This Army press conference has a lot of information in it. There is a very useful discussion of the Army and how end strength is hardly the only way to increase combat power. The Army is made up of many components and some can be squeezed or changed or substituted to add new combat units:
We have an end strength that is as follows, and again, as I like to say -- and everything in the Army is a little complicated. It's hard to answer straightforward. But let me try to give you just a second of background, and that is there's three components to the Army. There's the operational Army, which fights the wars. There's the institutional Army that generates the force, and we have this large overhead account -- when you're in neither one of the other, you're in this overhead account called the TTHS, the Transient Trainee Holding Students. It's probably the world's largest overhead account. So those three components add up in FY '04 to approximately 482,400. So that's a baseline that we established in the FY '04.
Our plan -- our strength plan is to grow the operational Army from 315,000 -- which was a subset of the 482,000 -- the 355,000 -- and this is again over the future year defense plan to FY '11 to -- through mil to civ conversion to reduce the number of soldiers in the institutional force by about 30,000 -- from -- which, 110,000 to about 80,000, and then to better manage the TTHS account for about 10,000. So if you look at the bookends, our plan is to start out with 482,400 and in FY '11, because of the dynamics of when you can add and when you can subtract and when you can convert, to end at 482,400. So in the interim years, we're going to grow above the 482,000 because we're going to do the operational Army near term, and we're going to convert the institutional Army long term. So you're going to see an increase and then a slow decrease over the future year's defense. That is the -- so we're going to grow that part of the Army that fights.
Calls to increase our combat units by adding new soldiers ignores that this is not the only way to gain manpower for new units. A common number floated for the past several years is that we need 40,000 more troops.
Well, by reducing the institutional Army by 30,000 and reducing the number of troops not in units for a number of reasons (in jail, in school, in hospitals, and in between stations), we are getting the 40,000 additional troops for combat units (the operational Army) that so many have called for.
Indeed, I've long supported a larger end strength, first calling for 40,000 troops for two new divisions (six brigades); and later, calling for eight separate brigades with the same manpower addition to get the units in action faster. But then I accepted that it would be wise to let the Pentagon try to get the additional combat units through this method.
We are adding nine brigades, remember, to the active component using this method. Deployable units is the bottom line, is it not? What's the harm of first moving troops from unneeded positions or increasing the efficient use of what we've got? If this isn't sufficient, I'll go back to calling for a larger Army.
Anyway, this short description should be on the fingertips of anybody discussing why we should add to the end strength. We should be discussing adding combat power and deployable units, and that is not the same question as adding end strength. At least not yet.
