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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