BCT Plan Change

The Pentagon has changed its plans to withdraw two brigade combat teams from Europe. Here's the explanation in a Defense Department statement:

Based on the administration's review, consultations with allies and the findings of NATO's new Strategic Concept, the department will retain three BCTs in Europe to maintain a flexible and rapidly deployable ground force to fulfill the United States' commitments to NATO, to engage effectively with allies and partners, and to meet the broad range of 21st century challenges.  This decision will be implemented in 2015, when we project a reduced demand on our ground forces.

The three BCTs remaining in Europe after 2015 -- the Heavy, Stryker and Airborne BCTs -- offer capabilities that enable U.S. European Command to build partner capacity and to meet interoperability objectives while supporting the full range of military operations, including collective defense of our NATO allies under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.

This BCT mix will be complemented by other capability enhancements, including the forward deployment of Aegis ships, land-based missile defense systems in Poland and Romania as part of the European Phased Adaptive Approach, forward-stationing of special operations aircraft, and a permanent aviation detachment in Poland.  Taken together, these measures will enhance and rebalance the U.S. force posture in Europe to make it more capable, more effective, and better aligned with current and future security challenges.

InsideDefense.com reported last month that with almost 10 years of irregular warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan under their belts, Army intelligence leaders have been reassessing what kinds of capabilities and force makeup the service should have to fight similar wars in the future. Specifically:

One key question is what the Army should do with its 42 quick-reaction capabilities amassed outside the regular acquisition process to plug shortfalls that programs of record were unable to fill. To Lt. Gen. Richard Zahner, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, the number represents the mismatch the ground service found itself in after initial operations began in Afghanistan in late 2001.

"Nine or 10 years of war told us that the programs that walked into this set were probably well-designed for the framework that we started with; they certainly didn't reflect the full range of requirements," Zahner said in a March 22 interview with Inside the Army.

A key yardstick in absorbing QRCs created since then into the Army inventory is the new concept of a "LandISRNet." Its central tenet is that all aspects of Army intelligence -- processing, communications, sensors and personnel structure -- must be seen as interdependent. Without this kind of treatment, "You wind up with a thousand points of light, but no consistent spotlight against those networks," Zahner said, referring to the way terrorist and insurgent formations are organized.

Additional guidelines for key intelligence capabilities in irregular wars have come from Defense Department studies that identified what Zahner called "driving capability sets." They include full-motion video, precision, geolocation, the exploitation of people and documents, source operations and "the internals of communications," he told ITA.

Additionally, ITA reports:

According to the three-star, a more flexible, rotational force pool would free intelligence personnel for missions at lower echelons -- a requirement also considered during an ongoing review of the Army's brigade combat team design. Possible organizational constructs include company intelligence support teams and so-called "multifunction teams."

The multifunction teams consist of 8 to 10 soldiers specializing in signals and human intelligence, according to briefing slides presented by Zahner at an industry conference in Washington last month. According to the slides, the construct envisions each team would have two Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All-Terrain Vehicles tricked out with communications technology, equipment for "exploiting" documents or cell phones, and biometrics capabilities. The teams also would have a "Portable Aerial Imagery Exploitation Supercomputer" and a see-through-walls radar capability, among others, according to the slides.

The goal is to "provide multi-disciplined intelligence collection, exploitation and limited analysis to generate actionable intelligence; time-sensitive detection, tracking and locating of key targets," the briefing states.