Army Chief of Staff Hints ‘Two-War’ Strategy Is Thing of the Past

By John M. Donnelly,
CQ Staff

The comments by Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. come as many in Congress are befuddled about the assumptions about future wars that undergird the changes in Pentagon spending proposed by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates .

Casey, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said after a speech this week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the chiefs have discussed the need to move beyond a strategy built on a military force capable of fighting two “major combat operations,” or MCOs, in different parts of the world.

Currently, he said, the military is not prepared to fight two major wars while also fighting two counterinsurgencies. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown the goal to be currently unachievable, Casey said.

“The reality of it is, with the amount of forces we already have deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of those MCOs is already kind of off the table,” Casey said, later adding: “The reality of the commitment is we don’t have the ready forces available to do everything that we would have liked to do under a two-MCO scenario.”

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