Casey: Families, modernization top priorities - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Casey: Families, modernization top priorities

U.S. Army chief of staff Gen. George Casey said there are three things that need to be protected in the Army’s budget: the size of the force, programs that support families and the service’s efforts to modernize.

“We need to keep our end strength about where it is until we’ve had a chance to reset the force,” Casey told reporters after a Jan. 6 breakfast hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army. “As budgets come down, the size of the force is going to have to come down, because you know where the costs are – on the personnel side – but we need to hold what we got for a few years so that we can reset the force.”

The Army is about to finish growing its active duty force by an additional 22,000 soldiers, Casey said. The service plans to stay at that level, roughly 569,000 through the end of 2013, when the force would come back down to its earlier size of 547,000, he said.

Maintaining the Army at this size is necessary for soldiers to be able to rest and recover from their one-year deployments, he said. An important milestone for getting the force “back in balance” comes Oct. 1, when there will be as many brigades not on the patch chart as there will be brigades scheduled to deploy.

Secondly, Casey wants to see family support programs protected in the budget.

“The families are out there thinking, ‘OK, we’ve seen this before. As soon as the budgets go down, you guys pull the rug out from under us.’ We have to protect that because we’re asking way too much of them,” he said.

Finally, Casey said the Army has to continue to modernize and it has to be able to do this with fewer resources.

The general said a focus on core competencies is one way the Army can ensure it’s getting the most value out of its investments.

This is the driver behind the potential transfer of Army watercraft to the Navy, Casey said.

“We’re asking ourselves, is ship-driving an Army core competency?” the general said. “As we operate in this period of constrained resources, we have to ask ourselves those questions. Is this function that we’re putting our resources in giving us, the Army, the most value? That’s how I was going into this.”

He said similar thinking was behind the decision to transfer the Joint Cargo Aircraft to the Air Force, a move that was initiated in the 2010 budget.

As for the watercraft transfer, the issue is “not yet resolved,” Casey said.