Bush To Announce Bigger Army, Corps
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Courtesy Of: Military.com
Original Source: InsideDefense.com NewsStand
Jason Sherman and Ashley Roque
January 10, 2007
Military.com

President Bush tonight is expected to announce plans to increase the permanent size of U.S. ground forces by as many as 90,000 uniformed personnel, the first such significant boost in end-strength since the fall of the Soviet Union, according to defense officials.

Senior Army officials also said today that the president will announce new and expanded recruiting goals for the service.

A source familiar with the president’s prepared address to the nation on what the White House is calling a new strategy for Iraq said the speech will not detail how many additional personnel will be added to the Army and Marine Corps. These specifics will be spelled out in a last-minute addition to the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2008 budget request, the source said.

Bush will "talk about things that we need to be doing over the long-term to strengthen the ability of the United States and its allies to deal with the war on terror over the long-term," a senior administration official told reporters at the White House this afternoon. "He'll talk about expanding the Army and the Marine Corps."

Asked today about the pending announcement of an increase in the size of the Army, a senior Army general declined to discuss specifics. Lt. Gen. David Melcher, the Army’s new budget chief, told reporters he “can’t get ahead of the president.”

However, the Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard Cody, hinted today that a decision on increasing the size of the Army -- in the wake of Bush’s request last month for options to grow the Army and Marine Corps -- was imminent.

“We've been growing the Army for four years and '07 is the year we're going to make a decision -- based upon the strategy, based upon what we see coming around the corner, based upon our commitment worldwide -- [on] how big the active force needs to be; how big the National Guard needs to be; and how big the [reserve] needs to be,” Cody said at an Institute of Land Warfare breakfast.

Bush is expected to announce new targets for growing the force, according to Cody.

“I won't tell you what our recruiting goals are this year,” he said. “You can wait till tonight and tomorrow.”

Melcher, the budget chief, added in remarks to reporters that “Intuitively, if you are going to grow the Army you have to take a look at what are your goals, with respect to recruiting and make a judgment if you have to adjust that. Right now we are bringing in about 80,000 people a year. . . . So, you have to take a look at the recruiting goals and make sure they make sense and are consistent with whatever you say your objective is for growth of the Army.”

Melcher further said that while the service did not budget for a possible end strength change, Army leaders have been consulted on options “under consideration” and they understand “exactly” where the service intends to go.

Army and Marine Corps officials in recent weeks have separately advocated significant increases -- which would take five to six years to realize -- that would total more than 90,000 uniformed personnel, according to Defense Department officials. The Army is seeking “significantly more than 60,000” additional billets to add to its current authorized size of 482,400 soldiers, as InsideDefense.com reported Jan. 4.

Some Marine Corps officials in recent days have discussed a need for as many as 30,000 additional Marines, which would boost the Marine Corps’ permanent authorized end strength from 175,000 to 205,000 uniformed personnel, according to defense officials familiar with high-level discussions in that service.

Under temporary authority, the Army is using supplemental funding to field 507,000 troops; likewise, the Marine Corps is making use of short-term permission to maintain a force of nearly 180,000.

The Army is looking to increase its size not only to deal with missions such as Iraq and Afghanistan, but to have enough personnel to execute the entire range of missions spelled out in last year’s Quadrennial Defense Review and the National Military Strategy.

“We believe the war on terror will have a long dimension to it,” a Pentagon official familiar with the Army’s request told InsideDefense.com last week, adding that the end-strength proposal is designed to address aspects of the national military strategy beyond missions like those under way in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Other facets of the strategy that require more Army troops, the official said, include homeland defense missions, assigning forces to focus on combating weapons of mass destruction as well as traditional conventional deterrence missions around the world.

Adding tens of thousand of new troops to the ranks likely will take years.

Last month, in testimony before the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker talked about how the service would handle troop increases. “Optimistically,” he said, “we could add 6,000 to 7,000 soldiers per year, in my view, but perhaps with greater incentives we could do more.”

As for the price tag associated with growing the force, for every 10,000 troops, $1.2 billion would be needed each year to cover “steady-state operating costs” such as payroll, health benefits, entitlements and a “minimum” amount of individual training, Melcher said today. Costs associated with unit training and equipping would carry additional bills, he added.

Using those rough calculations, if the Defense Department were to grow by 60,000 and the Marine Corps by 30,000, more than $11 billion per year would be required to support that growth. Billions of dollars more would be needed to equip and train the units formed by these new personnel.

Steve Kosiak, a budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the rough cost of equipping an Army division, about 15,000 troops, is approximately $5 billion -- more for heavy units and less for lighter units.

Meanwhile, the defense budget request remains in limbo as the end strength adjustments are fine-tuned.

“We built the '08 budget based upon the previous set of assumptions,” Melcher said today. “So, '08 would have to be amended if somebody wanted to decide to put [an end strength increase] in the base as opposed to having it funded in the supplemental,” Melcher said, referring to an FY-07 supplemental appropriations bill expected to be sent to Congress with the FY-08 budget request.

However, he added, “there is not a lot of time between now and [when the budget is due to Congress on Feb. 5] to completely change things and put [it] in the budget.”

A Defense Department critic of the end-strength increase said that the president is offering Army and Marine Corps leaders a gift that his successor will be stuck figuring out how to finance as other pressures on the federal budget mount in coming years.

The president “can make all kinds of promises,” said the defense official, because the White House will oversee only one more defense budget, and most of the end-strength increases will be paid for across the administration of the next president.

Kosiak, the defense budget expert, agreed. “Most of the costs associated with a major end-strength increase would be borne by the next administration,” he said.

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Copyright 2006 InsideDefense.com NewsStand. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.