Force Structure

During the last two fiscal years, the Army has reduced its active military forces from 540,000 to 495,000. A key issue is whether the Army's active end strength should be reduced to help pay for force modernization. Last year, Congress established an active Army military personnel end strength floor of 495,000 out of concern that further cuts could undermine the Army's ability to respond to two nearly simultaneous regional conflicts, as well as to deploy to operations other than war. This report reviews (1) the extent to which the Army's process for assessing its active and reserve support forces resulted in sufficient force structure to meet the requirements of the national military strategy; (2) whether the Army's streamlining efforts have identified ways to reduce Army personnel resources devoted to institutional functions; and (3) the feasibility of reducing active Army end strength, a matter that Congress will review when it debates future Army end strength authorizations.

GAO found that: (1) it does not appear feasible to have a smaller active Army support force at this time, but a smaller active combat force and institutional force may be possible in the future; (2) a smaller active support force today would certainly increase the Army's risk of carrying out current defense policy; (3) current initiatives being explored by the Army regarding its institutional force could lead to greater efficiencies and thus a smaller active force; (4) improvements in the requirements determination process for both support forces and institutional forces could provide greater assurance that the size and composition of the Army is appropriate to meet war-fighting needs; (5) on the basis of TAA 2003 results, the Army believes it can deploy sufficient support forces to meet the requirements of two nearly simultaneous major regional conflicts (MRC) with moderate risk; (6) because it lacks adequate active support forces and must rely on reserve forces that take more time to be readied to deploy, an estimated 79,000 support forces needed in the first 30 days would arrive late; (7) support forces needed for the second conflict would consist of only 12 percent active forces; (8) high reliance on reserves for use in the second MRC may entail risk if the second MRC occurs without warning, or if mobilization is delayed; (9) existing active support units are short another 19,200 required positions and some required support units exist only on paper; (10) TAA 2003 had some limitations and the Army's risk assessment depends largely on the assumptions and model inputs that were adopted for TAA 2003; (11) the Army used many favorable assumptions that, although consistent with defense guidance, understated risk; (12) the Army's recent efforts to streamline the institutional active Army by identifying better ways to organize and adopt more efficient business practices have identified up to 4,000 military positions that the Army plans to use to offset active support shortfalls; (13) the Army may reduce the number of major commands, which could result in some additional force savings in the future; (14) however, the Army's efforts to make its institutional force more efficient and potentially smaller are hampered by long-standing weaknesses in its process to determine institutional force requirements; (15) GAO's analysis indicates that the Department of Defense (DOD) has not supported its proposal to reduce the active Army to 475,000 by 1999 with sound analysis; and (16) DOD has an opportunity to explore these and other alternatives during its Quadrennial Defense Review.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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