Vietnam War: The Individual Rotation Policy

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

Second Lieutenant James McDonough was about as green as you can get when he arrived in South Vietnam in 1970. A 1969 West Point graduate, McDonough spent the next year attending the Infantry Basic Course and then Ranger School before shipping out. He arrived in the remote village of Truong Lam, located only three kilometers from the North China Sea, both excited and apprehensive.

McDonough was the new leader for 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company, 4th Battalion, 503rd Infantry of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He choppered into the platoon’s isolated defensive position near the village of Truong Lam as dusk descended; hethen made his way to the platoon leader’s bunker where, according to McDonough, he found the man he was to replace ‘lying on his stomach in a depression….As I bent over to introduce myself he motioned for me to get down.’ McDonough spent most of the night talking to the lieutenant, neither one venturing out from the relative safety of the platoon leader’s command post. Eventually, his counterpart ‘homed in on his point….’I could have been a hero. Sometimes I even wanted to be. But I had to think of my family. You see, don’t you? Most of these boys don’t have any family. They’re just boys.” It was his way of rationalizing why he had spent his entire six-month tour avoiding combat. His troops had not mattered — victory had not mattered. All that mattered to the lieutenant was to survive for six months.

McDonough was determined to lead his men, and did so in an exemplary manner, first relying on the seasoned NCOs in the platoon, and gradually finding his own way as the platoon’s leader. But six months later McDonough also rotated out, leaving the men to a new platoon leader, also untested in combat. The motive for the Army’s policy that rotated leaders every six months, McDonough later wrote in his book Platoon Leader, ‘must have been to ensure proper exposure of all military leaders to the only war the Americans had…(but) the six month rotation of officers was predicated on the assumption that Vietnam would be a short war.’ Instead, it was the nation’s longest war, ‘but once a bureaucracy as large as the U.S. Army set a rule in place, it is almost beyond the power of mortal man to change it.’

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army used a personnel rotation policy that at first blush defies military logic. The Army rotated soldiers through Vietnam on one-year tours. Officers also spent a year in country, but only six of those months were in a troop command.

In a profession where unit cohesion, combat experience and competent leadership mark the difference between victory and defeat, the Army’s rotation policy made little sense to those who lived through it. Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army, written by Major Richard A. Gabriel and Lt. Col. Paul L. Savage, was one of the more thoroughgoing and insightful indictments leveled against the Army in the years following the war. ‘The rotation policies operative in Vietnam,’ Gabriel and Savage argued, ‘virtually foreclosed the possibility of establishing fighting units with a sense of identity, morale, and strong cohesiveness….Not only did the rotation policy foreclose the possibility of developing a sense of unit integrity and responsibility, but it also ensured a continuing supply of low quality, inexperienced officers at the point of greatest stress in any army, namely in its combat units.’

The policy of rotating junior officers through command positions every six months was particularly destabilizing, they asserted, and led to an institutional climate where ‘career management becomes the ultimate means to the ultimate value — promotion. The cumulative impact…has been to bring about the rise…of the ‘officer as entrepreneur,’ the man adept at managing his own career by manipulating the system, mastering its technology…having his ‘ticket punched’ and achieving the ‘right’ assignments.’

Many others echoed similar criticisms. John Paul Vann, the Army’s maverick warrior-savant during the Vietnam War, commented derisively that ‘the United States has not been in Vietnam for nine years, but for one year nine times.’

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

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