Considering a Cadre Augmented Army - RAND Corporation

-35- A Budgetary Analysis of Cadre
augmented force only increases risk in the early periods of a war while cadre units are
mobilizing. The cost savings from cadre are sensitive to the length of war. The longer a war
is, the larger the fraction of time that cadre units are mobilized. We explore this sensitivity in
Chapter Three by holding constant the time horizon and varying the length of war.
1.4.3—Deterministic Force Demand
The LWAM also assumes that wars occur according to a deterministic process. We
attempted to model cadre units stochastically using the RAND SLAM Model 20 (see
Appendix C) but model limitations prevented us from utilizing this model to perform all of
the analyses in this paper. For the same force structure alternatives analyzed in this paper, we
found that the risk calculated by the stochastic model is higher than that calculated by the
deterministic model. We attribute part of the increase to the fact that some wars will occur
with little gap in a stochastic model while all wars will occur with twenty years in between in
the deterministic model. AC units experience significant stress in back-to-back wars because
cadre units are demobilized and must go through the full mobilization process again before
they can be deployed. Therefore, the stress calculated in this paper may be slightly underestimated.
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1.5—OUTLINE
The remainder of this paper analyzes the attractiveness of a cadre augmented force
in terms of cost and military risk. The second chapter calculates the cost and risk from a
cadre augmented force under a baseline set of assumptions. Chapters Three through Seven
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20 Klerman et al (2008)
21 We do not attribute the entire increase in risk to the stochastic process because there are other significant
modeling differences that could also be causing these discrepancies. See Appendix C for more detail.