HAMMER: Korea was the first war where the US Army rotated Soldiers in and out of theatre in significant numbers, a practice that has continued ever since. In doing practical and instructional knowledge is lost and lessons have to be re-learned, sometimes at great cost. How would you change the manner in which we now rotate Soldiers into different conflicts across the globe? Are the benefits worth the cost, when our enemies remain in place and continue to learn? What are the pros and cons of each system?

Specifically regarding the situation in Korea, I think the discussion of rotating units in and out of here revolves around this question: Are we, as an Army, preparing for a specific and seeming inevitable conflict with North Korea?

If the answer to that question is yes, then I fully believe that we need to have a permanent party unit replace and assume all responsibilities that the rotational brigades have undertaken over the past several years.  Why would you continuously swap experience and lessons learned from training on the ground you would fight every nine months for a brand new brigade that has to start the process all over again and will experience the same pains regarding maintenance and readiness as the previous brigade did? It just makes more sense to keep a brigade stationed here to avoid that loss of knowledge.  One never knows when a hot war might start. Who’s to say it won’t start the day of a future RIP/TOA between brigades? Having a brigade here permanently would avoid any potential disaster that might come of that, because the duties and responsibilities are enduring.  Consistency is key, and with rotating units preparing for specific conflict, you don’t achieve consistency at all. If the answer is no, which is admittedly far fetched, then I believe rotations would be appropriate, and a good opportunity for training and preparing for future world conflicts. However, the cons definitely outweigh the pros if the Army is trying to accomplish both of these goals of preparing to fight NK and preparing for unknown future conflict at the same time.

When talking about rotations in and out of actual combat, I believe the rotations are a good balance of maintaining effective combat power while preventing combat fatigue from consuming entire brigades, that could otherwise be locked in combat operations for years.