Vietnam War: The Individual Rotation Policy

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

As combat veterans Richard Gabriel and Paul Savage stated in their 1978 book, ‘command positions came to be valued not for the purpose of producing effective fighting units, but as a ‘ticket’ that had to be punched in order to sustain the drive toward career advancement.’ David Hackworth, perhaps the most vocal of the postwar critics, referred to it as the ‘command musical-chairs rotation policy,’ arguing that it led to a perversion of Army values. The quintessentially American emphasis on the individual had replaced the soldier’s ethos of selfless service, an ethos that called for soldiers to subordinate their own selfish interests to the welfare of the group.

By the end of the war, there was a profusion of voices willing to condemn the stupidity and the destructive aspects of the rotation policy. The most common criticism was that it impaired unit cohesion and therefore contributed to the Army’s declining performance on the battlefield. It eroded the soldier’s will to win, said the critics, and replaced it with an all-consuming focus to survive to the end of his tour. As another critic wrote, there was ‘an unspoken compact between ‘lifers’ and ‘grunts.’ The rules were simple — stay alive, finish your year, and go home.’ In other words, take no risks. The Army’s rotation policy had eroded the soldier’s bond with his unit, and replaced it with self-preservation.

The most scathing criticisms, however, focused on the policy that rotated officers through six-month command tours. That policy, plus the inevitable casualty rate among the Army’s inexperienced young officers, many of whom were ‘90-Day Wonders’ (untested products of Officer Candidate School), led to an alarmingly high turnover rate for platoon leaders and company commanders. In combat units where leadership experience and a sense of camaraderie were inexorably entwined with unit cohesion, and where unit cohesion marked the difference between success and bloody failure on the battlefield, the rapid turnover of officers was devastating. One young grunt’s experience was all too typical. ‘During my year in-country I had five second lieutenant platoon leaders and four company commanders….We were more experienced than any of them. Yet they acted like little gods.’

Lieutenant Colonel David Holmes, writing in Military Review a few years after the war, asserted that ‘the short tour policy…undoubtedly contributed to the instances of mutiny, corruption, drug abuse and fragging.’ Another more senior officer was even more blunt, calling the six-month command tour ‘the worst personnel policy in history.’ With that, they laid much of the blame for the Army’s rot in the waning years of the Vietnam War squarely at the feet of the senior brass. They were at fault, so the argument went, because of their ‘flawed’ rotation policies. It was, to use the soldiers’ own vernacular, a self-inflicted wound.

Why was the military during the Vietnam War so strongly committed to a personnel rotation policy that proved, in retrospect, so detrimental to the war effort and today is almost universally denounced by the veterans themselves? Ultimately, the military’s rotation policies were driven by the nation’s Selective Service legislation that limited draftees to a two-year tour of duty. Once a recruit was trained and shipped to the theater, soldiers had little more than a year remaining to serve. Congress had opted for a 24-month tour of duty for draftees during the Korean War because of the public’s traditional concern for equity and fairness — it was a policy in concert with the spirit of the American people.

And when President Johnson decided in 1965 not to mobilize the Reserve and National Guard units, relying instead on the Regulars, he essentially eliminated the Army’s ability to rotate units through the war zone. Military planners were left with little choice but to rotate individual soldiers. Johnson’s decision was inherently a political one; specifically, he feared that a debate on mobilizing the Reserves might undermine his domestic agenda. While Johnson’s decision protected America’s traditional citizen-soldiers from overseas duty, however, they soon found themselves fighting the war on a different front — on America’s streets and college campuses.

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

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