Four Returning Army Divisions to Reduce Readiness

Its equipment and troops battered from fighting in Iraq, the Army will allow four of its divisions returning from overseas to fall to readiness levels that would make them not fully combat-ready for as long as six months, a senior Army official said Friday.

The divisions -- which together make up more than 100,000 soldiers, 40% of the Army’s combat troops -- are reeling from yearlong deployments fighting first a war, then a counterinsurgency, that have wreaked havoc with everything from tank treads to helicopter rotors to nerves.

By permitting the divisions to, in effect, drop their guard and recharge, the Pentagon is taking a calculated risk that it won’t be forced to fight a war with a major adversary like North Korea on short notice. Not since the all-volunteer military was established in 1973 has the Army allowed so many of its units to fall to such low readiness levels.

“We have a nonnegotiable contract with the U.S. people that our Army will always be ready to fight and win its wars,” said the senior Army official who briefed a small group of reporters on the plans Friday on condition of anonymity, after the Army’s plan was disclosed in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “But this is a fact of life. What we are seeing now is the operational tempo of our Army is going to require time to reset our equipment, reset our training, reset our soldiers so we can build this Army back up.”

The four divisions -- the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, the 1st Armored and the 4th Infantry -- will be replaced by four other divisions beginning in February as part of a nearly complete rotation of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Bush could take political heat for the decline in readiness. During his run for president in 2000, he struck hard at the Clinton administration for permitting two small divisions just back from missions in the Balkans to lower their readiness levels for four months.

Because of the toll that Iraq has taken on the Army’s equipment -- not to mention its people -- it could take six months to bring some units returning from the war zone back up to speed, the senior Army official said.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers said the news is indicative of an Army stretched too thin by a war it was not prepared for or designed to fight.

“The Army will always march at the sound of the guns, regardless of the condition they are in. But the reality is they’re not going to go with the same kind of efficiency and force that they were prepared to go [with] six months or a year ago,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), who has proposed increasing the size of the Army. “They would have to scramble; they would have to divert resources that are scheduled to go to Iraq and Afghanistan; they would have to improvise.”

Senior Army officials say that while they have not discounted the possibility of asking for more troops, they are trying to make do with what they have. Privately, they have expressed concern that the expense of adding soldiers would force them to draw from funding for modernization and maintenance.

The move by the Army comes as the U.S.-declared war on terrorism and other overseas commitments are straining the military, and the Army in particular, for the first time since overall troop levels were reduced more than a decade ago in the wake of the Cold War.

About 369,000 of the Army’s 1.04 million active-duty and reserve troops are now deployed away from home in 120 countries. That includes about 150,000 in Iraq and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region in support of the war, and another 10,000 in Afghanistan. Another 5,000 are in the Balkans, and 30,000 are in South Korea. About 138,000 of those deployed overseas are reservists, many in specialties that are being called up repeatedly. An additional 67,000 reservists from other branches of the military also are deployed.

When the troops return to their home bases beginning in February, their commanders will allow them up to 30 days of leave to be with their families and attend to personal business. Meanwhile, maintenance crews will begin the task of bringing their equipment -- including 650 helicopters, 750 tanks and more than 46,000 wheeled vehicles -- up to par. That could take six months.

The Army measures four degrees of readiness among its many units, and the two lowest ratings signify unpreparedness for combat. Army officials emphasized Friday that within the four divisions, not all companies or other units will be at depressed readiness levels. And they insist that even those at lower levels would be able to fight if a real need arose.

“Oh, there’s a risk,” the senior Army official said. “It’s a manageable risk.”

The official said commanders would have had no choice but to grant the time off.

“You’re sitting there as a commander, and you’re going home after 12 months of combat, and you’re going to let your people take leave,” the official said.

Former military officials and defense analysts said that by permitting troops some recuperation time, the Army hopes to stave off a mass exodus of its personnel.

“We got ourselves into a pickle here,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. Edward B. Atkeson. “You’ve got to realize that this is not a draft Army. This is a volunteer Army, and it’s a married Army. And people are not going to want to reenlist if we don’t give them some kind of a break. We’ve stretched this thing way beyond its design capabilities. We didn’t design the Army to fight another Vietnam.”

It is unclear how many units within the four divisions will drop their readiness to a point at which they are not ready for combat.

The nature of the Iraq mission has complicated the readiness issue. With the conflict largely a counterinsurgency effort, many of the returning units have been fighting a brand of combat for which they were not trained. As a result, their skill levels at their regular assignments have fallen. Tank units are in many cases using lighter vehicles, not tanks. Combat engineer battalions are not practicing building bridges in combat.

But how far readiness levels fall and for how long is driven primarily by the time it will take to revamp the equipment, the senior Army official said. Commanders have been asked to report by Dec. 15 on how much of their equipment will need to be transported back to the U.S., and how much can be made combat-ready in Iraq.

Army logisticians are laboring to set up a production flow that will allow the units to keep as much as 70% of their helicopters and other equipment ready at one time, while the balance undergoes maintenance, the senior Army official said.

He said that much of the equipment is usable but needs regular maintenance.

“We’re running those tanks now, right?” the senior Army official said. “We’re flying those helicopters now.”

But, the official added: “We have to take good care of our tanks, our Bradley [fighting vehicles]. Because this is not Hertz rent-a-car. We own this stuff. And if we don’t take care of it, we pay down the road.”