$40B Price Tag for Larger Army
The U.S. Army projects it will need $40 billion annually above current spending levels once a planned 74,200 troops are added, according to a draft service report for the Obama transition team. The report says the planned force of 1.1 million soldiers would require a budget of "$170 billion to $180 billion per year to sustain," well above the 2009 budget of about $140 billion.
Defense News obtained a draft copy of the 43-page document, labeled "predecisional" and dated November 2008.
The Bush administration in early 2007 proposed swelling the Army, as well as the Marine Corps, by early next decade. Congress approved the plan. Army officials have hinted for months that a larger force will require a bigger annual budget.
But if service officials have previously estimated the full costs of sustaining the proposed increase thereafter, they have not released the figures.
Independent defense budget analysts have estimated that just recruiting and training 10,000 soldiers costs $1.2 billion a year. Carrying out the entire proposed increase is expected to cost about $80 billion through 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and independent budget analysts.
The Army paper, which outlines a broad range of service plans, strategic insights, future needs, goals and potential threats, does not spell out how service officials arrived at their $170 billion to $180 billion estimate.
One Army official familiar with service planning said the extra funds would go toward personnel costs and gear.
The CBO has estimated that sustaining the extra forces will cost about $14 billion per year, far less than the Army report suggests.
At press time, an Army spokes-man had yet to respond to requests for further details.
Several analysts declined to speculate about the discrepancy with the CBO figures.
The document does explain why senior military officials want a bigger Army: more brigade combat teams. The end-strength increase is "an important element of building resilience back into our force, restoring strategic flexibility," it says. The extra active, reserve and National Guard troops are needed to meet a service goal of fielding a total of 15 brigade combat teams and "to deal with the most uncertain strategic environment we have ever faced."
The planned 1.1 million-soldier force could support 20 brigade combat teams and support forces, assuming 12-month active-component deployments and nine-month reserve-component deployments with a 12-month mobilization, the document says. If active and Reserve component units are given three years to five years between deployments, "the planned 1.1 million-soldier force could continuously supply 15 brigade combat teams and their support forces," it says.
The document is largely a reflection of current status and plans, not a call for changes to be made under a new administration, said Andrew Krepinevich, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Studies, Washington.
"Remember, with [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates' reappointment, the Army still has the same leadership at the Pentagon. The transition team is not Gates. And the members will not necessarily have positions in the Pentagon. In fact, most will not," Krepinevich said. "The transition team is there to gather information useful to those who will assume senior positions under Gates. So there does not appear to be a reason for the Army to modify its position from that which it had prior to the election. If it has, I don't see it here."
The document says the service is "making progress, but there are [two to three] rough years ahead" in the ongoing effort to repair and restore its war-worn vehicles, helicopters, and other gear. "We have an achievable plan to restore balance to the Army by the end of fiscal 2011. The next two years are critical."
The document calls the service "out of balance," meaning the ground force is "feeling the cumulative effects of more than seven years of war in which the demand for forces exceeds the sustainable supply."
The document mentions almost no specific weapons, save in a few paragraphs and in one chart that lists programs central to Army modernization plans. The most in-depth discussion of its prized Future Combat Systems comes on a page that describes the service's modernization plan.
"Our combat fleet is aging and will require replacement in the next 20 years," the report says. FCS is "designed to ... meet that goal with an integrated system of systems, and ... enhance the capabilities of our combat formations with 'spinouts.'"
Service sources said the FCS program office has prepared its own paper about the multibillion-dollar initiative for the transition team.
Some defense analysts have placed the program, run by Boeing and SAIC, on a list of high-dollar defense programs the Obama administration may cut.
The document predicts that the current global fiscal slowdown likely will complicate global security, and predicts a threat picture shaped by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, globalization, demographic shifts, resource competition among nations, climate change, natural disasters, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
The service predicts the next administration will primarily face "hybrid threats," which the document describes as "dynamic combinations of terrorist, irregular, conventional and criminal elements." But a war against another nation, as opposed to groups like al-Qaida, "cannot be ignored," it says.
For that reason, the report says, the Army's force must have "utility across the spectrum of conflict."
While the Army report points to failed and failing states as another top threat, one former Army official discounts such notions.
"The world is full of failed states and always has been. Trying to rectify this situation by governing and developing failed societies, and with American military power, will bankrupt us and change nothing of substance in these regions," said Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel who writes on military reform for the Center for Defense Information, Washington. "It's time Americans woke up and recognized that so-called [counterinsurgency] in Iraq, along with the nation-building it implies, is a euphemism for territorial imperialism, an economic, military and political loser." ■
Kris Osborn contributed to this reportsource: defencenews.com
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