Army Moves Units To Interior

[333MP]

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
April 21, 2005

Army Moves Units To Interior

By Sam Bishop, News-Miner Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON--Army transformation efforts will bring three new aviation companies with about 150 personnel from Korea to Fort Wainwright Army Post by mid-June, slightly offsetting much larger deployments of Wainwright soldiers to the Middle East.

The three companies will bring with them eight UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. The companies handle command and control, administration and maintenance for the 1st Aviation Battalion, 52nd Aviation Regiment.

The helicopter companies currently are under the control of an aviation brigade in Korea that the Army will deactivate June 16.

At Fort Wainwright, the new personnel will occupy barracks, offices and hangars previously used by the 4th Battalion, 123rd Aviation Regiment. Many of its personnel left for Iraq and Kuwait in December and January.

All told, about 500 of Fort Wainwright's 4,700 military personnel currently are deployed, according to Linda Douglass, the post's public affairs officer.

However, about 3,200 more, from the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, will leave in late July or August and spend about a year in Iraq. Their vehicles have already been shipped out to a training center in Louisiana, Douglass said. The personnel will follow soon, be certified as a brigade and then return to Alaska before deployment.

The Army, in news releases, said the aviation companies are being moved from Korea as part of a broader restructuring.

"We are reconfiguring into Units of Action, which means realigning and reshaping the aviation units that currently make up our force structure," according to a news release from the 8th U.S. Army at the Yongsan Army Garrison in Seoul, South Korea.

A Pentagon spokesman contacted late Tuesday afternoon said he couldn't immediately expand on that explanation.

"Can you say Iraq?" said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, when asked about the broad reconfiguration. His group, based in the Washington, D.C., area, maintains a detailed Web site on the deployment of U.S. military forces.

Pike said the Iraq war and a transformation to new, more mobile combat systems have forced a reworking of the Army's brigade-level structure.

"A 'unit of action' is their new fancy word for brigade," Pike said. Divisions that previously had three brigades each are being cut into four "units of action," Pike said. That's in part because the Army needs more than the existing 33 brigades to create a reasonable rotation schedule in Iraq, he said.

"With 48 brigades, they can sustain a 15-brigade posture in Iraq indefinitely, they believe," he said. "As a result of this restructuring, they're moving heaven and earth, they're moving all kinds of people all over the place."

On the Korean Peninsula, the Army is both cutting back on total troop numbers and moving them south, away from the border with North Korea, Pike said.

"Your particular unit is part of this mix, or remix, rather," Pike said of the aviation companies destined for Fort Wainwright.

Christine Wormuth, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the Army's restructuring results from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's effort to create a leaner, more centralized force.

The idea is to decouple the Army from large bases established in regions of old Cold War tensions, she said.

"All of the movements out of Korea and Germany are being done for that larger purpose of being able to respond globally," she said. "We're going to have a global pool that's managed centrally."

The addition of 150 new aviation troops to Fort Wainwright likely will require the construction of some new facilities, said Douglass. The 4th Battalion, 123rd Aviation Regiment will return late this year or early next.

Then the 172nd Stryker team will return in late summer 2006, along with an additional 700 soldiers currently stationed at Fort Richardson near Anchorage.

"The Army-wide restructuring indicates only growth for (U.S. Army Alaska) and Fort Wainwright," according to a news release from Fort Wainwright.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, announced the pending arrival of the Korean aviation units while in Fairbanks on Friday for the annual military appreciation dinner.

Stevens spokeswoman Courtney Schikora Boone said the senator was happy to make the announcement.

"We are always pleased that Alaska can continue to serve the U.S. in its military defense," she said.