The surge in Afghanistan, evolving missions and tighter budgets will shape the year ahead for the Army. For soldiers, 2010 may mean tougher chances at promotion, a new camouflage pattern for uniforms and better gear and training.
Here is the final installment of our three-part series about things to watch out for in 2010.
GOODBYE, IRAQ
By August, the Pentagon hopes to have pulled out all but 50,000 of the 120,000 troops serving in Iraq.
All U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by the end of 2011, under the terms of the security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq.
President Barack Obama’s plan to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan could make this goal a lot more challenging for Army logistics gurus managing the drawdown in Iraq.
For the past seven months, planners in Iraq and Kuwait have been sorting through millions of pieces of military equipment, identifying what will go home and what will be left behind. Now, the priority will be to pull serviceable engineer equipment, mine-resistant vehicles and communications equipment out of Iraq and ship it to Afghanistan.
There are a lot of nontactical vehicles on forward operating bases. In many cases, it would be too expensive to ship them to the U.S., said logistics officials, who are considering selling them to Iraqi forces or civilians.
CHEATING CRACKDOWN
The Army is looking to stop cheating on correspondence courses with new measures expected to be in place by March.
Cheating for promotion points has been an open secret in the Army since 1999, when correspondence courses were computerized, but has been hard to prove. Training and Doctrine Command is looking to nail cheaters and make it harder for others to cheat in the future.
Changes to the Army Correspondence Course Program include:
• More test-sharing sites will be banned from .mil domains.
• Sub courses in the program have been reduced, and test item banks will be established, creating a pool of more than 30,000 answers that will pop up randomly during tests.
