The decision to put a Stryker Bde in Hawaii never made sense to me in the first place. Even with the proposed increases in training areas, there will never be enough to support the brigade. Plus, you have very high shipping costs every time the brigade needs to deploy or go to the Mainland. But, it was a political decision, IMO.
Perhaps the Envirowackos are doing the Army a favor, providing an excuse to fix a mistake.
Well, room to train is one thing, and maybe they can only train a BN at a time, but the shipping thing makes perfect sense to me. I'm sure it cost plenty to ship my Stryker from Lewis to Kuwait. It also took a long time. Shipping from Hawaii would be that much faster/cheaper, I would imagine.
The other part that caught my eye here was the "must be deployable by November" line. That's only about 10 months from now. If these enviro-whackjobs and bureaucrats actually move them to Knox, you're talking probably about 3 or so of those 10 months gone, solely devoted to packing, moving, and resettling into a new permanent home station. So that leaves about 7 or so months to go from 60% transformed to fully deployable in-theater. Not a chance. CAN it be done? Sure. The Cav BDE that replaced my Stryker BDE in Mosul had only been stood up about 9 months prior. Were they nearly as good as my BDE who had combat vet NCOs and well-trained Soldiers (we had about an 18 month train-up)? Not even in the same league as us. So while it can be done, it is a really bad idea to try to rush that sort of thing. But what do I know? According to a lot of decision makers, rank and wisdom are directly proportional, which makes me very unwise...