The price of Empire
Army Expansion Could Last 5 Years

An additional 30,000 soldiers authorized this week by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on a temporary basis could swell the ranks of the Army for five years or longer, depending upon troop requirements in Iraq, Afghanistan and other potential conflicts, a senior Army official said yesterday.
Briefing reporters one day after Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, disclosed the increase in congressional testimony, the official said a wholesale restructuring of the nation's largest military service should produce efficiencies that would enable the Army eventually to return to its current authorized troop strength of about 480,000 troops.
But the official, who briefed on the condition that he would not be identified, said it is not certain the Army would be able to cut strength in four to five years from the 510,000-troop level authorized by Rumsfeld under emergency authority approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.


Gee, I wonder how much that little expension is going to cost and how much money KBR is going to get out of it.

Schoomaker's restructuring plan calls for an increase in the active-duty combat brigades from 33 to 48, creating more versatile units available for rapid overseas deployment. Each new brigade will be more self-sustaining and have more combat power than current brigades, enabling the Defense Department to respond to smaller-scale contingencies by deploying a brigade of 5,000 soldiers, instead of a much larger division, with 20,000 soldiers.
There will be three types of brigades: heavy, with tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles; light, with motorized infantrymen; and airborne, with helicopters and paratroopers. Commanders then could deploy a headquarters structure from one division to command heavy, light and airborne brigades from three other divisions.
In assessing the current Army structure, still largely a Cold War force, Schoomaker and his staff decided the service had far too much artillery and air defense artillery, the official said. They now plan to convert 39 field artillery battalions and 10 air defense battalions to military police, civil affairs and light infantry units in greater demand for fighting the global war on terrorism.

Looks like we are planning for many more small colonial wars in which the locals will have quite a bit of firepower, but limited control of the airspace and little to no artillery and very little armor. If I was running a small country sitting on any sort of valuable natural resource, I'd be working overtime to get my hands on as many portable light anti-tank/ anti-aircraft weapons as possible, as many men trained in their use as possible, since there is no realistic way of preventing the Americans from invading said country, but it might be possible to make so expensive that they will leave rather than get sucked into a bloody quagmire.
- posted by Don Quijote @ 11:02 PM