Fort Carson could lose 3,500 soldiers officials expected to move to Colorado Springs under a Pentagon budget proposal unveiled this week.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday he would block the creation of three Army brigades, one of which is planned for creation at Fort Carson by 2013.
The change doesn’t impact massive growth at Fort Carson this year. The post’s population of troops will climb to 24,600 from 18,100 when the 4th Infantry Division headquarters and the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division arrive this summer.
But an additional 3,500-soldier brigade pledged to Fort Carson in 2007 under a plan to grow the Army for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan appears to be in Gates’ crosshairs.
“I think that’s a reasonable assumption,” said Christopher Hellman, a Military Policy Fellow with Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C., who specializes in analyzing Pentagon budget plans.
The Army had expressed confidence in stationing the 5th Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson as recently as last month.
But on Tuesday, Army spokesman Dave Foster said, “it’s too soon to tell” whether that brigade is going to come here.
Local business leaders pledged a fight in Congress to get the brigade.
“It isn’t over until it’s over,” said Brian Binn, president of military affairs for the Greater Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce.
Still, the Fort Carson brigade would be a relatively painless cut for the Army, because it hasn’t spent the money to build barracks and office buildings to house it. Fort Carson had planned to construct a home for the brigade near Butts Army Airfield and had already completed an Environmental Impact Statement for the move. But contracts to build the facilities, with a price tag that could top $150 million, hadn’t been solicited.
Other brigades in the Army already have homes, making them less vulnerable than the 5th BCT at Fort Carson, which exists only on paper.
“I don’t know why you would cut the ones you have equipped and already put together,” Hellman said.
The move went virtually unnoticed Monday, hidden among higher-profile cuts Gates proposed, including the elimination of two Air Force plane programs, the F-22 superfighter and the C-17 transport plane.
Gates said he still plans to grow the Army to 547,000 soldiers. “This will ensure we have better-manned units ready to deploy and help put an end to the routine use of -loss’,” Gates said while announcing his budget.
It’s a solution to a problem that has plagued the Army since 2003, with the pounding pace of war requiring the service to send units to war undermanned and with some soldiers serving past their original commitments under the “stop-loss” rules that kept them in uniform involuntarily.
Because Gates would still increase the number of people in the Army, Colorado Springs will remain in line for more soldiers even if it doesn’t get the 5th Brigade, said Mike Kazmierski, CEO of the Greater Colorado Springs Economic Development Corporation.
Kazmierski, though, isn’t giving up on the extra brigade. “We haven’t lost it yet,” he said.
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