Army Taking 'Hard Look' At Readiness Spending.

* The Army is looking for ways to control training expenditures and personnel costs as it pushes forward with modernization, Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said recently.

Modernization, readiness and end-strength/force-structure are the three "big resource buckets" where the service invests the bulk of its funding, he noted during remarks at the Global Force Next conference.

"We must modernize," McConville said. "I owe it to my successors that I have the Army on a good path to transformation."

When it comes to readiness, "we're taking a hard look at how we go after the funds" to find efficiencies, he said. That could include focusing more on small unit training.

"That's actually less expensive" than higher level training, he explained. "We might be able to be more efficient with the money that we spend on readiness."

The Army's budget for fiscal year 2021 is approximately $178 billion. About $45 billion is going toward personnel. To control costs, end strength will likely remain at around 485,000 active duty soldiers in coming years, McConville said.

"We're probably going to flatten out...where we are right now," he said. "We really don't want to make it any smaller. We would like to make it bigger, but what we have to do is prioritize."

A recent report by the American Enterprise Institute think tank, "Defense Budget Lessons," by analysts Elaine McCusker and John Ferrari, said the...