Question 16: Ms. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA):
Summary: What do you think we really have right now as far as the capabilities of the Iraqi army and the military infrastructure?
(question summary by incap)
Play Audio
Response from General Wesley Clark
Transcript by Melange
First of all with respect to the Iraqi army, I’m not there and I’m not working with them and I don’t have any access to the reports. I can’t answer... What I can tell you is there’s a process that you have to look at and you have to set the process up right.
The process is to find the lower-risk areas, redeploy US troops away from those lower-risk areas, put Iraqis in and then check to make sure the insurgency’s not taking root underneath the Iraqis.
You have to have a feedback mechanism and what, if I could suggest, what members of Congress should be doing when they’re visiting over with our troops, they should be looking at this process.
It’s not where the oil level is right now, it’s the process you’ve got to check your oil level, whether you’ve got a gauge or not because this is a process that’s going to take years – to work and train Iraqi forces to put the Iraqi defense establishment up and so forth – unless the insurgency just melts away overnight – and there’s no indication of that. It’s still there, there’s still numerous incidents everyday, they’re mounting large-scale attacks so this is an active fight, it’s going to take a process to win it.
And what we should be looking at is ‘what is that process’ and ‘is it in place’. Process entails taking risks and it entails resourcing the training and resourcing an advisory effort and those are the appropriate gauges to look at to see if we’re moving in the right direction.
Like I say to…like I said earlier with respect to the conversation with Richard Perle, a lot of what’s going on in Iraq is going to be overshadowed, or potentially overshadowed, by what’s happening in the region and so everything we can do to free up our forces now is important. So taking some risk is justified.You asked me a second question also. Oh, on in-strengths
Question 17: Ms. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA):
Summary: If we need to increase our end strength, what would you suggest? What would that look like, how would we do it, what would the timeframe look like?
(question summary by incap)
Play Audio
Response from General Wesley Clark
Transcript by Melange
Right now the army is at the equivalent of about 650,000 people on active duty, counting the reserves. What were authorized, as I recall, something like 494 plus 30 percent…30,000 were on authorized overstrength.
Out of the active force, we think we’re going to be able to create 44 brigade level combat units under the army chief’s reorganization. To sustain 17 brigades in Iraq will take at least 51 combat brigades so we’d be 7 short. Each of those brigade groups would have maybe 3500 troops in it so you would say ‘ok, immediately that’s 30,000 troops’ but to sustain those troops, you have to have the follow-on echelons and that slice is double the forward slice, so you’d say – if you were going to size the force adequately and do it right - we’d probably need – beyond the 525,000 – probably, my figure would be about another 90,000 and that’s strictly…that’s ballpark old retired general’s back of the envelope scratching on this.That’s Army, that’s Army active – that doesn’t address what needs to be done for the reserve component.
Chairman Hunter asked early on about the overall shape of the army armed forces and the transformation effort and I do think it’s important to keep in mind that every military operation is unique.
When we set up the Paradigm for the modern armed forces in 1996 with Joint Vision 2010, we said we had to achieve full-spectrum dominance. That meant we had to be more effective than any conceivable grouping of adversaries at the high end – most intense combat - and throughout the range of combat. We knew we had problems – not at the high end but at the low intensity end because we hadn’t invested in it.
What this occupation duty in Iraq is forcing us to do is train and invest for mid-intensity and low-intensity conflict but we cannot forget the fact that we’ve got to have dominance at the top end too. So, there’s still a need for…there’s going to be a need for F-22 fighters…maybe not for 500 of them, but for F-22 fighters.
We need a…need for Navy network-centric warfare to make our forces work in the Pacific…and we need something like future combat systems for the Army to provide network-centric capabilities on the ground.
We need unmanned aerial vehicles; we need higher-performing systems in every service. So we can’t become so mesmerized by the problem of Iraq that we destroy our R&D or our procurement for the high-intensity spectrum.
This is the problem that this committee faces, obviously, in terms of resources because there aren’t enough and what I’m trying to suggest is the most urgent problem is to retain the capacity of the all-volunteer force, meaning the Army and the Marine Corps. We can’t lose that because that’s a three…that’s a thirty-year problem to try to restart that but we need to retain our grip on high-intensity combat also.
