An Interview with George W. Casey, Jr

Joint Force Quarterly, Jan, 2009 by David H. Gurney

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JFQ: The Army traditionally recruits recent high school graduates. Today, however, fewer younger people meet minimum standards for service, and more are going on to higher education. There is a declining pool of candidates, and, frankly, the possibility of military service does not even enter the minds of many. What initiatives are under way to deal with this?

General Casey: This gets right to the heart of the issue about how we recruit and sustain an all-volunteer force at war, and it's something that we're breaking new ground on every day. The last time we did it was the American Revolution. That said, all the things you stated in the question are true: the number of high school graduates is down, the number with the propensity to serve is down. But last year, fiscal year 2008, almost 290,000 men and women enlisted or reenlisted in the Army, Guard, and Reserve. When they signed up, they all knew that they were going to war. That speaks highly of the men and women of the United States of America. Now, as you can imagine, we are looking at that and saying, "Are the recruiting procedures and skills that we've used since the early 1980s still sufficient to serve us in this current environment?" And intuitively, we say, "Probably not; there's got to be something different that we can do." We're trying a range of things--one of them is the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia--to bring technology to bear in a way that relates more to the folks that we're trying to attract. And I've made a note to myself to swing by and see it myself. I've only heard about it, but it's probably a little too early to tell how it's going to work out.

One of the other things we're doing is a forum we're participating in called Investment in America. It's a group of business, not-for-profit, and Army leaders, and we meet every year and talk about ways that we can work together to do things that will help the country. Last summer, for example, the discussion turned to how we build an educated population for both the business community and the military. The business community faces the exact same challenges that we do. The folks that they're getting out of the high schools don't have the intellectual skills, the writing skills, the communication skills, and frankly, they don't have the ethical and moral skills that business leaders are looking for. And so we've had several sessions since then, and we're working to put together a group where we can go into a city and say, "Here's a group of business, not-for-profit, and military folks who want to work with you to improve secondary education in your city." Obviously, business brings money and the promise of jobs; we bring Junior ROTC [Reserve Officers Training Corps] and other things. And I expect to have a plan that we might offer a couple of target cities. Mayor [Richard] Daley in Chicago has already done some amazing things with Junior ROTC, and when I was there for the Memorial Day parade, he invited me to be the grand marshal. The mayor had these marching units of Junior ROTC cadets representing the high schools, and he knew about every one of the schools. When you look at these formations walking down the street, almost all in step, you could see the power that Junior ROTC brings and the discipline that allows them to finish school, to get more out of the school that they're in, and achieve better test scores and better completion rates.

So this is a long way of saying we need to focus not only on changing how we recruit but also how we think we could work with folks on improving the level of secondary education in the country. We think it's something that we could do to help the country and also help us on the side.

JFQ: The Army Force Generation model was created to optimize your personnel/training/equipment investments. Do you have any concerns that the Force Generation model short-changes the broader national security needs of the country, particularly those of the Governors and homeland defense needs?

General Casey: Short answer: no. But in fact, I think it's even more important for us to put ourselves on a cyclical readiness model where we can both generate forces to sustain long-term commitments and have forces ready to do other things. Before September 11, 2001, we were basically a garrison-based Army that lived to train, and we were very good at it. The rotations into the Balkans were the closest we had to the situation we find ourselves in now, and that certainly didn't impact anywhere near the percentage of the Army that these current deployments have. So we say that we need to be expeditionary, which is one of the key characteristics of the Army in the 21st century. To do that, we have to put ourselves on a rotational model. ARFORGEN [Army Force Generation] is that rotational model. It allows us, one, to give predictability to the Soldiers and their families because they know where they are in the cycle; two, to continually generate forces to sustain the long-term commitments; and three, to have forces in readiness that are trained, equipped, manned, that can go anywhere on short notice. If you look at the different phases of the cycle, I think it's exactly the model that we need for an era of persistent conflict. I believe that's where we are. We're at war, we've been at war for 7 years, and all the emerging global trends will probably exacerbate rather than ameliorate those conditions. And so I believe we, the ground forces, and the air and naval forces to a lesser extent, are going to be committed either in engagements or other activities for the foreseeable future, and we need to have a force generation model that allows us to continually prepare our forces for that.