Considering a Cadre Augmented Army - RAND Corporation

-203- An Operational Analysis of Cadre
5. WARTIME CADRE UNITS
“We believe that availability for deployment (of cadre units) is dependent upon the time it
takes to fill and train the unit and not the component (in which the cadre are retained).”
- Army Secretary Michael Stone in Letter to House Armed Services Committee 106
The first paper in this dissertation assumed that the first cadre unit will be ready to
deploy thirty-six months after the beginning of a war. We also assumed that after the war is
over, cadre units would be demobilized as quickly as possible. There are a number of steps
required to mobilize and demobilize a cadre unit. We split the wartime state of a cadre unit
into five stages: deliberation, filling, training, deployment, and demobilization. This chapter
discusses concerns related to activating, filling, training, and demobilizing cadre units during
wartime. 107
5.1—ACTIVATION
Before a cadre unit is mobilized, it must be activated. Delays in activation can
significantly reduce the attractiveness of a cadre augmented force. In the first paper of this
dissertation, we showed that the longer the mobilization delay, the lower the cost savings
from a cadre augmented force. Additionally, the need to activate cadre units early on, when
the need for them is uncertain, creates an additional risk to the DoD that it may not have
enough forces available when needed.
There are a number of ways in which cadre units could be activated depending on
the way in which cadre units are authorized in law. In this section, we consider two
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106 Tice (1991a)
107 The deployment stage is no different for a cadre unit than any other unit and is therefore not addressed in
this chapter.