Reed,

Have enjoyed your post so far and appreciate your position. I did 5 1/2 years active, then spent a stint in the NG, before coming back on active duty.

The Army had the solution to the personnel turnover problem. It was being implemented when OIF became more than a single 6-month deployment for us all. The Unit Manning process would have locked personnel into a brigade for 3 years. No moves out, and people were going to be encouraged to do a second 3-year stint if the timing was right. This meant that for 3 years, a brigade would have the same people on board. After 6-9 months of a deliberate train-up, culminating in a CTC rotation, the brigade was ready for deployment.

A brigade, once it had completed training and certified for deployment, was now ready to focus on advanced skills. For a heavy brigade, I can imagine this would have included more advanced fieldcraft, maneuver operations at the battalion and brigade level, large-scale combined arms breaching, MOUT under more realistic conditions, advanced live fire training, etc.

Not every brigade would be ready as during the early part of the 6-9 months of standing up, a lot of fire team, squad and platoon training would have to be conducted. However, in the aggregate, we would have more units ready. For instance, 4 brigades in a division, spread over 4 different start points, would end up this way: The 'senior' unit, in its 33d month of activity, would, in the event of a major incident, forego standing down. It is ready for deployment right now. The middle unit, at the 24 month mark, is also ready and can deploy immediately, having been conducting advanced training for quite a while. The next brigade, having been together for 15 months, should have just finished its certification training 4-6 months ago. It is also ready. Finally, the 4th brigade, having just started its training 6 months ago, will probably not be ready for at least 30-60 days. This shows a single division's 4 brigades, with 9 months staggered resets. Even with a brigade that just stood down, 3 brigades are ready to go and the 4th must start training with new soldiers/leadership immediately, with a condensed training cycle to get them in the fight in 4 months or so.

ARFORGEN and OIF killed this. When a brigade is spending 12 months in Iraq, then 12 months at home, before going back again, typical command timelines for BDE and BN commanders became 2 years. This is part of the out-of-sync feeling the Army has right now.

I will not say this will solve all the Army's woes - an interest in quality training versus lots of watered-down iterations is something the Army hasn't grasped yet. And a lot of the support units won't fall into this cycle. But I think it was going to be a really good start.

Hopefully the power holders at HRC didn't kill the unit manning concept. Once our optempo slows, we have to get this back. 3ID and 101st did do this briefly before the war kicked in on second tours for them. I love the idea of having Soldiers who are studs and know it, confident in their abilities and the hard, advanced training they have experienced. As an OC at the NTC, I have often (only 1/2 jokingly) referred to the NTC as the National PLATOON Training Center, based on the level of training some units arrived there at. We are starting to get beyond that now as dwell time increases.

Tankersteve