By Brig. Gen. John S. Brown, U.S. Army retired

The first brigade to pass through the three-year life-cycle manning system (the former 172nd Stryker Brigade, Fort Wainwright, Alaska) is back from Iraq and, understandably, the object of considerable scrutiny. Reviews are mixed. The avowed goal, unit cohesion, was certainly achieved, as were high standards of mission performance. The debit side included such impediments to individual professional development as newly promoted sergeants with nowhere to serve as NCOs, schools and positions deferred or denied and skewed rank structures disproportionately junior at the beginning and disproportionately senior at the end. Three years is a long time. Life-cycle manning seems a success, but will nevertheless require adjusting if it is not to go the way of Long Thrust, Gyroscope, Ovurep, Rotaplan, Brigade 75, COHORT and other worthy attempts at unit stabilization that ultimately proved too costly to the individuals within them and to the Army as a whole. We do need to be mindful of historical precedent: no manning system can suit all circumstances.

Our 19th-century, Indian-fighting Army had features common to life-cycle manning. Soldiers were in their regiments for a long time, generally for the duration of their service. Units—almost always smaller than regiments—deployed and redeployed as a whole, moving with what families they had from one frontier post to another as circumstances required. Promotions and schooling were less of an issue then than they are today, and neither happened often. In the crucible of frontier duty, units developed impressive effectiveness and cohesion. Many of our contemporary cavalry lineages are replete with the lore and esprit of this era. One reason the system worked as well as it did is that although service was rigorous, combat was episodic and casualties relatively few. Soldiers could reasonably anticipate serving an entire year with the same comrades. This feature, too, they share with our brigade recently returned from Iraq.

The 19th-century regimental system worked far less well when exposed to high casualties. During the Civil War, volunteer regiments raised by the states too often wore down to ineffectiveness in the face of horrific casualties, only to be replaced by green regiments that suffered horrific casualties in turn because of their combat inexperience. The state of Wisconsin adopted a policy of individual replacement, feeding new troops into the structure provided by depleted but experienced units. The experiment worked. Civil War combat was generally sporadic, and in the intervals between battles, surviving veterans taught the new troops what they needed to know to survive and succeed. The Wisconsin model was widely admired, occasionally emulated and often influential in the thinking of later theorists. After the Civil War the earlier regimental system reemerged and succeeded because, once again, combat was occasional and casualties relatively few.

The drain of fighting in the Philippines inspired a transition to individual replacement. The issue was not so much losses in battle as losses to disease, geographical distances and the concern that units with local cultural familiarity not be abruptly moved. Circumstances in the Philippines differed considerably from island to island, and continuity was best maintained if soldiers cycled through units in such a manner that old hands were always present to bring newcomers up to speed.

By World War I individual replacement was pervasive as policy for sustaining units overseas, and it adapted to the demands of the Western Front. Most armies introduced systems of rotation. Ideally, battalions alternated between frontline duty, support, reserve and rest and rehabilitation. There was a certain industrial aspect to the slaughter as units absorbed, trained and integrated replacements in rear areas before they deployed into the forward trenches and then migrated through stages to the rear to begin the cycle all over again. This system worked well when the situation was static and there was an ample supply of units to rotate. Orderliness broke down, however, when major offensives created operational fluidity. Too often, units were broken up to provide individual replacements to others because there was no system to generate individual replacements on the scale needed during severe combat.

During World War II the U.S. Army developed an individual replacement system that allowed it to sustain units in combat without rotation. By that time, major units were so complex and carried so much overhead that rotation was often not practical. The United States gambled that 90 divisions properly sustained could outperform the hundreds of divisions other nations would have organized from a similar manpower pool. An individual replacement system trained vast numbers of new soldiers for subsequent assignment to units already deployed. On balance, the gamble was a success. In the Pacific and the Mediterranean, combat was generally infrequent enough that replacements could be fed in to learn the ropes from veterans during slow times. Fighting was more often a grind in Europe, where green replacements too often became casualties before they properly integrated into their units. For all its flaws, however, the individual replacement system proved a superior way to sustain combat effective divisions. Time and again American divisions wore out their German counterparts, which implemented unit rotational schemes.

In Korea and Vietnam, general officers who had seen the carnage of World War II continued to rely on individual replacements. They believed most frontline soldiers would become psychiatric casualties if exposed to more than a year of combat, but they also recognized that rotating major headquarters in and out of combat was too disruptive. They favored a system wherein there were always some old hands available to sustain local familiarity and continuity, and to train the newly arrived.

With life-cycle manning we have set aside the Civil War, World War I and World War II and returned to our 19th-century roots. This can work, as long as combat remains episodic and casualties relatively few. Increased effectiveness with respect to unit cohesion will trump increased inefficiency with respect to personnel allocation. We should preserve our appreciation and understanding of individual replacement, however. Should we encounter truly lethal adversaries, we may need to return to it.


Recommended Reading:

Brown, John Sloan, Draftee Division: The 88th Infantry Division in World War II (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986)

Kriedberg, Marvin A. and Henry, Merton G., History of Military Mobilization in the United States Army, 1775-1945 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1955)

Rush, Robert S., Hell in Hurtgen Forest: The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2001)