[IWAR] MIL US Army restructures

From: 7Pillars Partners (partnersat_private)
Date: Wed Jun 10 1998 - 09:13:06 PDT

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    Bleeding-Edge Redeployment?
     Wired News Report 
    
     3:15pm 9.Jun.98.PDT
     The United States is slimming down its heavy
     combat forces and equipping troops with digital
     technology to create a more agile army to face a
     growing range of threats in the 21st century.
     Based on the army's recent high-tech war-game
     record, it remains to be seen whether the brass
     and the grunts will be all they can digitally be. 
    
     The Army announced plans today to modernize
     and mobilize its lumbering heavy divisions with
     more computers and fewer tanks beginning in
     2000. Five years in the planning, the overhaul will
     cut the number of troops in each division from
     18,000 to 15,700. 
    
     Each of the six heavy and four light divisions will
     have more long-range rockets, better intelligence
     and air defense, and computers in vehicles and in
     soldiers' backpacks. Old-fashioned telephone and
     radio communications systems will be kept as
     back-ups. 
    
     New technology will also help forces fight hackers,
     who broke through firewalls in Army war games. 
    
     The first high-tech unit would be fielded from the
     Army's large Fourth Infantry Division by the end of
     2000. Remaining units would be ready by 2010. 
    
     General William Hartzog, the architect of the new
     design, said the revamped divisions will be
     "smaller, more agile, and more lethal" to handle
     threats ranging from terrorism to regional conflicts.
    
     "We need physical agility. We need smaller
     forces," he said. "We want to dominate a much
     larger battlefield." 
    
     The Army said divisions will be able to cover a
     battlefield of more than twice the size of an old
     division -- 72 miles by 120 miles compared with
     the current 60 miles by 60 miles. 
    
     Hartzog said the info-age fighting gear is designed
     to answer the three main questions soldiers and
     commanders ask in combat: "Where am I? Where
     are my subordinates? And where is the enemy?" 
    
     "I can tell you that in the operations that I have
     been in, in my career, they are the three things I
     knew least about most of the time," he said. 
    
     But one question the phalanx of
     camouflage-wearing military muckamucks weren't
     directly addressing at a Pentagon news
     conference today was whether their troops were
     up to the high-tech rigors of war. During an
     embarrassing high-tech drill last year,
     computer-equipped forces degenerated into
     information overloads, system crashes, and a
     puzzling increase in friendly-fire victims during
     battlefield exercises. 
    
     Even Hartzog, who is the commander of the US
     Army Training and Doctrine Command, admits he
     probably couldn't command a high-tech force
     since he can't beat his 18-year-old son at
      Nintendo.
    
    [MW: I have news for him--iwar isn't Nintendo.]
    



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