Considering a Cadre Augmented Army - RAND Corporation

-136- A Budgetary Analysis of Cadre
possible reasons for this. The first reason is that two long wars can occur with very little time
in between in the RAND SLAM program while all units are assumed to be fully rested at the
beginning of a war in the LWAM model. Back-to-back wars would place a significant
amount of stress on the AC because cadre units would need to be remobilized 146 and many
RC units would also be inaccessible for deployment at the beginning of the second war. The
second possible reason is that there are differences in the assignment algorithms between
SLAM and the LWAM. Once a unit is deployed in the LWAM model, it is deployed for as
long as the maximum deployment specified for that force. A unit deployed in the SLAM
model can be deployed for any period of time depending on the number of look-ahead
periods and the assignment rule. 147 In the LWAM, this means that once a unit is deployed at
the beginning of a war, it is deployed for as long as possible after which a replacement unit is
deployed. In the SLAM model, some of the units deployed at the beginning of a long war are
only deployed for short tours because the SLAM model “thinks” that the war will not last
very long. This leads to increased stress on the AC because those units deployed for short
tours at the beginning of the war will be called upon for redeployment sooner than they
would have been if they had been deployed for the maximum deployment length.
This section has compared the analyses performed in Chapter Two with the LWAM
with similar analyses carried out with the RAND SLAM program. We find that the cost
results are almost identical. However, we also find that the SLAM model calculates a much
higher level of stress on the AC than the LWAM. This may be due to both the stochastic
nature of the SLAM model and differences in the force assignment algorithms.
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146 Once cadre units are demobilized in the SLAM model, they require the full 36 months to be remobilized.
This is an unrealistic assumption, but is required for modeling purposes.
147 See Appendix D of Klerman et al (2008) for a discussion of SLAM assignment rules.