Having spent time serving in the Iron Brigade it is a bit sad to see it deactivate:
A woman pauses to watch personnel carriers and tanks from the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment and 1st Battalion, 72nd Armored Regiment that were participating in an exercise on Korea’s western front on Dec. 23, 1966. On July 2, 2015, units belonging to the 2nd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team will inactivate, marking the end of more than 50 years on the peninsula.
A unit that has guarded the Korean peninsula’s tense border for five decades has been inactivated and replaced with the Army’s first rotational brigade combat team deployed to the area.
The 2nd Infantry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team — known as the “Iron Brigade” — was inactivated Thursday morning during a ceremony at Camp Casey. Assuming its responsibilities is the Fort Hood-based 1st Calvary Division’s 2nd “Black Jack” Brigade Combat Team, which is in Area 1 on a nine-month deployment.
Military officials have touted the move to rotational deployments of units stationed along the Demilitarized Zone as a way to maintain cohesion in a theater where constant turnover is the norm. Troops are typically stationed in South Korea on one- or two-year tours. But under the rotational deployment plan, entire units will train for and deploy to the peninsula together.
“I can tell you that when this transfer of authority takes place, our amount of readiness goes up,” said Gen. Theodore Martin, 2ID commander. Having intact rotational units deploy to the division also means he won’t see a turnover of about 10 percent of his forces each month, he said. [Stars & Stripes]
I served in 3rd Brigade during my time there, I understand the 10% turnover argument but at the same time, we were trained up quickly by both NCOs and junior enlisted we were replacing. Within a couple weeks of arriving, I was already in place and doing my job, when I was stateside after 2 weeks I was still trying to find the orderly room to in process it seems. My point is no one, except the guys in brigade that have served in Korea before have no institutional knowledge of serving on Freedom’s Frontier. The ‘villes will love it, all that fresh GI money to take, but I believe all in all it will hurt rather than enhance readiness.
Bruce K. Nivens
9 years ago
#1: I believe this has more to do with saving money than readiness. With a rotational deployment, they eliminate PCS for the affected soldiers. They rotate all of them in one big movement rather than bringing them over piecemeal on CAT Y and space-required MAC flights (do they still categorize them that way?). Since it is a deployment, there are no considerations of any kind for dependents or household goods, coming or going. For the rotational forces, Korea is being treated like a battle zone, rather than a change of station. This concept has been in the works for decades. I remember it being discussed when I served in Korea thirty years ago.
As for increased readiness, it sounds nice in theory but I don’t believe that is truly the case. I don’t see how rotating a major unit all at once every nine months makes it any more ready for battle in Korea than having a unit permanently in place with ten percent of its personnel in transition. If anything, all this will do is make the deployed soldiers more antsy about getting back to the U.S. than their previously PCSed predecessors.
One of the problems we faced with the hardship tours (one-year PCS) is that they were so short that many soldiers arrived with a short-timer’s attitude from the start. In our unit (WSD-K) we did everything we could to encourage extensions, usually by providing more leadership opportunities and pushing for early promotions. We also were supportive of soldiers who got married in Korea (a ticklish subject for other units), because those soldiers had a vested interest in the country and felt more at home there. That sense of living there — not just being deployed there — gave our soldiers more focus. It tended to mature them faster, which cut down on the amount of trouble they got into. The additional continuity it provided was invaluable, as we were tasked to provide support throughout the length and width of the country. Soldiers who knew the roads, terrain and other arcane facts about the country and its culture gave us an edge in being able to perform our mission.
I served in 3rd Brigade during my time there, I understand the 10% turnover argument but at the same time, we were trained up quickly by both NCOs and junior enlisted we were replacing. Within a couple weeks of arriving, I was already in place and doing my job, when I was stateside after 2 weeks I was still trying to find the orderly room to in process it seems. My point is no one, except the guys in brigade that have served in Korea before have no institutional knowledge of serving on Freedom’s Frontier. The ‘villes will love it, all that fresh GI money to take, but I believe all in all it will hurt rather than enhance readiness.
#1: I believe this has more to do with saving money than readiness. With a rotational deployment, they eliminate PCS for the affected soldiers. They rotate all of them in one big movement rather than bringing them over piecemeal on CAT Y and space-required MAC flights (do they still categorize them that way?). Since it is a deployment, there are no considerations of any kind for dependents or household goods, coming or going. For the rotational forces, Korea is being treated like a battle zone, rather than a change of station. This concept has been in the works for decades. I remember it being discussed when I served in Korea thirty years ago.
As for increased readiness, it sounds nice in theory but I don’t believe that is truly the case. I don’t see how rotating a major unit all at once every nine months makes it any more ready for battle in Korea than having a unit permanently in place with ten percent of its personnel in transition. If anything, all this will do is make the deployed soldiers more antsy about getting back to the U.S. than their previously PCSed predecessors.
One of the problems we faced with the hardship tours (one-year PCS) is that they were so short that many soldiers arrived with a short-timer’s attitude from the start. In our unit (WSD-K) we did everything we could to encourage extensions, usually by providing more leadership opportunities and pushing for early promotions. We also were supportive of soldiers who got married in Korea (a ticklish subject for other units), because those soldiers had a vested interest in the country and felt more at home there. That sense of living there — not just being deployed there — gave our soldiers more focus. It tended to mature them faster, which cut down on the amount of trouble they got into. The additional continuity it provided was invaluable, as we were tasked to provide support throughout the length and width of the country. Soldiers who knew the roads, terrain and other arcane facts about the country and its culture gave us an edge in being able to perform our mission.