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By Estes Thompson
Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. — By the time a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division deploys to Iraq this summer, it will have been reorganized, retrained and given much new equipment.

Through it all, the storied 82nd will remain ready to deploy at a moment’s notice to any spot in the world that requires a military force.

“We will be able to respond during the transformation,” said division spokeswoman Amy Hannah. “We are unique in that we are not standing down like other divisions.”

The division plans to complete the retooling of one brigade by June 16, then start work on its three others.

The military will recognize the changes ahead with a colorful ceremony Friday afternoon at an airfield on Fort Bragg. The ceremony honors past commanders with a display of units flags and reminds all the division’s troops that a new way of doing business is afoot.

The 82nd’s officers and top enlisted soldiers will be managing more than a reorganization during the first six months of the year. They will be welcoming a new, fourth brigade combat team that will boost the division’s personnel roster to nearly 20,000.

Other divisions in the Army already have been reorganized under what the military calls a “modular force transformation policy.”

“The idea behind modularity is to make the combat units interchangeable so that you can construct a fighting force that consists of standardized building blocks,” said Washington-based military analyst Loren Thompson of The Lexington Institute.

“If a force is modular, then it can deploy faster and each of the units will be relatively self-sufficient and you will get a lot more fighting power out of the same number of troops.”

Thompson compared the reorganization to creating a “series of Lego blocks that can be snapped together in whatever size you need to carry out a military campaign.”

The change was needed because the old division structure had created units that were very different and cumbersome to move in war time.

In the new military world, the brigades will have their own helicopter and reconnaissance units — “all the capabilities it needs to go to war quickly,” Thompson said.

He predicted that one day the Army’s primary structure would be brigades of 3,000 to 4,000 troops instead of divisions numbering three to four times that.

Brigades are being assigned a platoon that operates three or four unmanned air reconnaissance vehicles as well as a battalion of soldiers, more helicopters and ground vehicles dedicated to scouting ahead of the main body of soldiers. The brigades also will be assigned heavy-duty CH-47 Chinook helicopters to supplement the UH-60 Black Hawk choppers that now do the division’s heavy lifting.

“The lessons learned by the Army coming out of Iraq are that each brigade needed its own aerial surveillance capacities,” Thompson said.

But the standardization of units doesn’t mean that highly individual units such as the 82nd will become homogenized, he said. Hannah said there are no plans to change the division’s training to arrive in combat zones by parachute when necessary.

“The 82nd is a light, hypermobile force,” Thompson said. “They’ll get there ahead of everybody.”