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WASHINGTON,
Oct. 2007 – A new agreement between the
active Army and Army National Guard represents a
big step toward achieving the force structure
balance Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey
Jr. calls critical to the Army’s transformation.
Senior
Army leaders signed a memo of understanding Oct. 9
during the Association of the U.S. Army convention
here to firm up a plan to rebalance force
structure and resources between the active and
reserve components.
Under the plan, the Army National Guard will have
112 brigades: 28 brigade combat teams, 46
multifunctional brigades and 38 functional
brigades. It is slated to grow by more than 5,000
troops to 358,000 in 2013. Almost 321,000 of those
soldiers will be in the operational force.
The plan also ensures Guard units, many
underequipped after leaving their best equipment
in the combat theater for follow-on units, receive
replacement equipment on par with their
active-duty counterparts.
Gen. Richard A. Cody, Army vice chief of staff,
joined Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn, director of the Army
National Guard, and Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau,
Louisiana’s adjutant general and chairman of the
Adjutants General Association Force Structure
Committee, at the signing ceremony at the
Washington Convention Center.
Cody called the plan a “necessary journey”
that will “make our Army stronger.”
Vaughn said the plan will reduce stress on the
force by providing more formations in the
deployment cycle. “It’s more capacity for the
Army,” he said.
He pointed to the talks that led to the agreement
as a model for the future. “This is the way we
need to go in (addressing) some of the hard
things,” he said.
Casey called adapting the reserve components a key
element in the Army’s transformation and its
ability to confront what is expected to be an era
of “persistent conflict.”
“Our reserve components are performing
magnificently, but in an operational role for
which they were neither designed nor resourced,”
he said during an address to AUSA attendees Oct.
9. “They are no longer a strategic reserve,
mobilized only in national emergencies. They are
now an operational reserve deployed on a cyclical
basis,” enabling the Army to sustain operations.
“Operationalizing” the reserve components
“will require national and state consensus, as
well as continued commitment from employers,
soldiers and families,” Casey said. “It will
require changes to the way we train, equip,
resource and mobilize.”
It also will require changes to outdated Cold
War-era administrative policies that inhibit
reservists’ ability to serve. “We changed the
paradigm for our reserve-component soldiers and
families, and we owe it to them to make this
transition right,” Casey said.
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