Gen. Casey preps for wartime transition

No matter who wins the White House in November, the next commander in chief will face a daunting challenge in overseeing the military, according to the Army’s leading officer.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will take over a military striving to recover from seven years of continuous combat in Iraq and Afghanistan even as it tries to prepare for future threats.

{mosads}“The next two years will be tough,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey Jr. told The Hill in an exclusive interview.

Casey will play a key role in preparing the Army’s transition to a new administration. Along with the other Joint Chiefs, Casey is working at the behest of Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to “refine and develop the appropriate military advice” for the new president, he said.

Casey, who commanded coalition forces in Iraq from June 2004 to February 2007, when Gen. David Petraeus replaced him, said it is critical that the Joint Chiefs give the new president the necessary information and advice so that he can completely fulfill his responsibility on day one.

 “It is particularly important because it is a wartime transition,” Casey said. “Everyone is thinking through how we do that as smoothly as possible.”

The new president will inherit U.S. military forces that are “in a great period of strategic transition,” and that need to develop new strategies and weapons to meet the different kind of threats the United States is likely to face in the future, he said.

“The Army is … trying to understand what the future is going to look like and what type of Army are we going to need for that future,” Casey said.

Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror will figure prominently in the general-election contest between Obama, who has promised to remove U.S. troops from Iraq, and McCain, a decorated Navy pilot and former Vietnam prisoner of war who is opposed to setting a deadline for withdrawal.

But Casey, a 59-year-old veteran of the military, emphasized that the Joint Chiefs are “apolitical,” and the two will get the same advice regardless of their differences.

{mosimage}Service chiefs like Casey are key to ensuring the continuity of strategy, since unlike the military’s civilian leadership, they are not appointed. Casey is in the second year of a four-year assignment as Army chief of staff, meaning he could remain in the position until the midpoint of the next administration. Casey noted, however, that he serves at the pleasure of the president.

Casey — whose father was an Army general killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam — declined to speak on the record about the politically charged issue of when and how quickly U.S. forces can withdraw from Iraq.

“We are preparing ourselves for staying at the force levels where we are now in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. That would keep troop levels at about 140,000 in the two countries.

Casey also is overseeing the transition of military deployments to Iraq from 15 months to 12 months after August 1.

He said this will take some time because of the surge of troops in Iraq last year. “It’s going to take us eight to 12 months to get the flexibility back in the system after the surge,” he said.

At the same time, the Army is expected to grow by 74,000 soldiers over the next two years. The growth will allow soldiers to stay at home longer.

The expansion could also allow the Army to cut down on the controversial stop-loss program, in which soldiers are kept in the Army beyond their original enlistments. The practice has garnered widespread congressional criticism and brought several lawsuits from members of the military.

 “Unfortunately … when we started down this path, the Army was not big enough to do what we wound up having to do [in Iraq and Afghanistan],” he said. “The most important thing for us is deploying cohesive units, and that is what stop-loss does for us — it allows us to deploy cohesive units.”

In a brigade of about 3,600 soldiers deploying to Iraq, 800 are kept through stop-loss. About half of the soldiers kept under stop-loss are sergeants, according to Casey.

“You would be pulling the senior leadership out of a unit in the middle of combat, and that does not work,” he said.

The Army would need to grow by about 20,000 people to be able to discontinue the controversial practice, he said.

Casey also declined to publicly offer his assessment of the war effort in Iraq. But he made it clear, based on his experience as the top commander of coalition forces in Iraq, that he believes American military strategy has fundamentally changed in the post-Sept. 11 era.

“It is not going to be all Iraq or all like Afghanistan,” he said. “When I speak publicly, I talk a lot about Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 — that is the type of operations that we are preparing the Army to deal with. And it is a big change for us … which says we need to be prepared to fight across the spectrum of warfare.”

This is a significant departure for the Army, which just eight years ago focused largely on major combat operations in which the enemy was clearly identifiable by uniform and equipment.

“When I was a division commander in Germany in 2001, and you’d asked me where on the spectrum of conflict should I focus my training … I would tell you if I could do major combat operations, I could do anything,” Casey said. “And I don’t believe that anymore after 32 months in Iraq.

“One of the lessons for me personally [in Iraq] was just because you can do major combat operations doesn’t mean you can do everything,” Casey said. In irregular warfare, such as in Iraq, “you are right smack into people, and it is a fundamentally different way of gathering intelligence and striking targets.”

Despite the challenge of adjusting to a new kind of warfare, “We are now five years in Iraq and we are the world’s resident expert in counter-insurgency operations,” he said.

Editor’s note: Gen. George Casey is married to Sheila Casey, The Hill’s chief operating officer.