Experts Say Army in Crisis

[unhappycamper]

Experts Say Army in Crisis
November 20, 2008
DoD Buzz|by Greg Grant

The influential Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank, recommends that the Army cut its planned force expansion of 65,000 new soldiers and comes mighty close to saying the service should axe its prized Future Combat Systems modernization program. The report (.pdf) was authored by renowned Army analyst Andrew Krepinevich and released at a conference this week in Washington, D.C.

Krepinevich's report is titled "An Army at the Crossroads." But a more appropriate title would have been an "Army in Crisis." In the report he writes: " risks a catastrophic leadership failure of a kind not seen since the late stages of the Vietnam War, a failure that took the Army over a decade to repair."


His central message is alarming: the quality of the Army's soldiers is in sharp decline, from enlisted personnel to NCOs to officers. It's a "particularly discouraging" trend for the Army as it is happening despite the service's "increasingly aggressive" use of financial incentives including bonuses and a salary increase of 33 percent between 1999 and 2005.

The Army has lowered standards to fill recruitment quotas, including weight and body fat restrictions, number of high school graduates and is allowing in more recruits with moral waivers. Krepinevich sees troubling signs of a repeat of the Vietnam era "shake-and-bake" sergeants, with the widespread promotion of inexperienced enlisted soldiers ill suited to the challenge of leading small units in combat.

The officer corps is also dropping in quality. Of the nearly 1,000 cadets from the West Point class of 2002, 58 percent are no longer on active duty. The Army is forced to pull soldiers from the ranks who have not graduated college and send them to OCS. Today, over 98 percent of eligible captains are promoted to major. The number of involuntary "stop loss" extensions has increased, by 43 percent between 2007 and 2008. Nearly half of those affected are NCOs.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/news/article/experts-say-army-in-crisis.html?col=1186032369115



uhc comment: Here's the 96 page report --> http://www.csbaonline.org/4Publications/PubLibrary/R.20081117.An_Army_At_The_Cro/R.20081117.An_Army_At_The_Cro.pdf