Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
Interesting article, I had not seen it before. It is IMO quite accurate, if anything it understates the damage done by that policy though it does seem to have caught all of them. It was indeed the most flawed personnel policy ever -- and note, we're now rotating units instead of people, so we did learn a little in Viet Nam. Very little. Steve is essentially correct in that the 6 month Officer rotations were for ticket punching purposes though it was as the article saed justified by saying it gave more 'combat experience.' I could never figure how bei8ng the Exchange Officer in Da Nang was combat experience...
It is of course difficult to believe that the top echelon of general staff (who probably did WW2 and Korea) can prove to be so inept in either/or/both military policy decision making and/or dealing with politicians. Then of course once the freight train starts rolling not much can stop it so the insane rotation of 6-month of platoon commanders continues... as they say like the great Mississippi just keep rolling along.

OK, so were are we now?

SO we agree that deployments should be by unit... but for how long and what size units (by brigade or by battalion)?

Then do we agree that the formation/unit's stateside base provides the replacements?

Now we get to:

Army Unit Cohesion in Vietnam: A Bum Rap

Some interesting stuff there.

"Prolonged tours during World War II had a devastating effect on
troop morale and the neuro-psychiatric health of infantrymen in particular.
Combat in North Africa and in Italy clearly indicated that psychiatric
breakdown in combat units was not a question of who but when, a con-
clusion later substantiated in France and Germany. Based on European
theater casualty rates, postwar researchers determined that 180 days of
combat represented the "burn-out point" for infantry and other front-line
troops. Of equal note was the discovery that after 180 days the neuro-
psychiatric casualty rate of the survivors exceeded that of untested
replacements."

and

"Since a soldier could easily reach burn-out within a year, it
was detrimental to unit efficiency to subject individual personnel to long
tours. Not surprisingly there were 927,307 cases of "battle fatigue" in
World War II, of whom 320,000 were discharged. This exceeded the number
of combat deaths (292,131) ..."

and importantly:

"In contrast to critics of individual rotation in Vietnam, World War II writers considered such tours to be the only solution to high levels of neuro-psychiatric casualties. They did not regard it as detrimental to unit cohesion because in their experience the infantry population of European theater units had been in constant flux anyway. Such units suffered casualties equal to their total personnel authorizations every 85 to 100 days in combat! This meant that the typical infantry unit was "destroyed" at least twice a year. Fifth Army casualty rates, which were average for the European theater, substantiate this estimate. Its infantry battalions possessed less than 18 percent of their original soldiers after 180 days, the majority of whom were cooks, clerks, and other support personnel. Thus there was no point to rotating units because the originals had long ceased to after even one year."
As to the last quote I do realise that casualty rates as mentioned are no longer the norm so that argument probably falls away.