Army, Marine Corps struggle with mandate to expand

The Bush administration's plan to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps by 92,000 troops over the next five years is running into trouble.

In January, Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed adding 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines to bring the Army's total to 547,000 troops and the Marines' to 202,000. The idea was to relieve pressure on today's overstressed ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and to better equip the military to deal with similar unconventional wars in the future. The move, designed to provide six more combat brigade teams and their support units, complements President Bush's order late last year to boost U.S. troop strength temporarily for the current "surge" in Iraq.

Now, nine months later, the services are clearly struggling with the expansion, and there are signs that the effort may face serious problems. Although Army leaders announced last month that they will meet Gates's targets by 2010 -- two years sooner than the secretary called for -- outside analysts say that the numbers belie such optimism. The Army fell short of its monthly recruiting goals in May and June, and it has begun lowering standards for new entrants in an effort to fill the gap. It also is paying unprecedented bonuses -- as much as $35,000 -- to retain midlevel officers and sergeants.

Moreover, the plan has set off a heated debate about the implications of such an increase for the longer run. With the expansion expected to take several years to complete and with some troop drawdowns likely in Iraq, will the kind of force structure that the military needs have changed markedly by the time the larger force is in place? Should the Army try to provide both combat troops and new units specially trained for counterinsurgency operations and nation-building? If so, should it reduce its long-standing focus on tanks and artillery? Finally, can the service meet its recruiting goals with an all-volunteer Army, or will the nation be forced to reinstate the draft?

Few people dispute that the overall increase is needed. "The Army is absolutely committed to the max," says retired Col. Don M. Snider, a former scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and now a political scientist at West Point. "The ability to continue to send people for 12-month deployments is at this point unknown. The critical problem is midterm officers, such as captains and majors, who likely will be in short supply."

At the same time, the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has convinced Pentagon planners that U.S. forces in future wars are more likely to find themselves quelling bands of insurgents and training local military and police forces than wiping out legions of tanks and artillery. Such roles will call for greater numbers of soldiers trained in civil affairs, human intelligence-gathering, psychological warfare, foreign languages, military policing, and light-infantry operations, rather than for conventional armor and artillery units.

"Both the Army and the Marine Corps are at a crossroads," says Andrew Krepinevich, who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense-oriented think tank in Washington. "Over the past 50 years, if you asked what kind of a force you'd need to defeat our adversaries, it was always one that was oriented primarily to conventional war -- with tanks and artillery. But today, irregular warfare is the most likely threat -- and also the most difficult. Should the Army go back to preparing for conventional war when there don't seem to be any tank armies out there to fight?"

The Army's difficulties in attracting recruits are compounding the problem. The service has already begun accepting greater numbers of recruits who lack high school diplomas, have not scored well on Army aptitude tests, or have even been convicted of low-level crimes -- compromising the standards that the Army has spent years building up. The Marine Corps, blessed with an image as an elite organization, hasn't had any serious recruiting problems so far.

To be sure, the reduction in standards has been modest. Pentagon figures show that although only 79 percent of Army recruits in 2006 had high school diplomas -- down from a 90 percent level achieved in recent years -- the percentage of soldiers who failed basic training has dropped. Instances of bad conduct, unauthorized absences, and desertion are unchanged. "Overall, the force is still in very good shape by historical standards," says Michael E. O'Hanlon, the Brookings Institution's top military analyst.

Still, some analysts view the slide in standards as a warning bell. "So far, the Army has been able to maintain its current strength only by lowering its standards," says Andrew J. Bacevich, a military-affairs expert at Boston University.Yet reconfiguring the force so that it can deal more effectively with insurgents and also train local forces is "certain to carry even more-demanding requirements," he says."This is going to pose huge challenges in coming years."

The expansion is also proving to be expensive. A study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in April estimated that adding 92,000 troops between now and 2013 would boost the defense budget by $65 billion over the fiscal 2007 authorization, and that doesn't include potential extras, such as more schools for dependents and additional military hospitals. Moreover, the bill would come at a time when the Pentagon is facing outlays of $30 billion to $50 billion to replace the trucks, tanks, helicopters, Humvees, and communications equipment that have been used up or destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That said, the most critical question posed by the expansion plan concerns what kind of force structure the Army and the Marine Corps should build for future wars. Army Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, Gates's senior military assistant, argued in a paper this month, "Like it or not, until further notice the U.S. government has decided that the military largely owns the job of nation-building" -- no matter how hard the services have been avoiding it in recent years. "We need to accept this reality instead of resisting it," he wrote.

The next question is how to reshape the force. The Army's answer so far, outlined in a recent speech by Gen. George Casey, the service's chief of staff, is that the Army can handle both conventional warfare and counterinsurgency, provided it receives enough money. Gates has endorsed a proposal to give the Army $3 billion over the next few years to begin recruiting and equipping the extra troops. However, many outside analysts believe that Casey will still have to nudge the Army away from its largely Cold War armor-and-artillery makeup toward a force that contains more anti-insurgent and nation-building units.

Prying the Army leadership away from armor and artillery may prove as difficult as convincing the Navy's 1930s-era admirals that the sea service should de-emphasize battleships in favor of aircraft carriers. (It took World War II to finally change their minds.) "The fundamental problem is that you are asking the subculture that has dominated the Army for more than half a century to step aside in favor of other parts of the Army," Krepinevich says. "My response is, 'I've seen this movie before.' "

One compromise now being debated among defense gurus is a proposal by John A. Nagl, a defense scholar at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, to establish a permanent Army Adviser Corps that would train, equip, and deploy 20,000 combat advisers -- troops dedicated to working with foreign security forces. The corps would develop doctrine for 750 advisory teams of 25 soldiers each, organized into three 250-team divisions. Soldiers would be rotated into the new corps for a three-year tour, one of which would be spent overseas.

Boston University's Bacevich suggests that one sure way to solve the recruitment problem would be to reinstitute a small-scale draft, supplementing the current all-volunteer force with a small cadre of conscripts. One possibility: making military service an option in a broader program in which young people would be required to do a stint in some kind of "national service." "The big question is whether the all-volunteer force still meets the nation's security requirements," he says.

A draft would have its downside, Bacevich concedes. "Generally speaking, draftees aren't as highly skilled -- or as competent -- as volunteers," he says. "A draft would involve a broader spectrum of Americans with the military and would serve as a constraint for policy makers," who wouldn't have as much latitude as they do now to deploy U.S. troops. "But," he adds, "there's a need to begin debating the issue because the heavy lifting for future Iraqs is going to be done by the Army."