U.S. MILITARY New commander wants Army to be all it can be

To improve the Army, the new chief is looking for quality, not quantity.
FORT POLK, La. (AP) -- The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are stretching the Army razor-thin, but the service's top general says the stress also has produced abler soldiers and opened a rare opportunity to change how the Army organizes to train and fight.
It also is giving Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who spent much of his career in the secretive Army special forces, a chance to instill in soldiers a "warrior ethos," or fighting spirit.
The wars have forced the Army to deploy all 10 of its combat divisions, call up tens of thousands of reservists, prohibit soldiers from retiring, and at the same time keep its commitments as peacekeeper in the Balkans and defender in South Korea.
"There is a huge silver lining in this cloud," Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said in an Associated Press interview this week after watching an Iraq-bound National Guard unit from North Carolina hone its combat skills amid towering pines on this central Louisiana Army post.
"War is a tremendous focus," he said. As a large institution, the Army "tends to perfect what it knows," he said, rather than seek change. "Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that [terrorists] have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph."
Expansion not needed
Schoomaker, 57, hopes to parlay these trying circumstances into progress toward ensuring the Army remains relevant in the global war on terrorism. That does not mean making the Army larger, as some in Congress prescribe, he says, but instead organizing it differently and making it more agile.
On the question of whether the Army needs to expand, Schoomaker is in sync with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who coaxed him out of retirement last August to take the top Army job. That issue remains to be settled, however, as many in Congress plan to push for an increase of 40,000 soldiers.
This and other issues have been sources of tension between Rumsfeld and some of the Army brass, most notably Schoomaker's immediate predecessor, Gen. Eric Shinseki, who warned at his retirement ceremony of the dangers of executing a "12-division strategy with a 10-division Army."
Visits
Since becoming Army chief, Schoomaker has made a point of visiting U.S. soldiers around the country and around the world, including two visits to Iraq. A burly former college football player, he is at once informal and deadly serious.
At each opportunity during two days at Fort Polk's Joint Readiness Training Center, Schoomaker, dressed in desert combat fatigues, handed soldiers a silver "dog tag" inscribed with what he calls the essence of the warrior ethos:
"I will always place the mission first.
"I will never accept defeat.
"I will never quit.
"I will never leave a fallen comrade."
He cited the insurgency in Iraq as a real-world test of soldiers' commitment to those words. Soldiers there must resist the temptation of complacency, of underestimating their enemy, he said.
"Real warriors never take their eyes off the horizon," he told one group. "You're like a wild animal in the woods. You pay attention to your instincts. You've always got your rifle within reach."
Careful during the AP interview to avoid implying shortcomings by his predecessors, Schoomaker nevertheless said some in uniform have become too wedded to convention, schedule, doctrine and the comfort of routine.
"You can't create armies and expect to be effective on the battlefield if their culture is only to practice," he said. "There's got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for."
"I'm not warmongering," he said. "The fact is we're going to be called and really asked to do this stuff."
In fact, since shrinking by about one-third in the early 1990s, the Army has been called upon repeatedly -- in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. And since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it has been asked to do more in Afghanistan and Iraq than some think can be sustained over time.
Schoomaker, however, is more optimistic.
He says that while he has not reached a final decision, he strongly doubts that recruiting more soldiers is the way to relieve the stress created by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"You aren't stronger just because you have more people," he said.