Army Readies Changing Battle Plan

The Army that intimidated the Soviets and routed the Iraqis will join battle this week with a foe it has never overcome: its own ponderous size.

Stung by criticism of its plodding performance in Kosovo and its long-standing resistance to change, the Army’s top officials are launching what they describe as an aggressive initiative to make the force lighter, faster and more lethal. They will experiment to develop new battlefield equipment and an organizational structure they hope will ultimately supplant the old division structure that dates back to the 19th century and Napoleon’s Grand Army.

“Our heavy forces are too heavy, and our light forces lack staying power,” the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, declared last spring as he assumed the service’s top post.

Observers within and outside the Army say this campaign is about more than a new generation of hardware; it is a struggle to find a new identity for a force that lost its focus with the end of the Cold War it was built to win. And some impatient reformers, while praising Shinseki’s new direction, fear this effort could melt away as some others have, leaving the Army stalled in its past.

The Army will kick off its reform effort Tuesday at a convention in Washington, at which officials for the first time will sketch their hopes to develop a lighter, 20-ton tank, and a new troop unit that falls about midway between the current heavy and light divisions. Ultimately, this new organization may be used throughout the force.

The goal is to develop forces strong enough to prevail against likely foes in the future, yet light and mobile enough to reach the scene of conflicts quickly.

And unlike past reform efforts that bogged down, some experts say this one may succeed. Criticism of the Army’s slowness to meet recent crises such as Kosovo has alarmed Army brass, who fear the service could suffer in future budget battles. A series of blue-ribbon study panels has also prodded the Army in this direction.

And, although Shinseki is no rebel against Army tradition, he and other top leaders seem convinced that change is necessary now. The Army is acknowledged to be without peer in large-scale land engagements, such as the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Central European war it feared it might fight with the Soviets and the major “regional” wars it has long been preparing to take on in the Middle East and Korea. No tank rivals the M-1 Abrams, which, with its 120-millimeter cannon, was able in the Persian Gulf War to accurately pinpoint and smash Iraqi tanks before their crews knew the enemy was present.

But the wars of tomorrow are less likely to be this kind of engagement. They are more likely to be fast-breaking conflicts in remote locations, where U.S. forces must arrive quickly on battlefields that may lack the convenient seaports and high-quality airfields needed to handle its present massive equipment.

And the Army won’t have the six months it took to prepare for the Persian Gulf War--and perhaps not even the four weeks it needed to deploy two Apache gunships and associated gear in last spring’s Balkan war.

The limitations of the Army’s arsenal in this kind of fight are clear.

The 70-ton M-1 tank was too large for Balkan bridges that could typically accommodate about 50 tons and too wide to pass through the region’s narrow streets.

The Army’s big field artillery piece, the $17-million Crusader, is an engineering marvel that can accurately hurl 100-pound shells 25 miles at a rate of 10 a minute. But this weapon--like the M-1, a product of 1970s research--weighs 100 tons and is tough to move, maintain and refuel.

The heavy divisions, at 10,000 to 18,000 soldiers each, are also in line for downsizing.

The Army brass has long recognized these limitations and has made repeated efforts to deal with the problem. But a number of reform efforts have fizzled, in the reformers’ views.

In the late 1970s, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Edwin Meyer designated the Army’s 2nd Division as an experimental unit that would test new concepts. The armored gun system, a lighter, more maneuverable tank born of this effort, “would have been perfect for Kosovo,” said Richard J. Dunn, a retired Army colonel who served as a combat engineer in the Vietnam War. “It could darn near go anywhere.”

But the program was canceled in 1996, on the eve of production. The Army continued instead to improve the M-1--adding another 10 tons to its weight since the Gulf War.

In another move meant to address criticisms about lack of mobility, the Army announced last spring that it would create a headquarters at Ft. Polk in Louisiana for a light, versatile “Strike Force.” But reformers lamented that without any single unit assigned to help develop the new approach, this move would have limited value.

Dov Zakheim, an advisor to GOP presidential front-runner Gov. George W. Bush and a former Pentagon official, says that with the exception of the post-Cold War force downsizing, the Army’s equipment and organization chart are basically unchanged in the last two decades. “Of all the services, they’re the one most disoriented by the end of the Cold War,” he says.

Army officials insist change is harder--and riskier--than it may appear.

For starters, they say, they have little money with which to develop new weapons, since the weapons-modernization budget has fallen 47% in 10 years.

And it is hard to free up troops to work out new approaches when so many are tied down with overseas deployments, as they are now and have been in recent years. The Army has had 33 major deployments since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, compared to only 10 in the previous 44 years.

And the brass has to worry about a top-priority mission, the ability to fight “major regional wars” that may explode in Korea and the Middle East in quick succession--wars in which the heavier equipment would be vital.

The critics acknowledge these pressures are real but see other forces at work.

After its successes in the Cold War and the Persian Gulf, the Army “doesn’t see a reason to change a winning formula,” says Andrew F. Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a reform-oriented group in Washington.

And there are powerful pressures to preserve the 10-division structure, which provides comfortable billets for tens of thousands and command positions for two-star generals.

Contractors who sell equipment for heavy land warfare, and their congressional allies, are also strongly invested in current arrangements.

Zakheim notes that in discussing their reform efforts, Army officials say they are “aiming” for key changes in weapons and organization.

“The question is, when will they not just aim, but fire?” he asks.