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The headquarters of the U.S. Army Materiel Command on Redstone Arsenal. (Lee Roop/lroop@al.com)

None of the 13,000 Army civilian and uniformed workforce at Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal will be laid off because of downsizing announced by the Army today, a top Arsenal official said. But if a second round of cuts happens as now planned in Fiscal Year 2019, that will likely change.

"We're not going to be giving pink slips to individuals and saying, hey, you need to turn around and go home," Brig. Gen. Edward Daly, deputy chief of staff of the Army Materiel Command, told a press conference.

The Army will use a combination of natural attrition, early retirement, and unfilled positions to downsize Redstone over the next two fiscal years, Daly and other officials said. The number of positions going away won't be clear until September, Daly said, but it will not be significant.

"There should almost be no concern at this point, " Daly said.

The Arsenal has a total workforce of nearly 40,000 people. Of those, about 1,000 are uniformed Army, 12,000 are Department of the Army civilian workers, and the rest are employees or contractors of other federal agencies on the giant base, including the Department of Defense, NASA and other agencies.

The Army announced today that it is cutting 40,000 soldiers and 17,000 civilians as it lowers its troop level to 450,000 worldwide. Some American bases were hit hard, including San Antonio where an estimated 6,000 jobs are being lost.

Redstone Arsenal is a different case, Daly said. It is a federal center of excellence "with diverse and very critical capabilities for the government," he said, and that will reduce the impact of job cuts there.

The Army has also been planning for these cuts for several years as troop strength has dropped from the levels reached during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The budget reduction law known informally as "sequestration" has also driven this round of cuts and is now scheduled to shrink the Army to 420,000 troops in Fiscal Year 2019. The cuts announced today are definitely happening, Daly confirmed.

The Army will still have "a sufficient force that meets all of our current demands and prepares for contingencies and current timelines ," Daly said, but if the next round of cuts takes the Army down to 420,000, that "would put the Army at significant risk of not being able to execute its defense strategy." Those cuts are something Congress still has time to prevent if it wants.