Considering a Cadre Augmented Army - RAND Corporation

-23- A Budgetary Analysis of Cadre
be about 20 percent of an AC unit. 1 See Chapter’s Two through Four of Paper II for a more
complete discussion of these issues.
1.1.2—Wartime Cadre Units
We split the wartime state of a cadre unit into five stages: deliberate, fill, train,
deploy, and demobilize as shown in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1—Cadre Wartime Stages
The deliberate period is when national leaders debate whether to activate cadre units.
Activation has a different meaning for cadre units than it does for RC units. Activating an
RC unit means brining its personnel onto active duty and training them. Activating a cadre
unit means filling the unit with junior personnel and training them. 2 In the base case analysis,
we assume that the deliberation process would take about 12 months after the initial
deployment of forces. 3 After it is decided that cadre units should be activated, the next two
stages fill cadre units with junior personnel and train them for deployment. In the base case
analysis, we assume this would take about two years- four months to fill and 20 months to
train. The mobilization period is followed by the deployment period, which we assume lasts
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1 See discussion of peacetime cost in Section 1.3.2 for more detail.
2 For all cadre unit types, activation requires increasing end-strength. Other actions required to activate a cadre
unit that are dependent on unit type are: increasing promotion rates, activating IRR personnel, increasing
equipment production, brining cadre leaders onto active duty, and training cadre leaders.
3 One might imagine that for military operations with sufficient warning time, the cadre mobilization process
could begin even earlier (even before D-day). See Vick et al (2002), p. 57-78, for a good discussion of U.S.
experiences with warning time. However, because cadre units are only needed for long wars, it seems fair to
assume that decision-makers will be unable to determine whether cadre units are needed until initial forces have
been deployed and there is a sense about the type of follow-on operations that might be needed.