The U.S. Army is speeding up by a year plans to reduce its active-duty force to 450,000 from the current 490,000, according to Pentagon documents.
The service intends to announce on Thursday that it will draw down its force by 40,000 personnel by the end of September 2017, according to a draft news release. The Defense Department budget released in February had called for the same level of cuts by the end of September 2018.
“We had to make decisions based on a number of strategic factors, to include readiness impacts, mission command and cost,” Lieutenant General Joseph Anderson, the Army’s deputy chief of staff, says in the planned release.
While the Army may be accelerating its plans by a year, the reduction of 40,000 troops “is not news,” Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, said in an e-mail statement. “I think the Army is making it news because they want to get people worked up about it” as the Defense Department lobbies for relief from budget cuts.