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Casey urges more conventional training

As the Army marches toward its seventh year in combat, marked largely by counterinsurgency operations, the Army chief of staff said it’s time for training to swing back toward conventional warfare.

In a speech Tuesday in Washington, Gen. George Casey said he believes the Army is in for a protracted period of conflict in which “forces must be versatile and led by agile, adaptive leaders.”

“Right now we’re focused on counterinsurgency training. We need to get back to full spectrum training as soon as we can,” he said to an audience at the National Press Club.

“We can’t get the future exactly right, so our forces must be able to adapt for full spectrum operations,” he said.

Casey pointed out, however, that the resumption of training in conventional warfare, while continuing to advance in counterinsurgency training, would require a unit be home for 18 months.

Army units are currently deployed for 15-month rotations and home for 12, a deployment model that, he said, that can be sustained through the spring as part of the surge of forces in Baghdad.

He reiterated his opposition to extending rotations beyond the current 15 month war tours.

“Any more than that and it puts our soldiers at a level of strain and stress that I’m not comfortable with,” Casey said.

The current 15-month deployments are the result of 90-day extensions ordered for all units in Iraq and those preparing to deploy. The extended tours were announced in April by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Casey also described the state of the Army as “unbalanced.”

The demands of operations overseas combined with the Army’s ongoing efforts to reset, transform and modernize, while keeping soldiers and families happy, have stretched and stressed the Army, he said.

“Today’s Army is out of balance. It’s a temporary state, but we must pass through it quickly,” he said.