The US Army released a white paper a few months ago laying out their latest reorganization, in which they plan to cut a net 24,000 positions out of the force structure.
Let's walk through it.
First of all, it's not a pure cut: the Army is adding 8,000 jobs and cutting 32,000.⬇️
The additions largely relate to rebuilding basic air defense capability and finishing construction of the Army's five "Multi-Domain Task Force" brigades. The former is wise, although the US Army's portfolio of air defense systems remains woeful - for instance, the "new" M-SHORAD is a glorified Avenger, a system which has served as little more than Lancet fodder in Ukraine. There is nothing in the pipeline to my knowledge that will fill the critical "mid-tier" air and missile defense gap that the Russian Buk and Tor systems currently live (and do so much essential battlefield work) in.
The MDTF is a strange beast - it's essentially a holding bucket for theater-level fires and air defense capabilities that look an awful lot like what the Navy would want out of the Army if war were to kick off against China in the Pacific. Not a bad concept per se, although some of the systems - particularly the hypersonic missile - don't work well. Given the Army's ostensibly new emphasis on high-end war I'm confused by the decision to build out a bunch of separate brigades with corps capabilities and then not associate them with the various corps.
Now for the cuts. Beyond some efficiencies, these largely came from gutting significant capabilities out of Brigade Combat Teams. There were three big cuts made:
1. They got rid of Brigade Engineer Battalions in favor of presumably having a single engineer battalion at the divisional level. I note that the white paper misleadingly claims the BEB was part of some "counterinsurgency-based" force structure. BEBs were introduced to BCTs during the 2015 reorganization after the US Army had explicitly rejected large-scale counterinsurgency as a future mission. They were intended to enable BCTs to maneuver across the high-end battlefield with breaching, gap-crossing and additional route-clearance assets.
Ergo, this makes BCTs - and the division as a whole, which is apparently now supposed to be the Army's basic tactical unit - considerably less capable than previously. I believe this move was taken purely as a result of the recruiting crisis due to difficulties in getting people to sign up to be sappers.
2. Once again citing "counterinsurgency force structure," they're getting rid of cavalry squadrons (for my foreign readers, reconnaissance battalions) in most light infantry and Stryker-motorized BCTs. Claiming these organizations were intended to do COIN is even more ridiculous than claiming the BEBs were - brigade cavalry squadrons go all the way back to the original Brigade Combat Team reorganization around 2004, based on force planning from the 1990s. As is well known, the Army institutionally sneered at the thought of doing COIN at the time. These organizations are intended for high-end combat.
Thus, light and medium BCTs are going to be far less independent of Division than previously given they're going to have few reconnaissance assets of their own - assets that were designed to be used in conventional, linear battle. As with the engineers, I suspect this was not driven by rational force design decision but rather by the recruiting crisis - I'm guessing it's quite difficult to get people to sign up to be cav scouts these days.
3. They're getting rid of the antitank companies in light infantry battalions and downgrading them to platoons. Not kidding. These, also, are not some COIN thing (my illustration aside, antitank teams aren't the most useful asset for winning over the local populace), they've been a part of American infantry battalion organization for a very long time. Again, this was likely a move made because of infantry recruiting shortfalls rather than any tactical requirement given the self-evident need for large amounts of antitank weapons to fight, eh, basically anyone these days.
Now, the ostensible counterweight to this is the fact the light units are going to be getting M10 Booker light tanks at a rate of one battalion per division. The problem is that this is (1) still less firepower given that any given brigade can now expect to have two "heavy direct fire" company-equivalents instead of three; and (2) the M10 is a vehicle the size of a small barn with a bad gun and worse armor. Coming back to recruitment, tank units are also a lot lighter on manpower than infantry ones!
The upshot of these cuts within the BCTs are that "new" BCTs - particularly on the light end of the force structure - will be considerably less capable than their predecessors and will now be reliant on Division for engineering support, reconnaissance, and even some augmentation of maneuver assets - and there will now be fierce competition for these assets within the Division because there's going to be a lot less of them to go around. This is actually going to change how the US Army fights on the brigade and divisional level pretty significantly because now Division is going to have to do a lot of stuff for the BCTs that they could previously be trusted to handle independently.
Other cuts include reductions within the Security Force Assistance Brigades (with Afghanistan long over, expect these advise and assist units to be put out to pasture in the near future) and a rather surprising and long-overdue slash of some 3,000 positions in SOCOM - an organization that did grow bloated over the War on Terror and its long aftermath.
As a final aside, I'm getting rather amused by the Army brass continuing to blame counterinsurgency for the service's woes. The Army was very focused on doing COIN for basically a five-year period from 2007 to 2011. Prior to that the Army despised COIN, to our considerably chagrin in Iraq and Afghanistan. After that time period, the Army - at least ostensibly - was actively moving away from the COIN mission and back into "big war."
Bluntly, the US Army has been explicitly out of the COIN business for a decade now and the service's leaders need to find a new whipping boy to blame their woes on.
Let's walk through it.
First of all, it's not a pure cut: the Army is adding 8,000 jobs and cutting 32,000.⬇️
The additions largely relate to rebuilding basic air defense capability and finishing construction of the Army's five "Multi-Domain Task Force" brigades. The former is wise, although the US Army's portfolio of air defense systems remains woeful - for instance, the "new" M-SHORAD is a glorified Avenger, a system which has served as little more than Lancet fodder in Ukraine. There is nothing in the pipeline to my knowledge that will fill the critical "mid-tier" air and missile defense gap that the Russian Buk and Tor systems currently live (and do so much essential battlefield work) in.
The MDTF is a strange beast - it's essentially a holding bucket for theater-level fires and air defense capabilities that look an awful lot like what the Navy would want out of the Army if war were to kick off against China in the Pacific. Not a bad concept per se, although some of the systems - particularly the hypersonic missile - don't work well. Given the Army's ostensibly new emphasis on high-end war I'm confused by the decision to build out a bunch of separate brigades with corps capabilities and then not associate them with the various corps.
Now for the cuts. Beyond some efficiencies, these largely came from gutting significant capabilities out of Brigade Combat Teams. There were three big cuts made:
1. They got rid of Brigade Engineer Battalions in favor of presumably having a single engineer battalion at the divisional level. I note that the white paper misleadingly claims the BEB was part of some "counterinsurgency-based" force structure. BEBs were introduced to BCTs during the 2015 reorganization after the US Army had explicitly rejected large-scale counterinsurgency as a future mission. They were intended to enable BCTs to maneuver across the high-end battlefield with breaching, gap-crossing and additional route-clearance assets.
Ergo, this makes BCTs - and the division as a whole, which is apparently now supposed to be the Army's basic tactical unit - considerably less capable than previously. I believe this move was taken purely as a result of the recruiting crisis due to difficulties in getting people to sign up to be sappers.
2. Once again citing "counterinsurgency force structure," they're getting rid of cavalry squadrons (for my foreign readers, reconnaissance battalions) in most light infantry and Stryker-motorized BCTs. Claiming these organizations were intended to do COIN is even more ridiculous than claiming the BEBs were - brigade cavalry squadrons go all the way back to the original Brigade Combat Team reorganization around 2004, based on force planning from the 1990s. As is well known, the Army institutionally sneered at the thought of doing COIN at the time. These organizations are intended for high-end combat.
Thus, light and medium BCTs are going to be far less independent of Division than previously given they're going to have few reconnaissance assets of their own - assets that were designed to be used in conventional, linear battle. As with the engineers, I suspect this was not driven by rational force design decision but rather by the recruiting crisis - I'm guessing it's quite difficult to get people to sign up to be cav scouts these days.
3. They're getting rid of the antitank companies in light infantry battalions and downgrading them to platoons. Not kidding. These, also, are not some COIN thing (my illustration aside, antitank teams aren't the most useful asset for winning over the local populace), they've been a part of American infantry battalion organization for a very long time. Again, this was likely a move made because of infantry recruiting shortfalls rather than any tactical requirement given the self-evident need for large amounts of antitank weapons to fight, eh, basically anyone these days.
Now, the ostensible counterweight to this is the fact the light units are going to be getting M10 Booker light tanks at a rate of one battalion per division. The problem is that this is (1) still less firepower given that any given brigade can now expect to have two "heavy direct fire" company-equivalents instead of three; and (2) the M10 is a vehicle the size of a small barn with a bad gun and worse armor. Coming back to recruitment, tank units are also a lot lighter on manpower than infantry ones!
The upshot of these cuts within the BCTs are that "new" BCTs - particularly on the light end of the force structure - will be considerably less capable than their predecessors and will now be reliant on Division for engineering support, reconnaissance, and even some augmentation of maneuver assets - and there will now be fierce competition for these assets within the Division because there's going to be a lot less of them to go around. This is actually going to change how the US Army fights on the brigade and divisional level pretty significantly because now Division is going to have to do a lot of stuff for the BCTs that they could previously be trusted to handle independently.
Other cuts include reductions within the Security Force Assistance Brigades (with Afghanistan long over, expect these advise and assist units to be put out to pasture in the near future) and a rather surprising and long-overdue slash of some 3,000 positions in SOCOM - an organization that did grow bloated over the War on Terror and its long aftermath.
As a final aside, I'm getting rather amused by the Army brass continuing to blame counterinsurgency for the service's woes. The Army was very focused on doing COIN for basically a five-year period from 2007 to 2011. Prior to that the Army despised COIN, to our considerably chagrin in Iraq and Afghanistan. After that time period, the Army - at least ostensibly - was actively moving away from the COIN mission and back into "big war."
Bluntly, the US Army has been explicitly out of the COIN business for a decade now and the service's leaders need to find a new whipping boy to blame their woes on.
The white paper itself: api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads…
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