Army ponders future force: not too large, not too small, just right.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Defense Watch

* In a pep talk to Army leaders recently, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta pointed out the obvious: There aren't many countries out there building massive tank armies, and it is "unlikely that we will be re-fighting Desert Storm in the future."

His predecessor, Secretary Robert Gates, already had professed in a speech to West Point cadets that they should not expect the United States to fight any large counterinsurgency wars in the foreseeable future, as that would be lunacy.

Channeling Goldilocks, the Army has decided to aim somewhere in between. Some call this middle area "hybrid threats," or as Panetta described it, a conflict against enemies who have "high-tech weaponry that is easier both to buy and to operate, weapons that frustrate our traditional advantages."

This posture, outside analysts and strategists agree, makes sense as it hedges risk and allows the Army to train and equip for a broad range of potential foes.

But the Army remains conflicted about how it will transition from a COIN-focused force to one that can multitask over a wide range of challenges.

With budget cuts looming, leaders are now more preoccupied by money issues than by the frustratingly futile task of trying to predict the future.

The Army is projected to downsize from 570,000 to 520,000 soldiers after the scheduled withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2014. But if the Army is serious about reshaping itself to be more adaptable against unpredictable enemies, it might find it hard to justify keeping more than a million soldiers--including active-duty, Reserve and National Guard--in addition to nearly 350,000 civilian workers and untold thousands of support contractors.

Also fueling anxiety among Army leaders is the prospect of ground warfare fading into irrelevance post-Afghanistan, and a subsequent reallocation of resources toward naval and air warfare. The culmination of the air campaign in Libya--which was relatively short and did not require any U.S. troops on the ground--is a reminder of Kosovo in 1999, when air power was so successful that it prompted the Army to overhaul its organization and weapons acquisitions as it sought to prove that it was no longer a plodding Cold War force.

At the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, the "future" is the dominant topic of conversation, said TRADOC Commander Gen. Robert W. Cone.

Budget cuts always are unwelcome, but for Cone, the more pressing issue is how to "excite this generation" of officers and enlisted...