WASHINGTON (Army News Service) -- "What we want is to deter. Nobody wants to have a war. The only thing more expensive than deterrence is actually fighting a war, and the only thing more expensive than fighting a war is fighting one and losing one," said Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark A. Milley.
"This stuff's expensive, we're expensive, we recognize that," Milley said of the Army. "But the bottom line is: it's an investment that's worth every nickel."
Milley, along with the chiefs of the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, were on Capitol Hill, Sept. 15, to discuss budgetary issues with the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Regarding the current end-strength of the total Army, Milley said, the Army is properly sized for what it is doing right now: fighting terrorism and conducting counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and elsewhere.
In Afghanistan, for instance, he said the Army is continuing to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces to maintain stability there so that the government, the economy and security can be sustained and improved over time.
But the current situation will most certainly change, Milley told lawmakers.
"The risk comes if we have a conflict with a near-peer, high-end competitor," he said. "Those are contingencies the secretary of defense and others have talked about: China, Russia, North Korea or Iran; each of which is different, operationally and tactically, and would require different types and levels of force."
Milley said if one of those contingencies took place now, "our risk would significantly increase ... and if two of them happened at the same time, I think its high risk."
BUDGET FOCAL POINTS
Milley told lawmakers that the Army's short-term equipment modernization strategy will continue to focus on the "five key capability areas" that are currently considered lagging. Those areas include aviation, command and control of networks, integrated air and missile defense, combat vehicles, and emerging threat programs.
Near-term innovation efforts are focused on overmatch, mobility, lethality, mission command and force protection, with specific emphasis on systems such as vertical lift, directed energy weapons, missile defense or long-range precision fires.
For the long term, he said, the Army is looking for "balanced, predictable resources," and will continue making readiness the No. 1 priority.
Milley offered up as an example of the Army's readiness posture the suggestion that, due to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, armor officers of today, up to the rank of major, have had very little experience in maneuvering tanks against opponents. And artillery battalions, he said, have not fired battalion-level fires systems in 15 years.
"We have to rebuild that," he said. "It's going to ... take considerable time and effort on our part."
PREDICTABLE BUDGETS NEEDED
If sequestration returns next month, Milley said, another 16,000 Soldiers would have to be cut, and it would take much longer to rebuild the Army and lower risk.
The chief called for a sustainable and predictable budget.
"If all we're doing is planning things year-to-year, things like multi-year contracts are harder to do because (vendors) don't know if they can count on us" to pay for it, Milley said. When that happens, "the unit price goes up. So it's built-in inefficiency, it's built-in cost overruns, it's not a good situation."
IMPORTANCE OF RESERVE
"A significant chunk of the Army" is in the Guard and Reserve, Milley told lawmakers, who were anxious about possible cuts in their states.
"Bottom line is, they're indispensable to the Army in a sustained land campaign overseas," he said. "There's a lot of combat power in the Guard and a lot of combat service support, such as logistics units, in the Reserve. So the Army couldn't fight, feed itself, couldn't maneuver, couldn't conduct any sort of extended land campaign anywhere in the world without the Guard and Reserve. It's absolutely critical to what we're doing."
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