On DoD: RAND analysis says Army needs to pause its drawdown

On this week’s edition of On DoD, we take a look at the Army’s current downsizing plan, which will take the service down to 450,000 active duty soldiers by 2017, its smallest size since before World War II. Military leaders have consistently said the force would be big enough to execute the current defense strategy, but only at the “lower ragged edge of risk.”

A new analysis from the federally-funded RAND Corporation begs to differ and finds “significant shortcomings” in the forces planned to meet three major defense missions the U.S. already promised it would execute: combating terrorism, deterring aggression and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Timothy Bonds, the vice president of RAND’s Army research division delivered that message to a recent meeting of the Commission on the Future of the U.S. Army and joined Jared Serbu to talk about his testimony, and the analysis behind it.

Later in the program, Rear Adm. Bruce Doll, the director of Defense Health Agency’s research, development and acquisition directorate and Col. Todd Rasmussen, the director of the Army’s combat care research program talk with Jared about the recent Military Health System Research Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and what DHA is doing to make sure the military’s information sharing efforts continue year-round.

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