Com-Central.net

First U.S. Army reorganizes

By Gina Cavallaro
Staff writer, Army Times

The Army’s ongoing realignment shifted again Tuesday with a ceremony to inactivate the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colo., and the inactivation earlier this month of the 24th Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kan.

Both divisions will be replaced officially on Oct. 1, when First U.S. Army activates Training Support Division East at Fort Meade, Md., and Training Support Division West at Fort Carson.

Each training division will be under a two-star commander and serve as command and control headquarters for pre- and post-mobilization training and certification and readiness oversight for Reserve and National Guard units in their geographic areas.

TSD East will stand up from scratch at Fort Meade, although some personnel from the 24th ID will migrate to the staff. TSD East will be under the command of Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood, and will be fully operational by January 2007.

TSD West will be operational in October and commanded by Maj. Gen. Robert W. Mixon, Jr. It likely will absorb most of its staff from the 7th ID since they are in the same location, First U.S. Army spokesman Lt. Col. Rich Steele said.

The Mississippi River will divide the two areas of operations.

Each TSD will comprise about 100 Reserve soldiers, 80 active-duty soldiers and 50 civilians.

After the TSDs are fully operational, the current five training support divisions � 75th, 78th, 85th, 87th and 91st � will be returned to the U.S. Army Reserve Command, Steele said.

The 16 training support brigades, comprising about 700 to 800 soldiers, will then report to the newly formed TSDs.

First U.S. Army has always been responsible for training Reserve and National Guard units east of the Mississippi River, while Fifth U.S. Army did the same for units west of the Mississippi.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the First U.S. and Fifth U.S. Armies have trained 399,000 Reserve troops for mobilization, 254,000 of which were trained by First U.S. Army, Steele said.

Now, First Army, which works under Forces Command, will be responsible for the two new divisions.

First U.S. Army on Jan. 16 dropped its standby mission of being on-call to respond to homeland disasters such as it did last year with Hurricane Katrina.

That mission of homeland defense and civil support operations now belongs to Fifth U.S. Army at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, which is known as U.S. Army North and works under U.S. Northern Command.

“With the Army’s new reorganization, First U.S. Army is the single training headquarters of all Reserve component conventional forces. Now we’re able to focus solely on training and devote 100 percent of our efforts on that,� Steele said.

My first active duty unit was the 24th ID at Ft Stewart, GA. Our Brigade commander then was Col. Honore, who is now the First Army Commander. He called all his junior officers "dick" all the time and always had an un-lit cigar in his mouth. I was with the 24th when they switched over to the 3rd ID back in 95-96. Besides changing all out unit patches, the renaming of bowling ally's, repainting of the water-towers, etc... was areal nitemare.

That's the best thing the could've done. I always thought it was better to retire those divisions than degrade them by making them TSD's. On Riley the 24ID patch was considered "Remf's" and basically was a garrison unit that served no real pupose other than to bother the combat brigades there (I'm sure I have now offended some). We did not consider them the "Real" 24 ID.

Joe_D