really, for the army leadership, what's most important is, not the forward 90 but the rampdown to make sure we do not put ripples in the force and we have the ability, we have reversibility. if something happens between now and the next five, six years as we do this rampdown, that we have the capability to reverse that and bring that back up. there are many things we can do for it, and so we can start to put a lot of our mid-grade majors and lieutenant colonels back into the regenerating force. we need to pull them out, we can do so. it's just the amount of risk that the army leadership will want to take as we start to do the planning for this. >> the involuntary separation, ballpark proportion you might require for that? >> i wouldn't -- i would probably not even estimate, because, again, you're going to have retirements. there are so many tools in the tool kit. we can do retirements. can you do early retirements. you can assess, assess less. you can -- you can extend promotions. there are so many things we can do, but the key is we really want to put that minimal stress on the force

i was wanting to hear a little bit more about the importance of a rampdown and attrition, but i think, general, you mentioned that that five-year plan is so important to what we're doing to be able to keep the best of the best. also i wanted to talk more about equipment and not -- and one of our readiness hearings a while back we were discussing about where do we go with equipment. how tied down are we to equipment we might have versus what we think we might need. and some of the future challenges we have. so the two questions i want to zero in on. i'm going to be spending quite a bit of time next week with a lot of our reserve and guard components in north carolina. just what do yaw all anticipate the role of the guard reserve being, and how we're going to balance that out towards where the challenges we have. >> i'll take that first. in terms of the guard. the lessons we have learned here is that we have to have a total army. we have to have certain capabilities but we have to have ready capabilities in the reserve component for us to be successful as an army. especially as we conti