Part 1, reforming the U.S. Army

This is the start of a multi-part series where I will suggest a force structure that will make the U.S. Army affordable, sustainable, deadly and ready.

This new force structure will be something a joint combat commander will ask for with confidence.

First off we are going to start out with the famous 82nd Airborne Division. It will become a light, highly deployable security division that can be dished out on a rotation method by regimental combat team. I have seriously hacked up its current organisation below. Gone are the brigade combat team. They are replaced by a regimental combat team.

The 4th BCT was going anyway. So that is easy. The aviation brigade is gone. The regimental combat team will have 3 infantry battalions and not two. The artillery regiment, spread over 3 RCTs will be very light. I suspect mobile 120mm mortars.

Companies and battalions will have more built in logistics and service support instead of separate battalions. Not on the chart is the possibility of adding an engineer battalion where 1 company is in each of the RCTs.

Vehicles will be primarily MRAPs of all sizes.

Missions for the division will be mostly security operations and non-high-end threat scenarios (occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan being an example).

It is likely that only one RCT will be deployed at a time with one getting ready to deploy and one having just returned to keep the cycle going.

Manning will be a bit different. Majors will be battalion commanders. Lt. Colonels will be basically the Exec for the Regimental commander which will be a Colonel.

Training will be held to the basics so to have realistic readiness requirements. Also, the goal here will be to have a high turn-over of enlisted E1 thru E-4. The idea being that if more of these units need to be stood up in times of crisis, that training, readiness and combat operations will be built around getting a soldier up to speed right out of basic as soon as possible. People don't want a draft. But note how many soldiers we got up to speed in a very short time to do patrols and kick down doors on bug hunts from 2001 until now.

Note: this is done with full respect to the 82nd, and its' fine heritage, however some hard choices have to be made. In my plan "airborne" is not going away; just changing.


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