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>> we discuss the war in afghanistan, modernization and the future of the army. good morning and welcome to this week in defense news. we are honored to have as our only guest, general george casey. he commanded u.s. and allied forces in iraq. let's take a look at the many challenges facing the army in this area of persistent conflict. at war continuously since 9-11, concerns are growing that the army is wearing out. of a force of 556,000, nearly half the army is deployed or stationed worldwide with 150,000 news in iraq and afghanistan. repeated year long combat tours

strained soldiers and their families. posttraumatic stress is widespread. soldier suicide rates hit record highs. young officers are quitting leaving a shortage of field grade leaders. they are promoting noncommissioned sphergs. the army added 26,000 troops to the ranks since 2004 with plans to add 26,000 more in the next three years. a full withdrawal from iraq should allow a certainly of 26,000 troops to afghanistan. will that be enough to rest weary combat units. general casey, welcome to the show. >> thank you. nice to be here. if you include national guard and reserves, the army is more than a million people. the brunt of the fighting is on the active duty force about half that size. since the army itself projects that you will have 100,000 or

more deployed for many more years to come, is the army big enough to handle everything thrown at it? >> we take take that 1.1 million person army and have continued access to the guard and reserves that we have today, i would say given what i know now, yes, it is. if we properly organize, train and equipped. we have been moving toward that. and i listened to some of the lead in to this. i know it's a big question in folks mind, how far can you stretch the army before it brakes. i have been saying since the summer of 2007 after i went around the army with my wife talking to soldiers, leaders, families trying to get a sense of where we were. i have been saying that the army is out of balance. we are weighed down by the comurnt commitmentments we didn't do the things we know we need to do to sustain the force in the long haul. we have been working for the

last 2 1/2 plus years on a plan to get ourselves back in balance by '11 and we made good progress. the big question i get is how can you absorb another 20,000 soldiers deployed given the state of the army? what people don't see is, one, we are 40,000 soldiers larger than 2007. we are going to continue to add another 17,000 here over the next two years. secondly, we have been transforming ourselves since 2004 from a very good cold war force to a force relevant for the 21st century. quick examples and i will stop here. but we reduced the army brigades by 40%. rereduced artillery by 70%. logistics, supporting units by 60%. we added -- doubled the amount

of civil affairs and psychological operations. >> but at base the question is whether or not you can increase the dwell time, the time between deployments. you want to increase that to a year. >> we want to increase it to two years. >> do you still have enough people and isn't this con continuing gent on too many wild cards like you will be finished up in iraq in time or you won't have another commitment suddenly rise up and bite you in the bottom. >> yeah, besides the growth and the transformation, the third element of why we can meet this is the draw down in iraq. we have about 100,000 soldiers in iraq today. it will be less than 50,000 by august of this year. and, so, what happens, when you lay the afghan deployment out over the iraq draw down, we don't have substantially more forced deployed than today. today we are continuing to built believed the time soldiers spend at home. the impact of the deployment to afghanistan is that we won't

meet the targets we hope to meet in 11. one years out, two years out for active force. one year, four years out for reserve. the reese will get there in 12. do you think that the 22,000 temporary increase would -- do you want those to become a permanent addition to the force? >> right now no but it's a hedge frankly. we will review this with the secretary of defense probably around the middle of this year. 40% of our budget is personnel. and if the draw down in iraq goes and we are out of iraq completely by '11, we probably can meet the commitments that i see coming at us with that 1.1 million person force. as you know, personnel costs not only the military but the civilian sector are rising.

we don't want a big hollow army. we want an army that is the right size that we can organize, train, equip and support the families with the money that we have. >> is there a fear that the army is breaking as some people fear it is and what are the metrics and signs that you are tracking to gauge the health of the force. >> this is something that we watch, as you can imagine, very closely. we do that with our eyes wide open. we know that these indicators that we see are lagging indicators. when i first came to this job, i called one of my predecessors, the chief in 1981 and said, shy, how do you tell? he said, george, you can't. there is a thin red line you will cross. as hard as you try, you will be on the other side when you realize it. we have been watching closely. we look at recruiting and retention which is

importanttive. it is i -- positive. it's a mixed bag. recruiting and retention are positive. >> the economy has been helping you out on that front. >> absolutely. >> the lead in mentioned suicides. there is no question that the suicide rates have continued to increase. we lost an average of about 18 soldiers more every year since 2004 to suicide. we have an active program to deal with that and we have another active program called comprehensive soldier fitness that we started in october for soldiers families and civilians to give them the skills and advance to deal with the challenges of these repeated deployments. so, we look at it very hard. we are stretched. i have just come back from a trip around the world visiting soldiers families, deployed, not deployed. i am amazed at the continued resilience and commitment of these soldiers. we watch carefully the scope of these deployments so that we don't break it. >> so, you are satisfied that

you neither have to get bigger nor in danger of breaking the force? >> again, based on where we are today, i believe we can handle the challenges with an army of 1.1 million dole soldiers. what we have been asked to do in afghanistan with the draw down in iraq, i believe that is executable without substantially increasing stress on the force. >> let me ask you one question, helicopters are critical in afghanistan. that is obviously just moving around the country, it's vital. you create a new aviation brigade to handle it. will you need to create another and where do you get the people to do that. >> aviation is one of the more stretched and demanded capabilities that we have. we have had an aviation study ongoing for about eight or nine months going. it has gone back and looked at the way we organized the

aviation brigades. we added more medical evacuations. we know a lot more. we made huge strides with unmanned systems. so, we are looking at integrating more unmanned systems into the brigades to leverage those capabilities that they have. we -- this is something that is tied to the '11 budget so i can't speak to specifics, but in general we could probably use another aviation brigade. it might not look like the ones we have today. we could probably use another telephone lesson the impact on the aviators. >> stay tuned. we will have more with general george casey in just a minute.

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we are back. let's talk about the future. what are some of the lasting lessons that you see from both the iraq war and the current war and how those lessons will shape the force of the future? >> that's a great question. this is something that we study very hard because we are conscious of our track record, frankly, not only as an army but continuing to fight the war. while we are learning and drawing lessons from iraq and afghanistan everyday. we have taken a broader view and looked at how conflict may be in the 21st century. you are seeing some of that in

iraq and afghanistan. we looked at lebanon in the summer of 2006. you had a terrorist organization operating inside one state supported by two other states fighting another state. >> with sophisticated weapons. >> exactly right. they had state of the art surface to air missiles. guided missiles. they had crews missiles. they had secure cell phones and computers and they got their message out on local television. that's a hybrid threat that is much more complex and difficult to deal with than the 8th guard tank army that i grew up. >> what does that mean in terms of how you are trained to equip and what are the kind of dangers that you need to be able to combat that. >> exactly. and back in february of 2008 we

published our first doctrine, a major revision of our doctrine since 2001. in that, we spelled out the main operational concept that no matter where we fight across the spectrum, army forces will use offensive, defensive and stability operations to achieve their results. this is a pretty fundamental change for us and has been a great internal debate within the army. when we started, we had the debate either conventional or regular war. we are saying, no, it's not. >> how hard is it to convey that point. anybody who knows -- >> very hard. >> armor and combined arms are inthe gral to the operations, in smaller number than division size or brigade size. >> it was a great debate within the army. when i looked at this, the way i expressed -- when i was a division commander in germany

in 2,000, if you asked me, general casey, where did you focus your training to be most versatile, i would have said if i could do con ven so shown -- conventional war, company do anything. but iraq, i don't think so. conflict in the 21st century is different than conflict in the 20th century. that is what we are preparing ourselves for. it's not something where you throw a switch and everybody goes i got it. we are debating it and discussing it in the schools, at every level. it's a process that we will be going through for a while. so, we are designing an army for versatility. if you think about it, the major organizing principle for the department of army and defense has been conventional war. >> against peer adversary. >> we may have to do some of that but that's not certainly the most likely thing we will

be doing. >> are the generation of leaders being bred in iraq and afghanistan better suited in some fashion to understand and incorporate the lessons than your generation? >> that's interesting. what i he tell the young captains and majors when i see them, i tell them you are so far ahead of where i was when i was in your rank in terms of your ability to understand warfare. you are way ahead of the game. they are combat seasoned veterans. i grew up in an army that had to relearn how to fight. we went through a tough period in the '70s and we had to build the war fighting skills back in the '80s. >> more questions than we have time. we will be right back. what is the future of the ground vehicles going to look like.

>> i'm back with general george casey. we are talking about modernization. secretary gates stripped a vehicle portion of the future combat systems out. you guys have been working on figuring out what you want the next generation of grounds vehicles to look like. what does the next generation need to look like? >> you are exactly right. we have been working hard on it since april. we had our own team looking at

it. we sought outside expertise to look at it. we brought in sergeants marks jurors, consultants based on experience in iraq and afghanistan. they told us they needed three things. one was protective mobility. two was adaptability and three was sit few asian nal awareness on the move. this is a fighting vehicle. it will be infantry fighting vehicle designed to operate from the ground up in an i-80 environment. we don't have anything like that. the -- it needs to have the under belly protection of an m wrap. the side protection of a bradley. the cross country mobility of a bradley and the urban mobility of a striker. >> and you need it to be adaptable so you can put mission packages on it. >> absolutely. that was the second point that they said it has to be adaptability.

the enemy will adapt to us. we have to have the ability to adapt. lastly, awareness on the move. they need the network. they need to be connected to understand what is happening around them. so, we are designing a vehicle that builds those three things into it. when do you expect to be able to, you know, shape the requirements and get a competition under way and when do you want to have vehicles on the ramp. >> when i started down this road, i said that i wanted the secretary of the army and i wanted a new vehicle on the street in five to seven years. and we are working toward that goal. i frankly think it will be closer to seven than five but we are committed to that. we have good support within the department of defense for that. i think you will see the specifics of this in february as the '11 budget is announced. >> we understand the '11 budget will include more money, 2 billion more for the army. have you figured out what to do

with the extra 2 billion you will be getting. >> you have to wait until february to find out the answer to that question. but the answer is, yes, we know where we need to put it if there is additional money. i'm not going to say that you are right on that, but i can't speak about the budget until it's released. what are some of your top procurement priorities. now that fcs is look he different, what are some of the things that are important issues for you to resolve from modernization standpoint. >> first, the ground combat vehicle is a major priority. the second thing you will hear us talk about is a brigade combat team modernization strategy, over which the combat vehicle is a part. basically as the future combat systems program was dissolved, we still kept elements of the program, the network and what we call a spinout. >> arguably the most important elements survived. >> exactly. what we had to do was

restructure that and put it into capability packages that we will use to upgrade and modernize everyone of our brigades. that is probably the second priority. go ahead? >> i was going to say, where do more -- do you need to buy, for example, more helicopters to satisfy lift requirements in afghanistan for example. >> we have enough helicopters to meet the additional requirements in afghanistan. as we talked about earlier, our aviation has some of the most stretched elements of the force. we probably could use additional aviation assets and you will see that again as the '11 budget plays out. >> does the humvee rank on the list of priorities for you? >> yes, but we are looking closely at all of the utility vehicle systems that we have. i'm sure people look at it and say you have humvee, m rats, strikers, bradley, tanks. what are you doing with this. we have to go back and -- we

already have a plan to incorporate the m wraps that have been procured into our force. so, we actually have an ongoing study to figure out what is the right mix of humvees and wraps. >> thanks very much. that's all the time we have coming up today. in the notebook, why less is often more in matters of intelligence.

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where you already save. well, actually, just a few rows over... in walmart's expanded electronics department. get unbeatable prices on new, fully activated verizon wireless, t-mobile, or at&t phones. they're a lot closer than you think. save money. live better. walmart. after 9-11, the nation's intelligence system was reorganized so officials would never again fail to connect the dots gathered by december par rate agencies. then a few weeks ago they missed again. a known nigerian man almost entered the united states with a bang after intelligence failed to connect the clues. as president obama explained it

was assist temperature mcfailure. post-9-11 intel reforms have been partly integrated. institutional, cultural and technical barriers limit the sharing of vital information. to be fair, it's not a simple job. much is collected and analysts looking for needles in highway stacks have foiled many past plots. in this game, almost is never good enough. no one designing an intel system from scratch would create the hodgepodge systems we have. we need fewer operations. making a change won't be easy. it's akin to repairing an airplane in mid-flight. we need to fix the problem with a sense of post-9-11 urgency before our luck runs out. thanks for joining us for this week in defense news, i'm vago muradian. you can watch this program online or e-mail me. i'll be back next sunday morning at 11:00. have a great week.