Dempsey: Future to focus on training 'for all potential forms of warfare'

A day after the last U.S. troops left Iraq, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the U.S. military must redirect its focus of the last 10 years from preparing for continuous deployments to training, with an eye toward the growing strategic importance of the Pacific region.

“We have to restore readiness for all potential forms of warfare,” Army Gen. Martin Dempsey told a crowd of more than 400 U.S. military members and civilians at a town hall meeting Monday in Ramstein’s officers’ club.

“If you’re a major or a staff sergeant or younger, you have known nothing in your professional lives except deployments,” Dempsey said. “As we now face the evolution of becoming an armed force that is still deploying … but also now has to go back to understanding how to train and prepare for other kinds of conflicts and other environments, we will transition from being an Army that lives to deploy to an Army that is still deploying but that is also living to train. …”