Grinston: Busy Army ‘More Ready’ Than Ever
Grinston: Busy Army ‘More Ready’ Than Ever
While major operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have ended, the Army continues to be on a high operational pace and is “more ready than we have ever been,” Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston said.
“We’re not 250,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan like we were in 2006 and [2007], but we are still extremely busy doing the missions that we’ve been asked to do for our country,” Grinston said Sept. 30 during a call with media hosted by the Defense Writers Group, part of the Project for Media and National Security at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
With the release of the Army People Strategy in October 2019, the service has made people its top priority, but that is not an impediment to readiness, Grinston said. He noted that the Army’s lethality comes from soldiers and formations that are ready for anything all the time, overseas or at home.
“We’ve missed no deployments in the last year, and we’re more ready than we have ever been,” he said. “That’s a testament of us being able to send the 82nd [Airborne Division] on a no-notice deployment to Afghanistan. We've also had 37 combat readiness training center rotations, and we did all that during COVID.”
When the Army deployed the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to support the evacuation of people from Afghanistan in August, it was on short notice and consisted of units made up of people, Grinston said.
“We didn't send a carrier group,” as the Navy would, he said. “We sent that unit of people, so if our people aren’t ready, I don’t understand how we could be a ready Army,” Grinston said. “It’s not People First versus readiness. People First is readiness.”
Units from across the Army also have carried out regular rotations to Europe, Korea and Kuwait, and they also have met domestic missions in support of the COVID-19 pandemic or to fight disasters such as forest fires, floods and storms, Grinston noted.
“From my perspective as an enlisted soldier, in our doctrine it says I’m responsible for individual small teams and crews,” he said. “I give a commander a ready soldier, and then they can focus on the collective task. That’s just basic Army doctrine.”