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Bosnian troops train with soldiers of the Maryland National Guard

WASHINGTON: As the Army urgently modernizes against Russia and China, which units get which new weapons first? How do they train? Where and how do they deploy?

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Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn

Those are the questions a new Regionally Aligned Readiness & Modernization Model (REARRM) is being developed to address, two generals told reporters this morning – and not all units will be treated the same. Instead, Army planners will align different units to different regions around the world and tailor their training and their equipment to that theater’s unique threats, terrain and war plans. That means more than soldiers studying different languages or liaising with different allies: An infantry brigade aligned to the Pacific, for instance, may get the latest tech before one aligned with Europe or Africa does.

Each unit will still be flexible enough, with a baseline of general-purpose training and equipment, to deploy wherever in the world it’s needed in case of major war. But the first units on tap to deploy to a given region will be drawn from the forces aligned to and optimized for that theater.

“You’ll have a cadre for each theater and contingency that is well-versed and deeply rehearsed in the war plans for those areas, and they will be early movers” in response to any crisis in that region, said Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, Army deputy chief of staff for operations (staff section G-3/7).

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An Army HIMARS launcher fires Lockheed’s prototype Precision Strike Missile for the first time in December, 2019.

There’s still a lot of details to define. “We’re working through rehearsals right now [and] throughout FY21,” Flynn said. Based on the outcome of those staff exercises, he said, “we intend to be implementing this across the Total Army” – active, reserve, and National Guard – “in FY22.”

That, not coincidentally, is the year before the Army begins fielding several new long-range missiles designed for great-power war. As these and other new technologies enter production throughout the 2020s, there’s no way the service can afford to buy enough of everything, fast enough, to give every unit the most modern kit at once. Given those budget constraints, which gear a unit gets, and when, will depend not only its type – infantry, tanks, artillery, and so on – but also on its role in regional Combatant Commanders’ war plans.

“Our most modern ABCTs [Armored Brigade Combat Teams] might be in one theater, our most modern IBCTs [Infantry Brigade Combat Teams] might be in another,” said Brig. Gen Peter Benchoff, who works for Flynn as Director of Force Management.

While Benchoff didn’t elaborate, historically Europe is prime territory for tanks, whereas the rugged jungles of the Pacific require lots of light infantry. Another regional variation that might make sense (although this is our speculation, not something the Army’s said): An artillery unit aligned to the Pacific might be among the first to get long-range anti-ship missiles, while artillery aligned to Europe might make do with shorter-range weapons that can only attack land targets.

The military’s geographical Combatant Commands (COCOMs).

From ARFORGEN to REARRM

The new model is a big departure from the past 20 years, when the Army was consumed by a single mission, counterinsurgency, in a single theater, Central Command. To manage that overwhelming demand, the service developed a system called Army Force Generation (ARFORGEN), which put most units on a predictable schedule: a “reset” period to transfer troops in and out of the unit and receive new equipment, a train-up period culminating in wargames at a Combat Training Center, and then a deployment to the war zone of nine to 15 months.

REARRM aims to take the ‘best practices” of ARFORGEN, particularly predictability for stressed-out soldiers and their families, and adapt them to an era of great-power competition, Flynn explained. So, under REARRM, each unit will get regular, predictable opportunities to train, modernize, and deploy, with about a third of the force in each phase at any given time.

The service is studying an 18-month cycle, in which a unit spends six months receiving new equipment, getting familiar with it, and reorganizing; six months of intensive training; and six months available for deployments. (That’s deliberately less grueling than the long tours to Iraq and Afghanistan). But the optimal length for each phase is still under study, and it may well vary from one type of unit to another: An armored brigade, for example, has a lot more heavy equipment than light infantry does, so it might need more time in the modernization phase as a result.

These are the tricky details the Army will work out in studies and staff exercises in the coming months. “In fact, just later this month I’m going down to Fort Bragg to work through… a wide range of scenarios that we want to make sure that we do deep dives on,” Flynn said. “[We need to] understand what the pitfalls are that we may not have surfaced in our modeling and our planning over the last couple of years.”