Vol. 71/No. 18      May 7, 2007

The Pentagon is placing greater value on combat experience. On March 1, the U.S. Army established a policy that soldiers must first fight in one of the two current theaters of Washington’s “war on terror,” Iraq or Afghanistan, before being eligible for an extension of service in south Korea, where there has been no combat for decades.

The Pentagon is also beefing up its spy capacities as it is reorganizing the military into “modular combat units.”

“The number of enlisted soldiers in intelligence jobs will grow by 25 percent in the next six years to fill billets in the Army’s modular units and to feed the critical need for information to fight insurgent forces in war zones,” the Army Times reported March 29.

There has been a steady decline in the number of troops stationed at the once-massive U.S. bases in Central Europe built during the Cold War.

A March 29 Army Times article headlined “Is the U.S. prepared for conflict in Europe?” said that in Europe, “if a major regional conflict broke out today, the [U.S. European] command—its ranks drawn thin by deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq—would have to ask for reinforcements.”

“At the height of the Cold War in the late 1980s, EUCOM [U.S. European Command] forces included more than 315,000 personal at 1,421 installations,” the section on “Transformation” on EUCOM’s web site states. “Today, they include some 112,000 personnel and 491 installations. Our envisioned end state will reduce these numbers by approximately 40 percent.”
 
 
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