Gen. Ray Odierno Seeks to Reshape Training and Deployment for Soldiers WASHINGTON - Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army's top officer, is beginning initiatives to reshape the way many soldiers are trained and deployed, with some conventional units placed officially under Special Operations commanders and others assigned to regions of the world viewed as emerging security risks, particularly in Africa. The changes reflect an effort to institutionalize many of the successful tactics adopted ad hoc in Afghanistan and Iraq. And as the Army shrinks by 80,000 troops over the next five years, General Odierno also is seeking ways to assure that the land force is prepared for a broader set of missions - and in hots pots around the globe where few soldiers have deployed in the past. General Odierno's initiatives are a recognition that the role - and clout - of Special Operations forces is certain to grow over coming years, and senior Pentagon policy makers briefed on the plans say they are fully in keeping with the new military strategy announced early this year by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With cuts ordered in the Pentagon budget - and cognizant of public exhaustion with large overseas deployments - the military will focus on working with partner nations to increase their capabilities to deal with security threats within their borders. The goal would be to limit the footprint of most new overseas deployments. Those scenarios would reflect a shift from conventional forces to Special Operations forces, and General Odierno's plans would increase the support of Army general-purpose units to those types of missions. Creating new sets of formal relationships between Army general-purpose units and the Special Operations Command would be a significant change in Army culture. For more than a generation, the large, conventional Army and the small, secretive commando community viewed each other from a distance, and with distrust. Armor and infantry units trained and operated separately from counterterrorism and counterinsurgency teams. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed that. The demands of combining high-end conventional combat and counterinsurgency missions for complementary and overlapping missions in Afghanistan and Iraq pushed conventional and Special Operations forces together. General Odierno, who now serves as Army chief of staff, oversaw many of those tactical initiatives firsthand. He was a division commander in northern Iraq when Saddam Hussein was captured there in a mission that combined armored units and the elite counterterrorism force. And during his tours as the No. 2 and then the top commander in Iraq, he integrated conventional and Special Operations missions on a daily basis. Under the emerging plans, conventional Army units would train alongside Special Operations units, and would deploy with them, under their command, on overseas missions. Other units would remain in the conventional force, but would be told in advance that their deployments would focus on parts of the world, like Africa, that do not currently have Army units assigned to them. This would allow officers and soldiers to develop regional expertise. General Odierno foreshadowed his planning in an essay published last week in Foreign Affairs, in which he wrote that "the Army will need to preserve and enhance its relationship with joint Special Operations forces." "The evolution of this partnership over the past decade has been extraordinary, and the ties can become even stronger as we continue to develop new operational concepts, enhance our training and invest in new capabilities," he wrote. On the effort to prepare Army units with a regional focus, General Odierno wrote, "We must align our forces, both active and reserve, with regional commands to the greatest extent possible." The military's global combatant commanders would guide whether the units focused on high-end combat skills, disaster relief or training missions to improve the capability of militaries within partner nations. "Regional alignment will also help inform the language training, cultural training and even the equipment that units receive," General Odierno wrote.