Vietnam War: The Individual Rotation Policy

By Mark DePu | Vietnam  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Westmoreland asserted that it’spread the burden of a long war over a broader spectrum of both Army Regulars and American draftees…I hoped it would extend the nation’s staying power by forestalling public pressure to ‘bring the boys home.” The one-year rotation policy satisfied not only the generals’ sense of fairness, but also appealed to the American public, concerned as they were with minimizing the danger to their own sons.

But this logic only went so far, for the draft, by design, excluded large segments of the available population, most notably college students, those who were married and those serving in the Reserve and National Guard. These exemptions eventually spawned criticism that the Army fought its war with the nation’s poor and dispossessed.

Another reason frequently cited by the two generals when asked to explain the rotation policy was the psychological comfort that soldiers gained from knowing their DEROS date. General Johnson told an interviewer that ‘the boost of individual morale that this policy gave…warranted and merited the one-year policy.’ Soldiers ‘need something to look forward to,’ he insisted. ‘I think that this is just a part of human nature.’ Westmoreland noted that it was ‘politically impossible’ to do otherwise, and that the existing policy was ‘good for morale.’

Senior leaders also justified the policy by insisting it countered the burnout factor that plagued the Army in World War II, when troops were in for ‘the duration.’ ‘A man began to wear out after about five months,’ General Johnson explained when interviewed in 1973. ‘He just [got] to the point of exhaustion.’ His views were based both on his own World War II experiences as a survivor of the Bataan Death March and a Japanese prison camp, and on several post–World War II rotation studies that pegged a soldier’s burnout point at 180 days. The Army’s inability to rotate personnel during World War II ‘resulted in an enormous number of battlefield fatigue cases,’ wrote Johnson. ‘The people just break down under that kind of unremitting pressure.’ The issue of burnout, therefore, resonated among the World War II veterans — the men who shaped the Army’s personnel policies in the 1960s.

Strategic planners also made other arguments for the policy, arguments rarely heard by the American public. Since the Reserves and National Guard were not mobilized, Pentagon staffers asserted, there simply were not enough units in the Army to sustain a unit-based rotation policy. The individual rotation policy took far fewer soldiers to maintain than one based on units rotating in and out of theater. The downside, however, was that personnel managers robbed units in Europe and Korea in order to feed the beast in Vietnam, leading to a precipitous decline in unit readiness.

Logic that was driven by the Cold War played out in another way as well. Since the overarching concern of Pentagon planners was the mammoth Soviet army in Europe arrayed against the United States and its NATO allies, the generals sought ways to prepare the Army for World War III. Thus, when Westmoreland opted for the six-month command rotation for young officers in 1965, he based part of his rationale on the assumption that the war in Vietnam would not be a protracted one. In the meantime, he chose to rotate the Army’s future leaders through command and staff positions in Vietnam in order to expand the pool of experienced leaders in the event of a confrontation with the Soviets. Indeed, it was the clash with the Soviets for which strategists had saved the Reserve and National Guard.

In more candid moments, many senior leaders advanced one more argument in support of six-month command rotations. The policy enhanced the career potential of the Army’s future leaders, they asserted, at the same time that it created a large pool of experienced personnel. It was this claim that exposed the Army to charges that it had unwittingly created an atmosphere that encouraged personal self-interest in the officer corps. For many young lieutenants and captains, managing their careers became more important than battlefield success or victory in the war.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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