As the war in Afghanistan winds down, US soldiers will be spread thinner and must be ready to perform a wider array of missions, the new US Army commander in charge of training and providing troops for the wars said on Monday.
General David Rodriguez, who took over as head of US Army Forces Command on Monday, said that as troops withdraw from Afghanistan, one brigade might have to take over where two have been working. And he said they must be trained to coordinate and use the high-tech surveillance, communications and command and control systems that are flooding into the war zone.
“I don’t think we can afford to have a bunch of tailored forces for different things,” Rodriguez said in an interview just before he took over his new command.
“That’s why we’re going to have to be able to operate across the full spectrum of conflict and use the tools and apply them in the right way,” he said.
VETERAN
A veteran of more than 40 months in Afghanistan over the past four-and-a-half years, Rodriguez takes over Forces Command as the army faces a difficult future. US President Barack Obama’s administration and a fractious US Congress are wrangling over hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to the Pentagon budget that could slash programs and force deeper reductions in the size of the armed forces.
Already, the army is set to cut about 50,000 soldiers by 2016, trimming the force back to about 520,000.
US Army Forces Command, newly located at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is the largest US Army command and is responsible for training and preparing soldiers for battle, with deployments to more than 30 nations, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
Looking into the future, Rodriguez said he needs to be able to provide the trained and ready forces that commanders at the warfront need to meet a diverse threat.
The US Army of tomorrow, he said, will have to be more flexible and adapt to many situations, from conventional warfare and deadly counterinsurgency campaigns to training missions that can help an emerging nation learn to protect itself.
HYBRID ATTACKS
Any future enemy will launch a hybrid attack that could involve of host of tactics, including chemical warfare, car bombs and cyberattacks. And the army’s leaders, he said, will have to adjust and “switch between high-tempo offensive operations to a defensive operation to a stability operation to a humanitarian operation.”
Soldiers today must be trained not only on how to use their weapons and conduct operations, but they must also master an ever-expanding array of high-tech intelligence, surveillance, communications and other equipment.
That will be particularly important, Rodriguez said, as forces shift to the hotly contested eastern border region of Afghanistan, where the rugged terrain and often isolated tribal communities force a greater reliance on long-range observation, a stronger link between manned and unmanned surveillance equipment and dependence on a fragile human intelligence network.
“In my first 20 years in the army we probably got about 20 to 30 new systems,” Rodriguez said. “In 15 months [in Afghanistan] when I was a division commander, I got 172 new ones.”
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