Which, considering that the Obama administration is simply assuming we won't need to fight a land war in the near future, is a wise move in the appropriations war.
But if we aren't going to be involved in any large land wars (as the administration assumes for budget purposes), being the first Army is no great place to be in the appropriations war.
So it seems that the Army is trying to be a second Marine Corps involved in expeditionary missions (for some reason, the link to the original web site is dead):
Odierno said the Army will go from a force that is forward-deployed to one that will rotate from the United States to hot spots. He said forces in the United States would be regionally aligned for contingencies and stocks would be pre-positioned.
Regionally aligned units are a change from having general purpose forces to those that are assigned to specific regions much as special forces groups are. Since the regionally aligned units are designed, in part, to take up the slack of training allied troops to free up special forces who traditionally did this for combat missions, this makes sense:
We have learned many lessons over the last 10 years, but one of the most compelling is that – whether you are working among the citizens of a country, or working with their government or Armed Forces – nothing is as important to your long term success as understanding the prevailing culture and values.
Before the most recent set of conflicts, it was generally believed that cultural awareness was only required in select Army units, such as Special Forces or Civil Affairs. Recent history has made clear that we need expanded levels of cultural and regional awareness in all Army units. So, in the simplest terms, regionally aligned forces are Army units and leaders – Brigades, Divisions, Corps, and support forces – who focus on a specific region within their normal training program by receiving cultural training and language familiarization.
AFRICOM, for example is getting an early brigade that is regionally aligned:
In 2013, we will align a brigade with U.S. Africa Command. Missions will be conducted primarily by small units from within the brigade, who will deploy to select locations to support small-scale security cooperation activities and annual military exercises. Brigade Soldiers who are not deployed will continue to train both for U.S. Africa Command requirements and for emergent tasks.
While the bulk of the brigade trains normally for combat, detachments (which could include attached reservists, I assume) will be sent to Africa for training missions.
But it makes sense only so far, if you ask me. If we start dividing up all our Army's brigades and aligning them with specific theaters, we pretty much abandon the idea that we must be ready to pool half of our active Army units to fight an Iraq-sized war someplace as we used to with the major theater war (and earlier: major regional contingency--or conflict, depending on who you asked) planning assumption. Sure, I assume good-sized chunks will be aligned with Korea or the Middle East, but will it be enough to fight a war the Army is told it doesn't need to plan for? I eagerly await the regional alignments list.
If the Army is just a big pool of troops to generate rotations of small Army Expeditionary Units to be a quickly deployed to specified regions for training or crises, won't we have two ground forces designed to win battles? If so, who wins our wars? I mean, if our enemies don't cooperate with our administration's assumption about not needing to fight wars, we might need one Army.
