With budget cuts promising to hit the U.S. Army harder than the other military services, Army senior leaders are saying they will not repeat history and keep people at the expense of scaling back training or upgrading soldiers' equipment.
"If you protect people, but you take away from training and you take away from modernization, then you have a whole bunch of people in your force that aren't trained and don't have the most modern equipment," Gen. Peter Chiarelli, vice chief of the Army, said in an interview at the Pentagon. "When you go to use them, it costs soldiers lives on the battlefield."
Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, agrees with Chiarelli that the different pieces of the Army’s budget need to be reduced proportionately.
“A hollow force can mean units without enough people, people without enough training, people without enough equipment, units without enough equipment, etc.,” he said.
In a July report, Harrison outlined five “key levers of control” that the Defense Department could manipulate to meet its new budget constraints: force structure, end strength, compensation and benefits, readiness and training, and weapon systems.
“The key to getting the right balance is using an evidence-based approach,” he said. “You don’t want to guess at these things.”
The Army needs hard data from controlled experiments to support its strategic choices on everything from training to pay.
“What level of pay and benefits do you need to attract and retain high-quality people? What is the right mix of cash versus deferred compensation?” Harrison said. “There are a lot of things the military can and should be doing to collect data and make sure they get this right.”