MILITARY MANAGEMENT ON THE MOVE
09 Oct 07. The senior leadership of the active Army and Army National Guard used the Association of the United States Army’s Annual Meeting as the forum to sign a memorandum of understanding to rebalance force structure and resources. Under the agreement, The Army National Guard will retain 17 tactical combat formations and four field artillery units at a cost of $4.8bn over the next five years. The money will be coming from the current budget and is programmed for future budgets. Some of the money will be coming from supplemental appropriations. The Army National Guard is to grow to 358,200 soldiers by Fiscal Year 2013; almost 321,000 of those soldiers will be in the operational force. At the same time, the guard will create a special account for soldiers who are in transit or in school. The memorandum is to be reviewed through FY 2013.
09 Oct 07. The Army is speeding up the rate at which it adds end-strength, its top officer announced Oct. 9. The Army will add a net 74,000 new soldiers by 2010 Army Chief of Staff General George Casey told the Dwight David Eisenhower Luncheon at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting. Originally the increase had been planned for completion by 2012. “We believe that by accelerating our growth we can … improve manning and improve opportunities for leaders to attend their professional military education,” he said. “Meeting this target will not be easy It will require a total force effort if we’re going to expand more rapidly and maintain the quality so essential to our long-term success.” Casey identified four “imperatives” that he said were key to the Army’s ability to maintain its operational tempo while preparing for future conflicts. The first was sustaining the force through recruiting and retaining quality personnel. “We need to improve the manner by which we sustain our soldiers, families and civilians,” he said. Key to this is not only recruiting, but ensuring that families remain committed and that wounded soldiers receive the proper health care. He added: “Our warriors are our ultimate asymmetric advantage, the one thing that no enemy can duplicate now or in the future and we need to keep them with us.” Casey’s second imperative is preparing the forces. “We’ve made great strides in equipping our soldiers and we’re continually adapting our training and our equipment to keep pace with an evolving enemy,” he said. “We’ve remained committed to providing our deploying soldiers with the best available equipment so that they can maintain a technological advantage over any enemy that they face.”
09 Oct 07. The Army is undertaking a variety of initiatives to improve the quality of life for soldiers and their families, officers involved in the programs said. Several members of the panel on “Support to Soldiers and Families” on Oct. 9 at the Association of the United States Army repeated the truism that “a soldier joins the army, but the family decides whether to stay.” So as military families suffer under the stress of multiple deployments, measures to ensure that families are well taken care of become more and more important, the panelists said. “More than half our soldiers are married and the greatest factor in deciding whether to continue their service is quality of life,” said Ronald James, the assistant secretary of the army for manpower and reserves affairs. Soldiers in the Army Reserve, for example, are deployed about every three years. As the reserve force thus becomes an operational force, the army needs to make sure that its family programs – which are usually centered on military bases – are also available to a widely dispersed population on a sort of “virtual installation,” said Lt. Gen. Jack Stultz, Jr., chief of the Army Reserve and commanding general of Army Reserve Command. To do that, the Army has signed memoranda of agreement with organizations like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, which can coordinate with