Hawaii needs to step up if it wants to keep thousands of soldiers and their families and $1.3 billion in annual soldier-related sales, the former head of U.S. Army Pacific said.
"If we want the military here, we need to show it," said retired Lt. Gen. Frank Wiercinski, a member of the Chamber of Commerce Hawaii’s Military Affairs Council. "And now is the time to do it."
That would translate chiefly to more support for training, a key element as the Pentagon studies force reductions, Wiercinski said. Live-fire training has stopped at Makua Military Reservation on Oahu, making Hawaii island’s Pohakuloa Training Area all the more important.
"Training is a key component to military readiness and is essential for Hawaii-based units to remain headquartered in Hawaii," Pohakuloa’s commander, Lt. Col. Jacob Peterson, agreed in recent statement.
In June the Army laid out a worst-case scenario for downsizing that included the potential removal of 19,800 soldiers and civilian workers on Oahu.
The chamber said that could mean the overall exodus, with 30,035 family members, of roughly 5 percent of Honolulu’s population.
The Army 2020 Force Structure Realignment report examined potential impacts from downsizing at 30 installations, including Schofield Barracks. No final decisions have been made.
"(I think we have to look at this) from a purely realistic view and say, ‘The Army is downsizing, the Army is in a downward budget — not just the Army, the military,’" Wiercinski said. "And we’re looking for cost-effectiveness, and if it costs so much to be able to do this in Hawaii, people are going to look (at that). It’s just common sense."
Asked whether it was possible that the Army would gut the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, Dan Goure, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., said, "Sure it is. The Army has got to cut active end strength along with other things. It’s certainly a possibility."
The days when Hawaii could rely on U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye to protect Hawaii’s defense infrastructure are gone.
Members of the chamber’s Military Affairs Council recently attended a Hawaii Army National Guard artillery live-fire exercise at the 133,000-acre Pohakuloa range.
"The military has always played a special role in our state, and the relationship between the military and our community is among the strongest in the nation," Sherry Menor-McNamara, president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce Hawaii, said in a news release. "But we need to ensure we are supporting our installations and military families for important issues like training or we may find ourselves losing our military assets to other cities who provide a more attractive opportunity."
Overall, the active-duty Army stands at 510,000 soldiers, down from a high of 570,000.
The Army said it will be down to 490,000 a year from now, 470,000 by fiscal 2016 and, if sequestration resumes, 420,000 by 2019.
"It would be a mistake for the Army or anybody associated with it — contractors, families, whatever — to not plan for a 420,000 Army," said Goure.
The cuts to reach 490,000 soldiers already are programmed. The rest will have to come from somewhere, and Hawaii’s key role in the Pacific "re-balance" might not be enough to prevent a big Army downsizing here.
Goure said potentially cutting forces in Hawaii at a time when the re-balance is underway "doesn’t make a whole lot of sense."
But politics might trump military strategy in Army downsizing, he said.
"We’ll do stupid things because of politics," said Goure.
In an environment that Wiercinski calls "very difficult and very different," even some former officers are calling for the Army cuts in Hawaii and a reduction to 420,000 soldiers nationally.
Al Frenzel, a Makaha resident and retired Army colonel who taught force structuring at the U.S. Army War College, is director of the Oahu Council for Army Downsizing, which supports the turnover of Army facilities and land to the state.
The council said it does not consider the bulk of the Army’s forces on Oahu to be strategically located because they don’t have readily available airlift or sea lift.
Further, the Army in Hawaii doesn’t have "forced entry" capability to allow it to enter hostile environments — a capability already possessed by Marines in Hawaii.
The value of assets at Schofield and Wheeler Army Airfield and land at Makua and elsewhere "would greatly outweigh the short-term economic impact that will be experienced from the downsizing," Frenzel wrote in a position paper.
Frenzel plans to hold a public information briefing at 7 p.m. Oct. 14 at Waianae District Park.
Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, meanwhile, has received a lot of media attention nationally for his proposal to streamline the Army to 420,000 soldiers and reorganize them into capability-based expeditionary fighting formations while doing away with bloated Army overhead.
But Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno insists that a reduction to 450,000 soldiers would pose a "significant" security risk and that a drop to 420,000 would mean the Army is unable to execute its strategy.
World events continue to place new requirements on the Army, he said.
"I have two division headquarters in Afghanistan," Odierno said during a recent Defense Writers Group meeting. "I have a division headquarters in Korea. I’m going to send another division headquarters to Iraq — just a small headquarters. I’m going to send a division headquarters to Africa to work on the response to the Ebola virus."
Cathy Kropp, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Installation Management Command/Army Environmental Command at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, said the Army has completed a review of more than 110,000 comments received on the force structure realignment.
"It is only one piece of a variety of data that Army leaders will review before making force structure decisions," Kropp said.
She added that communities will have another opportunity to provide input to the force structure decision process through "listening sessions" that will be held between mid-November and March at each of the analyzed installations.
