Gung - Ho but Slow:
Why the U.S. Army Is
Ill-Equipped to Move
Into Kosovo Quickly
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As Configured, Force Lacks
Required Combination
Of Swiftness and Strength
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'A Relic of the Industrial Age'

WASHINGTON -- Suppose President Clinton decided today that sending in ground troops was the only way to win the war over Kosovo.

The U.S. Army could fly several thousand lightly armed infantrymen to Kosovo fast -- where they would be vulnerable and unable to take on Yugoslav tanks. Or it could ship a lot of monster 70-ton main battle tanks to Kosovo -- in a couple of months.

But the Army can't do what many say is needed right now: Get a strong armored fighting force to Kosovo quickly, in time to halt the Yugoslav military's bloody offensive against the province's ethnic Albanian population.

Today's Army isn't structured to give the president that option. In fact, as many in Congress in recent days have begun to call for ground troops -- especially as the air war has done nothing to halt Slobodan Milosevic's aggression and civilian casualties have mounted -- Clinton administration officials counter that such action isn't only unnecessary, but that the troops simply couldn't get there fast enough.

'FUNDAMENTAL RESTRUCTURING'

"There has got to be a fundamental restructuring of the Army," concludes Sen. John McCain, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a Republican candidate for president. "The post-Cold War restructuring of the military has got to entail the ability to move forces rapidly anywhere in the world and, when they get there, to be able to decisively affect the battlefield equation."

As it happens, Army generals seriously considered reorganizing the service a few years ago so it would be faster, more agile, more flexible. The key change would have been to abandon the Army's basic structure of 10 combat divisions and instead shape it into about 25 "Mobile Combat Groups" of about 5,000 troops each.

Every combat group would be a complete package, some emphasizing artillery and armored vehicles, others attack helicopters. Each group would be light enough to travel fast, moving anywhere in the world in a week or two, yet strong enough to take on tanks once it arrived. What's more, the reorganization promised to halve the number of headquarters in the Army, producing savings that could be devoted to pay and training. At one meeting last year, a U.S. military briefer noted explicitly that this system would allow the Army to move 40,000 combat-ready troops into the Balkans in 28 days.

Instead, the Army right now is struggling to move 24 Apache helicopters, related artillery units, and a few thousand troops into Albania in two weeks.

Why?

A look at how the Army tiptoed up to radical reform and then shied away from it says a lot about the service's difficulties in adjusting to the post-Cold War world.

At the time the Army chose not to go down the path of reform in April 1997, its Gulf War victory, the Army's biggest success in more than 50 years, was still fresh in the minds of the service's leaders. And there were other reasons not to change: The Army's basic mandate is "to fight and win the nation's wars," and getting ready for small brush-fire wars could distract it from maintaining the sharp, tank-heavy force needed to win a land war in Korea or the Persian Gulf region -- both hot spots that loom as large as any in American strategic thinking. In fact, since the Gulf War, the Army has stepped up its efforts to "pre-position" thousands of tanks and other heavy equipment, both aboard ships and near likely hot spots, as a way of trying to be both heavy and fast at the same time.

A STRAINED SERVICE

Moreover, the Army of the 1990s has been continuously and unexpectedly busy -- first in the Gulf War, then in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia -- and that has made it harder to consider radical reform. Doing all that has strained the service, forcing it to do more with less as it shrank from 780,000 troops in 1987 to 492,000 a decade later. Many generals felt they and their troops had absorbed about as much change as they could take.

But now, in a situation where they can't move a lot of heavy troops quickly, some of those same generals are grappling with the question of how, if they are called upon to do it, they can get 40,000 troops and all their equipment to Kosovo. The most likely scenario would be to move 20,000 troops into Albania and about as many into Macedonia, and perhaps some to Hungary -- a process that would be slow, with clogged airports and ports posing endless difficulties.

The predicament has particular irony for Col. Douglas Macgregor, who is a top planner for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, running the alliance's Joint Operations Center as it grapples with the question of whether -- and how -- to send a ground combat force to Kosovo.

In late 1995, Mr. Macgregor, who as an armored cavalry officer played a major role in the key land battle of the Gulf War, took a big risk with his career and wrote a book recommending that the Army reorganize itself so it could move robust combat forces faster. (The book's title, "Breaking the Phalanx," alludes to the battles around 200 B.C. in which the more agile Roman legions smashed the once-invincible Greek phalanxes, helping establish Roman rule that would last for 500 years.)

Then a mere lieutenant colonel -- who in the Pentagon might be relegated to bringing coffee to the generals -- Mr. Macgregor argued that today's Army simply isn't configured to deal with today's world. The next time, he worried, the U.S. wouldn't be as lucky as it was in the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein delayed attacking American forces even as they spent six months massing in the desert.

Col. Macgregor's plan was to reorganize the Army into combat groups. Some would be "heavy," bristling with tanks and artillery. Others would be "light," relying more on helicopters. But all would be rapidly deployable. And while these groups would resemble the Marine Corps' "Marine Expeditionary Units," they would wield far more firepower. Most important, they would move by air transport, not by ship, as the Marines are designed to do.

Younger Army officers seized on the book, passing it around and discussing it in e-mails. Three Army officers studying at the Naval Post-Graduate School cited it as evidence that the Army as currently constituted is "a relic of the Industrial Age."

Soon, some senior officers became advocates of the book. The Army's top officer, Gen. Dennis Reimer, took interest in it and began mailing copies to other Army officers. He even made a point of reaching down several levels of command to have lunch with Mr. Macgregor, then posted to Fort Leavenworth.

Shortly after that meeting, in April 1997, Gen. Reimer effectively endorsed the book. "This is an interesting proposal, and worthy of a lot of deep thinking," he wrote in the regular, informal e-mail letter to his generals that he calls "Random Thoughts While Running." "I think most of us have recognized the need for strategic mobility."

Four weeks later, the Army's four-star generals -- its so-called board of directors -- gathered for their regular meeting at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. This time, most of the discussion focused on a possible redesign of the Army, Gen. Reimer recounted in a subsequent "Random Thoughts." Three possibilities were laid out. Should the Army adopt "Breaking the Phalanx" as its blueprint for the future? Should it stick with the division structure? Or should it choose an intermediate course that retained the big division but made the smaller brigade the Army's basic fighting unit?

Some of the half-dozen four-star generals at the meeting argued that the Army was simply too worn out from its recent campaigns to embark on a major reorganization. Others worried that Congress would grab the savings realized by the restructuring and prevent the Army from spending it on personnel and training; that, they thought, would result in an Army that was simply smaller and weaker.

Some said the division system had served the Army well for decades, and there was no reason to dump it now. A few simply dismissed Mr. Macgregor's ideas as typical of the armored cavalry way of thinking: overvaluing maneuverability while underestimating the importance of sheer firepower.

But when the meeting was over, it was clear that "Breaking the Phalanx" had been rejected -- for the time being. The consensus of the generals, according to insider accounts, was that the "Phalanx" Army was something that would come into being in a decade or two, as part of what the Army calls "The Army After Next." In the interim, the Army would stick with its division structure and make relatively minor adjustments.

As word leaked out of the rejection, disappointment among younger officers who had hoped that the Army was on the verge of a major cultural shift was "widespread," recalls recently retired Col. Richard Dunn. It became clear, he says, that "There was a definite generational gap here between senior and junior officers."

"What's the difference between `Jurassic Park' and the Army?" asked a colonel on the staff of the Joint Chiefs. The answer: "One is an amusement park dominated by dinosaurs. The other is just a movie."

Explaining the rejection to the rest of the Army, Gen. Reimer sounded almost apologetic. "There's a little caution in all of this," he told "Army Times," an independent newspaper. "The Army is a very conservative organization." Gen. Reimer declined to comment for this story.

Last fall, the Army announced plans to experiment with a "Phalanx"-like "strike force." But the plan has been met with skepticism by many in the Army, who say it is a pale imitation of Col. Macgregor's mobile combat groups. Among other things, it consists of only a headquarters, without troops. "It's a greatly crippled effort to address the issue," says Andrew Krepinevich Jr., an expert on military modernization issues for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank. Mr. Krepinevich worries that the Army, as currently structured, runs a high risk of becoming "strategically irrelevant."

As for Col. Macgregor, since writing his book he has been passed over three times in the selection for brigade command -- a virtual death warrant for his Army career, relegating him to staff jobs as a colonel for the remainder of his service.

Nonetheless, the colonel, who holds a Ph.D. in international relations, remains at the center of the debate over the future course of the Army.

Working as the top planner for Gen. Wesley Clark, military commander of NATO, Col. Macgregor helped devise NATO's attack on Yugoslavia. NATO insiders say the attack was restricted at first by the alliance's political leaders and only now is reaching the size intended from the start.

Meantime, the colonel continues to be a vigorous advocate of the ideas he espoused in "Breaking the Phalanx." But even if the Army had adopted his ideas in 1997, the Army's chief spokesman says, it still wouldn't be able to get forces quickly to Kosovo right now. "It would be impossible for the Army to adopt, reorganize, equip and train a structure proposed in the book `Breaking the Phalanx' in such a short period of time to make any difference for the current contingency," argues Maj. Gen. John G. Meyer.