Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey has said rotational force packages will fit into the ArForGen model.
Under the plan, each package would have one corps headquarters, five division headquarters, 20 brigade combat teams and 90,000 enablers. Within those numbers are Guard and Reserve units and soldiers, evidence that those nonactive, Guard and Reserve soldiers will be formally transformed into a vital part of the deployable Army.
The three packages will be at varying states of readiness and availability as they move through the ArForGen model’s reset and train, ready and available pools, allowing the Army to deploy some or all or combinations of units based on the demands from combatant commanders.
This represents earmarking the 45 active brigade combat teams into one of the three packages and then adding 5 of the 28 National Guard brigade combat teams to the mix, cementing their role as an operational reserve.
You could also add two or three Marine regimental combat teams available each year using similar logic.
And it hopefully fills out supporting units so the so-called "high demand-low density" units (we have few of them but need them a lot) aren't going overseas too often.
This will work just fine as long as we aren't called on to deploy more than 22 brigade equivalents in a given year. If we have our choice, I'm sure that will be true. But enemies get a vote, too. Still, it is as good as you can do in an uncertain world. At least the plan eases the strain on our troops.
UPDATE: Actually, the 22 brigade equivalents are the force pool available and not what we could sustain in the field. I forgot that the rule (I think my memory is right on this) is that we need 1.15 brigades to keep a brigade in the field for a year. You need some extra for relief in place as the units are sent in or pulled out. So the 22 brigades could put 19 brigades in the field fairly continuously without the strain we faced in the latter years of the Iraq campaign.
