should not give a crap about the sexuality of the person working with you, neither should you have to worry about defending yourself from unwanted attention. In the civilian work world, that kind of behavior gets people fired.
However, in the military it still seems to be an obsession that is unhealthy and demoralizing, and that needs to change a LOT. There does not seem to be much difference between sailors coming off 6 months of sea duty in the 1960s, and current military personnel in general treating their work place like ‘this one time in band camp’.
There’s a time and place for everything, and work is NOT the place for acting like overgrown teenagers taking advantage of parental date night absence.
If the military ever decides to get its idiot head out of its ass about sex, someone let me know.
And please don’t blame it all on women. Men are responsible for their own behavior, whether you guys like it or not.