Posted on: Monday, November 22, 2004
'Jointness' sought with new base closures
Knight Ridder News Service
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The next round of military base closings will save money by paring the budget. But experts at a seminar here last week said the bigger gain would be in transforming the armed forces into a leaner, meaner tool.
Next May, the Pentagon will issue a list of bases to be closed under a process known as BRAC, for Base Realignment and Closing.
The Pentagon says it has 25 percent more base capacity than it needs. In this round, the Pentagon says, every base is on the table.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has made transformation a key priority. He wants to transform today's heavy force into a lighter, more nimble force built around electronics and precision weapons. The electronics can sniff an enemy coming from afar, and the precision weapons can kill the enemy at long range — and with one shot.
The thinking behind transformation — and its progress, or lack of it — was the topic of a two-day seminar in Colorado Springs, Colo., sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.
Former Navy Capt. Kenneth Beeks, now with a nonprofit group called Business Executives for National Security, said Afghanistan and Iraq have shown the benefits of "jointness"—of America's armed forces working together instead of as rivals.
In Afghanistan, a few Army Green Berets served as target spotters for Air Force bombers. Together, they delivered more crushing firepower than either service could do on its own.
But to fight jointly, the armed forces must first train jointly. And many of the current bases can't accommodate joint training. The BRAC list — the fifth such list since 1988 — will pin down just which bases are too outmoded for transformation.
"Earlier BRAC rounds were about money," said Heritage analyst Jack Spencer. "This one is about transformation," with savings merely a side benefit.
The future Army will be largely built around wheeled and lightly armored vehicles that will be more muscular than a Humvee but lighter than a tank or Bradley infantry fighting vehicle.
Paul showed razzle-dazzle video clips of a robotic flying camera about the size of a wastebasket, and a toy-sized gadget on treads that can climb stairs, traverse rocks and flip itself over.
Change of a sort is already under way. Before Iraq, the Army had 33 brigades or their equivalent — 33 combat units of 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers. Now, the Army is reshuffling its fighters into more brigades, anywhere from 43 to 48, to be called "units of action."
The aim is to fashion more brigades to ease the rotation burden. These new "units of action" are meant to be deployed in a hurry while packing along the support elements they need to fight on their own.
