Odierno Fleshes Out Pacific Strategy, Afghan Advisory Mission

WASHINGTON, Feb. 21, 2012 — The Army will remain strong in the Pacif­ic to reflect the increased empha­sis on the region, the Army chief of staff said here today.

The Army already has a strong pres­ence in the region, Gen. Ray­mond T. Odier­no told a Defense Writ­ers Group roundtable. 

“If you added up the num­ber of peo­ple, the Army has more peo­ple over there than the Navy and the Air Force,” he said. 

These num­bers will not drop despite over­all reduc­tions in the Army’s size, the gen­er­al told the group. “We will sus­tain what we have and then review how we do our busi­ness,” he said. “This issue over the past eight years has been that many of the forces in the region were used in Iraq and Afghanistan.” 

This means troops nom­i­nal­ly assigned to the region actu­al­ly fought in U.S. Cen­tral Com­mand, the gen­er­al explained. The 25th Infantry Divi­sion, for exam­ple, recent­ly returned to Hawaii after com­plet­ing its mis­sion in the Cent­com region, Odier­no said. 

This mod­el will change, he added. Going for­ward, if the Army must use Pacif­ic forces out­side the region, com­man­ders will replace that capa­bil­i­ty. “There will always be a base­line of capa­bil­i­ty in the Pacif­ic,” he said. 

But the num­bers tell only one part of the sto­ry, Odier­no said. The ser­vice will review pre-posi­tioned stocks around the world to ensure these are posi­tioned prop­er­ly in case of a con­tin­gency. In the Pacif­ic, the gen­er­al said, the most impor­tant aspect is to accom­plish mul­ti­lat­er­al train­ing, not­ing that he is work­ing with region­al Army chiefs to find ways to increase this training. 

These army-to-army con­tacts are impor­tant, Odier­no said. Sev­en out of the 10 largest armies are in the Pacif­ic, he not­ed, and 22 of the 27 nations in the region have an army offi­cer as chief of defense. “Us engag­ing with them to build rela­tion­ships will help us in the long run in the Pacif­ic,” the gen­er­al told the defense writers. 

Odier­no also talked about the “advise and assist” brigades that will deploy to Afghanistan short­ly, and said they will become more impor­tant for Afghan units in the future. The Army is putting togeth­er two of these brigades now, the gen­er­al said, and they will deploy with the num­bers of offi­cers and non­com­mis­sioned offi­cers need­ed to advise and assist Afghan nation­al secu­ri­ty forces. 

Most sol­diers in the brigades will be com­bat vet­er­ans and will under­stand what these Afghan forces need, Odier­no said. With the end of the U.S. mil­i­tary mis­sion in Iraq, he added, more forces are avail­able for the advise-and-assist mis­sion in Afghanistan. The gen­er­al told the writ­ers he expects the num­ber of advise-and-assist units to grow as the dead­line for turn­ing over secu­ri­ty respon­si­bil­i­ty to the Afghan forces approach­es at the end of 2014. 

Spe­cial oper­a­tions and con­ven­tion­al forces will work even more close­ly togeth­er to accom­plish this train­ing mis­sion, Odier­no said, and the Army forces will work with Marine advise-and-assist teams as well. The gen­er­al added that he sees no dupli­ca­tion of effort with spe­cial ops, the Marines and the Army pitch­ing in to train Afghan sol­diers and police. “There’s room for all of us to do this in order to sus­tain it for a longer peri­od of time,” he said. 

This shows the Army is flex­i­ble, Odier­no said, as Army brigades can “own ground,” con­duct coun­terin­sur­gency oper­a­tions, send a brigade to con­duct high-end oper­a­tions in Korea, all while being able to con­duct the train­ing and advis­ing mission. 

“That shows the flex­i­bil­i­ty of our orga­ni­za­tion and the kind of orga­ni­za­tion we will need in the future,” he added. “We are going to have a lot of diverse oper­a­tions to do.” 

Source:
U.S. Depart­ment of Defense
Office of the Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense (Pub­lic Affairs) 

Team GlobDef

Seit 2001 ist GlobalDefence.net im Internet unterwegs, um mit eigenen Analysen, interessanten Kooperationen und umfassenden Informationen für einen spannenden Überblick der Weltlage zu sorgen. GlobalDefence.net war dabei die erste deutschsprachige Internetseite, die mit dem Schwerpunkt Sicherheitspolitik außerhalb von Hochschulen oder Instituten aufgetreten ist.

Alle Beiträge ansehen von Team GlobDef →