On his first full day in office, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno warned congressional budget negotiators against shrinking the force too quickly or taking away the flexibility to fight threats of all types.
“Be careful of going too small, too fast,” he said in a roundtable interview Thursday at the Pentagon.
Congress and Pentagon leaders are posturing to protect against deeper defense spending cuts in budgetary battles this fall, and Odierno is leaving much of that fight to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. In the background, the new chief is figuring out how to downsize an Army that is still fighting wars by reviewing the entire force structure – including size, organization, training and equipment – through the next four to eight years.
Notably, Odierno said he does not think the Army will shrink to a maximum size of 520,000 soldiers, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed. That total was still "reasonable," Odierno said, if the assumptions made at the time are fulfilled, including withdrawing from Afghanistan by 2014.
"I’m comfortable with 520," he said. "Do I think we’re going to end up at 520? Probably not. So, what is the right number?"
Odierno insisted the Army remained agile — a word he stressed repeatedly — and appropriately balanced so it could continue to meet a wide range of unpredictable future national security threats, from wars of all sizes to terrorism and transnational criminal activity.
