Tradition Left in the Dust as Army Reinvents Itself

Flushed and sweating, Leonard Bentley is shaken.

The 21-year-old Army specialist has just watched six fellow soldiers fall to bullets from an unseen gun. He is being taunted in Arabic by an angry mob. Helicopters hum overhead, mortar fire is exploding around him, a turbanned kid has brazenly stolen his stores of food and water and his commander is nowhere to be seen.

“I feel exposed. We’re always taught to seek cover. Here you’re in the middle of the street, you have windows and doorways everywhere. You don’t know what to do,” the Dallas native says.

Just as Bentley was jolted by events in this simulated Middle Eastern city deep in the Louisiana woods, so was the entire U.S. Army after it rumbled into Iraq a year ago.

Last winter, soldiers getting ready for deployment to Iraq ran traditional drills. The Army was well-prepared for the charge that took it to Baghdad in less than three weeks. But after occupying the capital, the force found that it was considerably less suited to the job at hand: putting down an insurgency and rebuilding infrastructure.

So today, with insurgents’ bombs shearing limbs off U.S. troops on a regular basis and no definitive end to the mission in sight, the Army is quickly reinventing itself. Defying its reputation for being recalcitrant and tradition-bound, the Army has begun the most ambitious restructuring in 50 years, radically reforming how it trains, equips, organizes and fights. Indeed, it has surpassed the Navy, the Air Force and the Marine Corps as a vanguard of change.

Thousands of tank specialists are being turned into military police. The division containing 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers -- the basic fighting unit for generations -- is being dispensed with in favor of smaller, more agile and self-sufficient brigades.

The Army has canceled a major traditional weapons system, the Comanche helicopter, and begun to thin its bureaucracy, moving many soldiers from desk jobs to fighting units. Soldiers who have lost limbs in the conflict are assigned to brief deploying soldiers on their experiences.

Army leaders have figured out how to learn from mistakes so quickly that the day after Iraqi insurgents began stringing bombs from overpasses to hit convoys, the people at the Army’s National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, in the California desert, were stringing fake bombs from overpasses in a mock city.

“When I was a captain, battle training was very predictable,” said Col. Robert Brown, standing outside a mock Iraqi city at Ft. Polk as the infantry brigade he commands -- the 1st Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division -- waged battle inside with Arabic-speaking role players.

“I used to know exactly what we would do in a training exercise six months in advance. It was like you were in a football game and you knew what plays your opponent was going to run. But now you get out on the field and the other team might play soccer, or it might play lacrosse, or it might cheat.

“Our Army trained for a checklist mentality,” Brown added. “Now we can’t rely on the checklist.”

The demand for the Army to change its ways is happening amid extraordinary turmoil for the service. Facing an unrelenting need for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has been forced to call up hundreds of thousands of reservists for active duty.

More than 100,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq, and even with the U.S. planning to return sovereignty to Iraqis at the end of June, tens of thousands are expected to remain there. Army officials warn that by the end of next year, they may be forced to mandate back-to-back deployments for 45,000 soldiers or more.

With the sands and heat of Iraq wreaking havoc on equipment, logistics experts are scouring bases worldwide for every available helicopter and Humvee. And every day, flights loaded with wounded soldiers leave Iraq for Army hospitals in the United States and abroad.

“There is no question that the pace of our nation at war challenges our Army. This state of war requires us to challenge old paradigms, to be flexible and adaptable,” the Army’s new chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, told the House Armed Services Committee this month.

Schoomaker, who remade himself from an artilleryman at the beginning of his Army career into a Special Forces commander, insists that the Army remake itself immediately instead of studying and analyzing options for years.

“Nothing so concentrates the mind as knowing you’ve got a war to fight, that if you don’t make changes today it could hurt you down the road in what is likely to be a protracted conflict,” said Andrew Krepinevich, a retired colonel who directs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. “Right now, the Army is playing in the big game.”

The Army “has been left to undertake this really hard mission, this really hard, unconventional warfare,” said William Taylor, a former lieutenant colonel and now a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That creates a pressure that really hasn’t been put on the Air Force or the Navy the way the Army has been feeling it.”

Even now, some question how lasting the changes will be. And until the next war, it is impossible to know whether the Army emerging today will be up to the job.

“I think the Army has not changed a lot.... The Army has been forced to adjust” because of the war in Iraq, said Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. Thompson doubts that the reforms being put into place will ease the task in Iraq. “I’m not sure how reorganizing the whole combat division really contributes to that,” he said. “Some of the concepts are much more long-term.”

Still, the Army’s changes do not spring solely from Iraq. For a decade, officials had talked about doing things differently. As the Soviet Union fell and new threats emerged, new ideas were tacked on here and there.

Some soldiers were trained to fight in urban environments. Some new technology was advanced. Under the former chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the concept of a light, self-sufficient brigade -- dubbed Stryker -- was born. It would rely on smaller, more agile armored vehicles equipped with advanced satellite-guidance systems.

But like most new ideas in the Army, Stryker moved forward in fits and starts. Traditionalists worried that the units would undermine the need for heavy tanks and artillery. Other services, particularly the Air Force -- with allies among powerful defense contractors and lawmakers -- competed with the Army for dollars. Money for the new brigades and other innovations was always short. The wars the Army talked about seemed amorphous and far away.

Meanwhile, other parts of the military were adapting and changing and assuming larger roles: the stealthy Special Forces, the precision-guided bombs, the Navy’s faster boats, the Air Force’s lightning-quick jets. The Army seemed to plod behind with its tanks, armored personnel carriers and truck convoys.

Nothing was proposed that would move the Army away from its basic culture, built on the belief that major wars would be fought in a linear way, with large groups of tanks and smaller groups of infantrymen moving across a battlefield against an easily distinguishable foe.

The mind-set had such deep roots -- and the sort of peacekeeping and nation building that now preoccupies the Army in Iraq was so out of political favor -- that just a year ago the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., was ready to close its Peacekeeping Institute. Only a major campaign on the eve of the war saved it from the ax.

Today’s war-driven demands fit neatly into a broader push by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to remake, or “transform,” the entire military -- but especially the Army -- for a new era in which enemies might not wear uniforms, represent nations or use tanks. Rumsfeld plucked Schoomaker out of retirement for the task.

“The current emergency presents a period of risk,” Schoomaker said. “Yet it also creates a window of opportunity to effect dramatic changes in the Army.”

Now, with a year in Iraq under its belt, the Army has started reassigning 100,000 reserve and active-duty soldiers to create larger pools in high-demand specialties. The Army will create civil affairs units and craft police officers from artillerymen.

Every day, commanders in Iraq are relaying lessons back to training grounds across the U.S. Although it used to take the Army months or even years to change its training drills, today it can occur in days.

In January, a 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment unit on patrol in Iraq came across a dog lying in the road and noticed wires protruding from it.

The next week, a rubber dog booby-trapped with pyrotechnics made its way into the training fields at Ft. Polk.

The Army deployed its first Stryker brigade to Iraq so fast that soldiers didn’t realize until they got there that they couldn’t fit into their seat belts in full battle gear. Immediately, mechanics refitted the Strykers with aircraft-style harnesses.

At the Pentagon, senior Army leaders such as Schoomaker and Lt. Gen Richard Cody, a tobacco-chewing innovator who is deputy chief of staff for operations, are puzzling out how to get more fighters on battlefields without substantially increasing the size of the Army.

War “requires you to really focus your efforts and to study exactly what risks you thought you took and how those risks actually play out on the battlefield,” Cody said.

All these changes do not come cheap. Just getting 1,200 Arabic speakers to participate in war games at places like Ft. Polk is costing $35 million this year. Officials estimate the cost of morphing the Army’s 10 active-duty divisions into 46 brigades, each capable of deploying separately, at $20 billion.

But unlike much Pentagon spending, based on predictions about imagined conflicts, the Army has learned to divine what it needs with precision.

“What has helped us with that is all these guys watch the news every night, and they see what’s happened to their buddies,” Brown said. “That has encouraged them to say, ‘I really need to figure this out, because I know I’m going to be in harm’s way soon.’ ”

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Shifting forces

The Army is reassigning 100,000 personnel, many of whom will shift from combat to police and civil affairs work.

Adding: Military police +149 units* Transportation +16 Petroleum/water distribution +9 Civil affairs +8 Psychological operations +4 Biological detection +11

Decreasing: Field artillery -36 units* Air defense -10 Engineering -11 Armor -19 Logistics -65

*Number of personnel within units varies. Source: U.S. Army