Friday, December 22, 2017

More Practice Makes Adequate

I've noted that America needs practice moving Army units to Europe from the continental United States. Shipping a brigade over has identified a lot of issues that need to be mastered to once again be proficient at this task. Now we need practice moving multiple brigades at once.

Indeed:

The U.S. Army is considering larger deployments to Europe in the coming years to test its ability to handle more than a brigade’s worth of troops and equipment, which would be needed should a crisis arise, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the outgoing U.S. Army Europe commander, told Defense News in a recent interview. ...

Hodges said he believes the Army is considering deploying an entire division in an exercise like the Reforger exercises conducted in Europe during the Cold War “where you have a combination of equipment coming over, but also troops coming over that would draw the pre-positioned [Army pre-positioned stock] equipment. We need to play with that, too, just like in Reforger.”

The brigade deployments were good practice. We need volume surge capacity.

And eventually troops in Poland with a REFORPOL capability like the old REFORGER.