Tiered Readiness Returns In Army 2015 Budget; Not All Brigades Ready to Fight

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http://breakingdefense.com/2014/03/tiered-readiness-returns-in-army-2015-budget-not-all-brigades-ready-to-fight/



Soldiers train at the notoriously realistic National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif.

Tiered Readiness Returns In Army 2015 Budget; Not All Brigades Ready to Fight
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on March 04, 2014 at 5:10 PM

PENTAGON: Last year, the sudden budget cuts known as sequestration forced the Army to cancel crucial training for 78 percent of its combat brigades. The budget request for 2015, released today, buys back a lot of that lost readiness — but not all. In fact, the Army has now officially resigned itself to what it once said it would never do: a system of readiness haves and have-nots, in which some units are never fully trained. That’s something the Army Vice-Chief of Staff, Gen. John Campbell, admitted was on the table when he talked to me in August, but now “tiered readiness” is the official Army plan.

The 2015 budget creates an Army Contingency Force — whose size is still to be determined — whose units will be funded to receive the latest equipment and the full training program, whose climax is a brigade-sized wargame at a Combat Training Center. The same priority of training and equipment will apply to the Army’s existing Global Response Force, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne (plus reinforcement) ready to airdrop into crisis zones on short notice, and to the remaining Army brigade in South Korea.

But the rest of the Army won’t get to go to the famously realistic and strenuous Combat Training Centers. In fact, instead of the entire brigade being able to train together in complex maneuvers at a CTC, the have-not Army will only be able to train smaller sub-units of each brigade at their home bases.

“This budget request seeks to sustain readiness achieved in FY ’14 with priority for forces in Korea, the Global Response Force, and the [new] Army Contingency Force,” Maj. Gen. Karen Dyson told reporters at the Pentagon today. “But for those units that are not assigned to one of these categories…training is expected to reach only to company level in some cases and in some select cases to battalion level.” And that’s in the regular active duty force. “The [Army National] Guard and the Reserves are funded to individual crew and squad level,” Dyson said.