Considering a Cadre Augmented Army - RAND Corporation

-176- An Operational Analysis of Cadre
considered. This is a major drawback to foreign army training cadre units. Second, foreign
training duties distract cadre leaders from their responsibilities as leaders of the cadre unit.
Third, creating foreign training cadre units would require reorganizing the foreign army
training program. 54 Lastly, like all other cadre units, assignments to foreign training units may
not be attractive to officers. A major concern of many officers deployed to Iraq and
Afghanistan as part of advisory units is that these assignments will hurt their chances of
promotion. 55 This is an issue for all cadre units, but specific experiences with advisory units
in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the Army is slow to adapt its promotion policies to
new career paths.
3.2—CADRE WITHIN EXISTING FORCE STRUCTURE
An alternative to maintaining separate cadre units is to maintain cadre unit leaders
within the existing army organization. This type of cadre augmented force would maintain all
the personnel needed to lead cadre units, but they would not be organized into separate units
until a war occurred. In this type of force, cadre leaders could be maintained in a variety of
different ways. This section explores four ways that we might maintain cadre leaders without
maintaining separate cadre units in peacetime.
3.2.1—AC Units with Surplus Personnel (AC+)
The first way we might maintain cadre leaders in peacetime without creating separate
units is to assign surplus leaders to existing AC units. The cadre leaders would serve
alongside AC unit leaders and would have opportunities to train and lead the junior
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54 However, these changes would be no more significant than the proposal in Nagl (2007).
55 Tyson (2007)