New deployment model will boost dwell time - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

New deployment model will boost dwell time

The Army is redesigning itself — again.

After nine years of scrambling to provide forces to two wars — and struggling to give soldiers sufficient rest in between — the new model permanently builds increased dwell time into the Army deployment structure.

Rather than focusing on divisions and corps and brigade combat teams, the new model will create “rotational force packages.”

There will be three of them: one at war or available to deploy, one in training and one in reset.

While soldiers will be deployed from the available package, the entire package is not likely to be deployed at once.

For nine years, the Army Force Generation model has enabled the service to meet the demands of the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan by combining groups of brigade combat teams, division headquarters and a slew of enablers.

It has worked well, but now the Army is looking to improve on the combat-tested model to give itself more flexibility and ability to respond to combatant commanders’ requirements while increasing how much time soldiers have at home.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey has said rotational force packages will fit into the ArForGen model.

Under the plan, each package would have one corps headquarters, five division headquarters, 20 brigade combat teams and 90,000 enablers. Within those numbers are Guard and Reserve units and soldiers, evidence that those nonactive, Guard and Reserve soldiers will be formally transformed into a vital part of the deployable Army.

The three packages will be at varying states of readiness and availability as they move through the ArForGen model’s reset and train, ready and available pools, allowing the Army to deploy some or all or combinations of units based on the demands from combatant commanders.

These force packages also would provide more stability and predictability to soldiers and help the Army increase dwell time for its combat-seasoned troops.

The Army’s goal is to give active-duty soldiers two years at home for every year they’re deployed, and four years at home for Guard and Reserve soldiers.

“Overall, what we’re seeking to do, by the time we enter in fiscal year ’12, is achieve what we think, at least in the interim basis, more sustainable [boots on the ground to] dwell ratios,” said Gen. Charles “Hondo” Campbell.

Campbell, the recently departed commanding general of Forces Command, generally is regarded as the father of the ArForGen model.

“And then, with the passage of time and with the diminishing of demand, desirably the chief of staff would like to see us migrate to [a one-to-three boots on the ground to dwell] ratio for the active duty and [one to five] for the reserve component.”

However, Army likely won’t be able to start moving toward those long-term dwell time goals until fiscal 2014 or 2015, and “it’s not likely we’ll complete it until sometime subsequent to ’17,” Campbell said.

“Of course, there are lots of things that are going to inform us between now and then, but that’s the longer term,” he said.

Approved by the Army secretary in 2006, ArForGen grew out of two epiphanies that occurred in 2004, Campbell said.

“The first great epiphany related to [Operation Iraqi Freedom] II,” he said. “OIF II suggested what? It suggested that OIF I had to be replaced and it was the recognition that you were now going to be in a protracted conflict and you were going to have to have some mechanism for generating forces.”

The old model called for the Army to deploy its forces, fight and then redeploy. It was not designed to “repetitively generate and cyclically deploy the force,” Campbell said.

The second epiphany was the realization that the Army had to have more forces available and ready at any given time.

“Under the tiered readiness model, we were not only tiered across the components, we were tiered across the active component,” he said. “So you have very ready active component forces ... that’s the XVIII Airborne Corps, the 82nd Airborne Division, the 101st Airborne Division and the 1st Cavalry Division, largely, so those units were maintained at higher readiness than other units [on active duty]. And virtually none of the Guard and Reserve was ready.”

That is why ArForGen is here to stay, Campbell said.

“The process has been refined over these past four years and it is, today, I think, a model that serves the Army programmatically and is a process that has been proven to be very agile, very flexible, very collaborative,” he said. “Everyone that has an equity in producing trained and ready formations can participate in the processes of ArForGen.”

ArForGen also caused the Army to change the way it uses its reserve-component forces.

“Over the course of the last 8½ years, we’ve employed those forces as a fully integrated part of the operational force,” Campbell said. “We’ve been hugely reliant on our citizen-soldiers and our community-based formations in our Army National Guard and Army Reserve.”

Since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 600,000 reserve-component soldiers have been mobilized; typically, about 75,000 of them are mobilized each year.

“We are forever wedded to this notion that the Guard and Reserve are going to be proportional contributors of forces, capabilities,” Campbell said.

In the meantime, the Army has shown it is capable of sustaining itself through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Campbell said.

“History suggests that you break armies in conflict, and you break armies even when you win wars,” he said. “We’ve been in this conflict for 8½ years, and I would argue that the Army is probably more capable today than it was when we entered this fray 8½ years ago, which is really without historical precedent.”

Off the top of his head, Campbell rattles off an impressive list.

“Today in the Army, we’ve got 68 brigades committed. We’ve got 23 brigade combat teams committed, and within that number we have five brigades from the Army National Guard and we have 45 brigades that are either multifunctional brigades or functional brigades, and now of that, 15 of them are from the reserve component.”

But there’s more, Campbell said.

“If you look at just what we’ve got committed in the main operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve got three corps committed, you’ve got four divisions that are currently committed and soon a fifth division,” he said. “You’ve got 20 BCTs committed to Iraq and Afghanistan, then you go down this incredible list: two expeditionary sustainment commands, six sustainment brigades, six combat aviation brigades, five engineer brigades, three [military police] brigades, two signal brigades, two medical brigades, a civil affairs brigade, a transportation group, an [explosive ordnance disposal] group, a Fires brigade, a battlefield surveillance brigade and 270-plus transition teams. Oh, by the way, that force doesn’t account for the 13 brigades that are in movement. They’re deploying, redeploying, or in some stage of reception or integration.”

It’s “remarkable,” Campbell said.

“And we’re able to do this largely because [Army Force Generation] ... allows us to continue to produce this force, organize it, man, equip, train it, deploy it, allow combatant commanders to employ it, then redeploy it, and then reset it while we generate its replacement,” he said. “That’s a huge undertaking. The Army has done it and continues to do it and is likely to do it on this scale for several months into the future, until we begin to benefit from the reduction of forces in Iraq.”

Campbell also credits the resiliency of today’s soldiers.

“I think when history is written, one of the stories that will be told will relate to the remarkable adaptability and resiliency of a force that, quite frankly, reinvented itself over the course of the prosecution of two protracted conflicts.”