Considering a Cadre Augmented Army - RAND Corporation

-147- An Operational Analysis of Cadre
assume that cadre leaders could be assigned other duties or retained in the reserves given
that they would have a significant amount of time (years) to hone their leadership skills
before deploying. We assume that all cadre leaders retained in the AC would be rotated
through cadre leadership positions as they are through staff and line positions but that cadre
leaders in the reserves would remain assigned to cadre units for the duration of their service.
The final peacetime cadre unit concern is how much equipment to assign to cadre
units. Cadre units could be assigned less equipment than AC units because they would have
many years to acquire equipment before deploying. We explore the general tradeoffs
between three options for equipping cadre units: full equipment sets, rotational equipment
sets, and relying upon the industrial base. Due to a lack of data, we ignored equipment costs
in the first paper. In this paper, we consider only the qualitative differences between
different equipment alternatives. Full equipment sets have the highest cost of the three
options examined. However, rotational equipment sets and relying upon the industrial base
both increase the risk that a unit will not have the equipment they need when they are ready
to deploy.
1.2—WARTIME CONCERNS
Cadre wartime issues can be split into five stages that are shown in Figure 1.1 along
with the durations we assumed in our base case analysis in Paper I.