Donahue: Enabling Expeditionary Capabilities in a CONUS Based Army

Despite its ongoing operations around the world, the U.S. Army is a CONUS-based force that must be able to deploy its capabilities seamlessly. Unfortunately, that is not yet the case. Brig. Gen. Brian Donahue, USA, director of the LandWarNet office, Army G-3/5/7, described that challenge to an overflow crowd in a combined track this morning exploring expeditionary capabilities and horizontal network centricity. And, the Army must be able to maintain its full capabilities throughout the entire spectrum of a deployed operation. Gen. Donahue declared that the Army no longer can afford to separate operational aspects. It must engage in decisive combat-phase three-concurrent with phase four stabilization operations. This was not done in the Iraq War, and now U.S. forces are paying the price. So it must smooth out capability changes throughout deployment and operation. When the Army was forward deployed, this was not as much of an issue. But now, it cannot afford problems on the CONUS end. Plans are underway. Over the next 60 days, the Army will sort out a construct at the DOIM level, he stated.