Casey: Army is ‘out of balance.’

In a new interview with Stars and Stripes, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey calls the current state of the Army “out of balance,” stretched by the President’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan:

What I’ve been saying publicly, really since August, is that the U.S. Army is out of balance, and out of balance isn’t hollow, it’s not broken. … But we’re consuming our readiness as fast as we’re building it, and so we’re not able to build depth for other things. We’re running the all-volunteer force at a pace that is not sustainable.

What has to happen is that we have to increase our size — and we’re doing that. … But it will take us three or four years to put ourselves back in balance, and it will take the continued support of Congress and the American people to ensure that we get the resources we need to do that.