bobdina
07-16-2010, 11:57 AM
Army wants to cut arms, not soldiers
By Kate Brannen - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Jul 15, 2010 19:39:12 EDT
The Army is looking to ax redundant weapons, not cut troops, to fulfill Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ order to reduce spending by $2 billion in 2012, according to the service’s vice chief of staff.
“The easy thing is to go out there and say, ‘Let’s take out a brigade,’ because you can quantify that pretty quickly,” said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, speaking Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The Army spends more than any other service on people, but to alleviate the stress placed on the force through years of war, the service wants to find other ways to reduce costs before it starts cutting end strength, he said.
Under Gates’ June guidance, the services must reduce their budgets in the coming four years by $3 billion, $5.3 billion, $8 billion and $10 billion, according to the Pentagon’s guidance.
One of the Army’s top priorities is to give soldiers two years at home in between one-year deployments.
Eventually, the service wants to be able to provide soldiers in the active force with three years at home between tours, Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, has said.
To meet that goal, the Army wants to avoid reducing its end strength, Chiarelli said.
“We are an organization that requires people and we better make darn sure that everything we’re not spending on people, we really, really need if we’re going to meet the goals the chief has had for almost four years, and that’s getting the Army back in balance,” Chiarelli said.
While there are redundancies within the force structure, particularly in the generating force and the contractor pool, they cannot be addressed through simple attrition, Chiarelli said. Instead, “you’ve got to sit down with individual requirements and figure out a way to attack that, to see how these things have occurred over time,” he said.
The vice chief is leading the Army’s belt-tightening initiatives through a series of portfolio reviews, which he began more than six months ago.
The reviews aim to figure out just what the Army owns, what is still needed and whether any of it overlaps, the vice chief said.
The reviews have already resulted in one major program decision: the cancellation of a multibillion-dollar missile program, called the Non-Line of Sight Launch System.
Chiarelli said it was after back-to-back briefings on individual precision rocket systems that he first stumbled upon what appeared to be a redundancy in capabilities. He decided that rather than looking at programs individually, they need to be considered as part of a larger portfolio, so that various systems and requirements could be compared.
At CSIS, he showed a briefing slide comparing the range, cost and accuracy of various Army artillery, mortar and missile systems.
“When you look at the costs of some of these precision munitions, it became clear to me that we really needed to have a new way of looking at these to make sure we didn’t have duplication in the system and that we’re buying exactly what we need,” the vice chief said.
His briefing included a list of every portfolio the Army intends to study: precision fires, aviation, engineer, air and missile defense, combat vehicle modernization, tactical wheeled vehicles, radios, the network, work force composition, software/hardware, soldier systems, ISR, training ammunition, watercraft, Army training strategy, installation management, sustained accounts and organizational structure.
Fast-Track Fuzziness
Because so much equipment has been rapidly fielded to Iraq and Afghanistan through nontraditional acquisition processes, it can be difficult to determine the long-term costs of these systems, the vice chief said.
For example, 70 percent of the Army’s sensor packages for its UAVs were purchased off the shelf and rapidly sent overseas. Part of the review process is to determine which of these can be sustained through base budget funding, Chiarelli said.
The portfolio review process may become a more permanent exercise so that requirements can be scrutinized on a more frequent basis to determine if what was needed five years ago is still needed at the same quantity, if at all, Chiarelli said.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies organizers said that each service’s vice chief of staff plans to make similar presentations in the coming weeks.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/07/army_chiarelli_budget_071510w/
By Kate Brannen - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Jul 15, 2010 19:39:12 EDT
The Army is looking to ax redundant weapons, not cut troops, to fulfill Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ order to reduce spending by $2 billion in 2012, according to the service’s vice chief of staff.
“The easy thing is to go out there and say, ‘Let’s take out a brigade,’ because you can quantify that pretty quickly,” said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, speaking Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The Army spends more than any other service on people, but to alleviate the stress placed on the force through years of war, the service wants to find other ways to reduce costs before it starts cutting end strength, he said.
Under Gates’ June guidance, the services must reduce their budgets in the coming four years by $3 billion, $5.3 billion, $8 billion and $10 billion, according to the Pentagon’s guidance.
One of the Army’s top priorities is to give soldiers two years at home in between one-year deployments.
Eventually, the service wants to be able to provide soldiers in the active force with three years at home between tours, Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, has said.
To meet that goal, the Army wants to avoid reducing its end strength, Chiarelli said.
“We are an organization that requires people and we better make darn sure that everything we’re not spending on people, we really, really need if we’re going to meet the goals the chief has had for almost four years, and that’s getting the Army back in balance,” Chiarelli said.
While there are redundancies within the force structure, particularly in the generating force and the contractor pool, they cannot be addressed through simple attrition, Chiarelli said. Instead, “you’ve got to sit down with individual requirements and figure out a way to attack that, to see how these things have occurred over time,” he said.
The vice chief is leading the Army’s belt-tightening initiatives through a series of portfolio reviews, which he began more than six months ago.
The reviews aim to figure out just what the Army owns, what is still needed and whether any of it overlaps, the vice chief said.
The reviews have already resulted in one major program decision: the cancellation of a multibillion-dollar missile program, called the Non-Line of Sight Launch System.
Chiarelli said it was after back-to-back briefings on individual precision rocket systems that he first stumbled upon what appeared to be a redundancy in capabilities. He decided that rather than looking at programs individually, they need to be considered as part of a larger portfolio, so that various systems and requirements could be compared.
At CSIS, he showed a briefing slide comparing the range, cost and accuracy of various Army artillery, mortar and missile systems.
“When you look at the costs of some of these precision munitions, it became clear to me that we really needed to have a new way of looking at these to make sure we didn’t have duplication in the system and that we’re buying exactly what we need,” the vice chief said.
His briefing included a list of every portfolio the Army intends to study: precision fires, aviation, engineer, air and missile defense, combat vehicle modernization, tactical wheeled vehicles, radios, the network, work force composition, software/hardware, soldier systems, ISR, training ammunition, watercraft, Army training strategy, installation management, sustained accounts and organizational structure.
Fast-Track Fuzziness
Because so much equipment has been rapidly fielded to Iraq and Afghanistan through nontraditional acquisition processes, it can be difficult to determine the long-term costs of these systems, the vice chief said.
For example, 70 percent of the Army’s sensor packages for its UAVs were purchased off the shelf and rapidly sent overseas. Part of the review process is to determine which of these can be sustained through base budget funding, Chiarelli said.
The portfolio review process may become a more permanent exercise so that requirements can be scrutinized on a more frequent basis to determine if what was needed five years ago is still needed at the same quantity, if at all, Chiarelli said.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies organizers said that each service’s vice chief of staff plans to make similar presentations in the coming weeks.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/07/army_chiarelli_budget_071510w/