Forward troops: the obvious and the trivial

Both Stars & Stripes and Army Times recently published stories about an upcoming War College report which concludes that rotating units overseas are more expensive than permanently basing them there.

War College professor John Deni's report — titled “Rotational Deployments vs. Forward Stationing” -- examined the cost of unit rotations in Europe and South Korea over several years, finding that the decades-old Department of Defense policy of troop rotations is inefficient, according to Stars and Stripes.

I'm glad the issue is being discussed, but to Army logistics officers like me, this comes as no surprise at all. It's only natural that the cost of transporting a unit overseas would be more than simply reassigning personnel to travel there individually.

Yet describing individual tours as "more efficient" in terms of government expense completely misses the point. The Army doesn't concern itself with what's efficient. If you wanted an "efficient" Army, you would only have as much Army as is currently necessary to put down revolts, and you'd only enlist people when there's a big war. This is how the U.S. approached things in the 19th Century.

However, that's not how standing armies work. Efficiency is a lower priority compared to readiness, redundancy, and "training value."

For example, soldiers have to qualify on their weapons once a year, even though most of us never have cause to fire them in combat. You could argue that it's very inefficient, but it's more important to be ready to fight the nation's wars at a moment's notice.

Redundancy is also key. At any given point, the Army has many different brigades in varying stages of readiness at any given point. This may be inefficient, but you never know what kind of emergency might come up that would require one brigade to deploy instead of another.

Finally, there's "training value" to consider. The Army participates in a number of foreign exercises every year from Europe to Asia. These help build familiarity with U.S. forces, and help maintain a U.S. presence overseas without dropping hundred of millions of dollars into a permanent presence, but they're not very efficient. Because of the reassignment cycle, U.S. soldiers cycle in and out of the participating units almost constantly, limiting the ability of the unit to manage knowledge. But this is immaterial because of the "training value" inherent to simply participating.

Money matters aside, rotational units offer a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Rather than rotating soldiers in and out individually, rotational brigades come into the host country completely deployment ready with the full set of skills. And given the way just about everyone stays for entire time, you never have to worry about bringing a "new guy" up to speed.

And with the fewer rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan these days, rotational deployments (and exercises like Pacific Pathways) allow the Army to maintain its deployment skills. (This may seem inconsequential, but true power projection is not a universal quality across the world's armies.)

On the other hand, rotational units suffer from lower reenlistment rates (no family is allowed to accompany them on the deployment), and they are not as effective in navigating local practices. For example, units in Korea typically have to request clearance before transporting ammunition to firing ranges -- a practice that rotational units must each be reminded if in order to avoid an international incident.

The line that struck me most from the Stars & Stripes articles was, "A U.S.-based armored brigade rotating to Europe costs about $1.19 billion compared with $1.05 billion to position that brigade in Germany." On the face of it, that's a mere 13 percent difference, but it makes me question how the terms are defined. Is the $1.19 billion a recurring cost for a single brigade for the typical nine months? And is the $1.05 billion "positioning cost" just a one-time expense? If so, that's a far deeper dimension to the discussion than would initially appear.

If it really is just a 13 percent difference, then it's better to focus less on which method of providing front line troops to overseas theaters is more efficient, and look more at the above-mentioned qualitative differences. We logisticians always knew rotational troops would be more expensive; the real question is, "Is it worth it?"