Twelve US-based brigades will be deactivated by 2017 to fit a slashed military budget. Despite cuts of over 80,000 troops, top brass assures that combat readiness will not suffer because the remaining brigades will have more battalions and firepower.

Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno announced Tuesday plans have been approved to inactivate 10 Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) with headquarters on the US territory. This comes under the $487 billion military budget cuts mandated in 2011 by the Budget Control Act, a fourth round of military budget cuts since President Barack Obama entered office.

It has been announced that the final cut of the service in five years is expected to be 80,000 service personnel, most of which is to come through attrition, Orieno said giving the difference from a wartime high of 570,000 soldiers to 490,000 by the end of 2017.

Overall drop in the number of BCT will be from current 45 to 33, as the US Army plans to return to about the same number of enlisted servicemen it had before the Iraq war started, it was announced at General Odierno’s press conference. 

A standard American infantry BCT currently has roughly 3,500 servicemen. The announced cuts, which are mainly to affect the active-duty force, could also be regarded as reorganization of the military, which has been conducting wars for the last 12 years. The Army Reserve will remain at 205,000 soldiers and the state-based National Guard militia will lose 8,000 soldiers, dropping to 350,000 from 358,000. 

‘Increasing tooth-to-tail ratio’

General Odierno explained that whereas the number of BCT is decreasing, the number of battalions in them will grow from present two to three thus increasing the Army’s “tooth-to-tail ratio.” Besides an additional battalion, which is usually 600-800 soldiers, BCTs will have more engineers assigned. It is expected that remaining brigades would be somewhere close to 5,000 personnel instead of the today’s 3,500 servicemen and women.

 “We will add a third maneuver battalion and additional engineer and fires capability to each of our armor and infantry brigade combat teams in order to make them more lethal, more flexible and more agile,” Odierno said. 

Reportedly, the decision to beef up the number of servicemen in a BTC came as a recommendation from commanders with combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. In their view personnel proliferation will extend fighting capabilities of the brigades on a battlefield. In this way the impact on combat power will be minimized and the savings will be made at the expense of support units outside of BCT and logistics. 

 General Ray Odierno insists the cuts were thoroughly calculated after thousands of hours of planning, personnel interviews and simulated combat tests. Naturally, because the brigades are slashed for economic reasons, the final selection was based on cost and logistic effectiveness, required training resources, ranges, airspace and infrastructure, as well as local economic impacts once BCTs are gone, Odierno said.

“I know in the local communities it will have its impact,” Odierno told reporters on Tuesday. “But we've done our best to reach out to them so they understand what the impacts are. We've tried to make it as small an impact as possible for as many communities as we could,” he said.

The deactivation of 10 BCTs comes as the first round of military reduction, because if the Congress does not reconsider austerity in military spending, the number of service personnel will be reduced even lower than the planned 490,000 troops.

A member of the Armed Services Committee, Democrat US Congressman Adam Smith warned that, “The real hazard to military effectiveness will persist as long as Congress fails to act on sequestration. If sequestration is not removed, then more extensive force structure changes will need to be made.”

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Howard P. McKeon, promised his panel “will carefully examine the implications of this initial restructuring, but we all must understand that this is only the tip of the iceberg, much deeper cuts are still to come.”

Whether they will be accompanied by same ‘tooth-to-tail ratio increases’ remains to be seen. 

BCT Reduction by military installation

Fort Bliss, Texas – infantry BCT

Fort Bragg, North Carolina – airborne infantry BCT

Fort Campbell, Kentucky – infantry BCT

Fort Carson, Colorado – armor BCT

Fort Drum, New York – infantry BCT

Fort Hood, Texas – armor BCT

Fort Knox, Kentucky – infantry BCT

Fort Riley, Kansas – infantry BCT

Fort Stewart, Georgia – armor BCT

Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington – Stryker BCT 

Though the US says that any flight carrying Snowden should not be allowed to pass, they are hardly able to do anything, aviation expert Chris Yates told RT, adding that it is unlikely that the whistleblower is now on the flight from Moscow to Havana.

RT: First, no one has seen Snowden on this plane. Is it possible to secretly get someone aboard and hide them on a passenger jet?

Chris Yates: Well, quite frankly probably not. We’ve got that plane stuffed with journalists and other people who obviously attempted to keep an eye out for Mr. Snowden. It’s unlikely that he will be on that plane, in fact nobody has actually seen him. The fact of the matter is that he still might be in that transit lounge, he may be held for some reason in that transit lounge because of the media scrum. Whatever the case might be it certainly appears that he is not actually on the flight at the moment. 

RT:  If he is on this plane, is there a legal way to intercept it?

CY: Yesterday the American government put out a warning to all nations in the Western hemisphere not to let Mr. Snowden pass through except en route to the US. It could mean that any plane he is travelling on other nations might prevent from entering their airspace, because they don’t want to be caught up in this particular spat.  It is unlikely that would happen.  The bottom line in the aviation world is that if the flight is operating legally, it filed all the proper flight forms and done the rest of appropriate measures then that plane should be given free access straight cross any bit of airspace it is flying through. Could the US intercept the aircraft if it were to enter US airspace? Possibly they could instruct it to land somewhere in the US, but I would think that would be unlikely. Of course the pilot himself has the possibility to divert so he does not actually need to enter US airspace to actually fly down to Havana. And that will be another possibility as well.

RT: Who makes the decision to divert? Who does the pilot respond to: a legal authority or his corporate superiors?

CY: Once the plane takes off it’s entirely down to the pilot to choose the best route depending upon all of the prevailing conditions at the time and that could be weather and a whole other variety of things as well. So if the pilot were to choose to fly the route just outside of US airspace close to it then he would be entitled to do that of his own volition provided that it didn’t have any impact upon the safety of the flight and everybody else on board it. 

RT: This is an Airbus 330 - does it have enough fuel to divert?

CY: Yes is the short answer to that question. All flights operating all over the world are required to carry enough fuel in case of diversion whatever that diversion might be. The bottom line is that – yes, the airplane will be carrying enough fuel. Now the US says that any flight carrying Mr. Snowden should not be allowed to pass, but on the other hand they are powerless to do anything provided that the airplane does not enter US airspace.  

RT: Reports say Snowden's passport was revoked by the US If so, how can he move around the world?

CY: I’ve had personal experience of losing a passport, for example, and there are methods and mechanisms in place for people to be able to travel back to their home country without a passport. That is a legal document which is usually produced by some official authority, the police for example, in my case it issued a document that let we travel across Europe to get back to the UK. The fact that the US government revoked his passport does not necessarily mean that he cannot get on a flight which is pre-booked, and particularly if he is the transit lounge of an airport because effectively he is in no man’s land. If he used a legal passport it would seem to me at his point of departure and while he is in transit then it would seem that it doesn’t really matter whether he has got that passport in his hand and it’s actually a legal document at that time.