ARFORGEN. What is it' The simplest answer of course is an acronym. ARFORGEN stands for Army Force Generation.
It affects more than just those serving in the Army. It affects the families, everyone who works on an installation and the surrounding communities.
Army Force Generation is the cyclic process of training a unit for deployment, deploying a unit, returning from deployment, reintegrating the Soldiers and families, resetting the units and starting all over again.
"Prior to the Global War on Terrorism, all units were measured and supposed to be at the same readiness level," said Lt. Col. Michael Getchell, 101st Airborne Division operations officer. "That gave senior leadership the option of picking a unit for a mission if a mission came down. With the Global War on Terrorism, the increase in the amount of requirements on the Army really invalidated that model. Not everybody could stay at the same readiness level there just weren't enough resources."
How does it affect more than just the Soldiers' ARFORGEN changed the way the Army does business. The change started with the Army's Transformation; creating modular brigade combat teams that could deploy individually. This meant entire divisions from one installation no longer needed to deploy together. Brigades could come together from across the globe, creating the forces needed for deployment. A community outside a military installation may no longer necessarily see all of the Soldiers in their area gone at one time.
"I know there were some businesses that closed when we left as a division in 2003 and we were gone for a whole year," said Getchell. "Nineteen thousand Soldiers and their families were no longer customers at those businesses. There was a little bit of a spread of the division from 2005 to 2006. This time much more so. There was still a period of time where a vast majority of the division was deployed, but it was a shorter period where a large group of Soldiers were gone."
The process of preparing and deploying troops also changed to give Soldiers more time before they had to be ready to deploy again. Getchell and Scott Heron, 101st Airborne Division Mission Support Element operations officer, explained that before Transformation and ARFORGEN, when Soldiers within the 101st deployed, they only received two weeks of leave once they returned and were expected to go right back to training and being able to deploy world-wide within 18 hours. There was the unknown of when and where they would deploy to next.
Soldiers now can expect to enter the reset pool once they return from a deployment. The reset pool is one of three force pools ARFORGEN is divided into; the others are the train and ready pool and the available pool. This pool typically lasts for approximately 180 days. It starts with arriving back home. The focus is on reintegrating Soldiers with their families, time to readjust and the duty day is usually very predictable and doesn't include collective training such as going to a maneuver live fire range. Toward the 60- to 90-day mark is when some Soldiers conduct permanent changes of station.
"From there you go into a rebuild phase," "From there you go into a rebuild phase," said Heron. "That's where you start to get all the new folks in. You start doing some individual training, still kind of a predictable duty day. But you're going after the business to prepare for moving into an intensive training phase."
ARFORGEN brought about an institutional change to how the Army conducts training. Forces Command and Training and Doctrine Command anticipated the need to change and implemented a new way Soldiers conduct some of their training. Instead of sending Soldiers away from their families for individual training and instead of sending entire units off to other installations for training, trainers are brought to the various installations. Soldiers spend less time away from their families and it also saves the Army money. It costs less to send a small group of trainers to an installation than it does to send a whole unit and all their equipment somewhere else to train.
The train and ready pool takes the next nine to 18 months for active component units. During this time, units receive any needed training, equipment and additional personnel they would need to take them to the available pool.
This is the pool where the process can be rough. If a unit was expecting a certain amount of time before their next deployment, yet mission requirements change and that time is condensed, any prior planning that was made has to be adjusted. Manning levels may not hit the expected level as quickly as desired, training may have to take place sooner than planned and equipment may not be ready as soon as the changes now require. However, it does not mean the unit will not be ready to deploy in time. ARFORGEN provides more flexibility than the Army had before and when changes to mission requirements are made, the Army as a whole is able to make changes quicker than before.
Getchell and Heron cited the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade as an example. During the unit's last deployment, their dwell time after was expected to be approximately 19 months, but there was a request for forces and it dropped to closer to 14 months. Planning to prepare the unit for another deployment after 19 months of dwell time began months before they even returned home.
Changes of personnel and training were all scheduled based on the one timeline and now there is five months less.
"That five months makes a huge difference in that he's training five months sooner," said Getchell. "They're training very hard in the later part of reset because they have so many training requirements to meet in order to be ready to go earlier than originally planned."
With ARFORGEN, saying "The division is deployed" or "The division is home" is no longer completely correct. The ARFORGEN cycles for the Screaming Eagles began with the first brigade combat teams headed to Iraq in August 2007. By June 2009, the Division Headquarters returned from their deployment. Many may see the division as being home, but the 159th Combat Aviation Brigade is deployed until the end of the year and early next year another brigade is slated to deploy.
ARFORGEN creates a continual deployment process. Instead of keeping the Division all at one level of sustainability, each brigade is on their own rotation.
"I believe over the next couple of years we're going to see [the process] spread out a little bit where it might be three brigades gone and four brigades back," said Heron. "The bottom line is each brigade is on its own timeline."
Every part of the Army community has to come together to make sure some units are meeting the requirements of the reset pool; some are meeting those in the train and ready pool; and others still in the available pool. It is a process which gives Soldiers and their families a greater level of predictability. It helps outside communities because typically not as many Soldiers from one area are deployed at once. It keeps those who work to prepare our Soldiers for their missions constantly busy because different brigades within one division are in different pools at the same time.
"I think for the typical Soldier he 'may not see the forest through the trees,'" said Heron. "[ARFORGEN] may not be staring him right in the face, but really he's living and breathing it every day."
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