Personnel stability is highly valued by all military forces, especially in combat units and other formations that deploy to a theater of operations. The Army in particular aims to maximize unit personnel stability—the degree to which a unit’s membership remains constant over time (White, 2002). Stability is viewed as particularly important as a unit prepares to go to war.

Yet deploying Reserve Component (RC) units typically experience a surge of personnel instability (often described as “turbulence”)—the departure of some unit members and their replacement by others who are cross-leveled into the unit to reach its target for deploying...

We now turn to analysis of our empirical data on stability and turbulence among RC unit leadership. In this chapter, we review overall rates of stability, the factors that generate instability, how those factors operate, and the prospects for policy actions to affect them.

Personnel stability means having a set of soldiers who have been assigned to the unit for a considerable period of time. Particularly when a unit is preparing for an expected deployment, it would be advantageous to have stability among the unit leadership over the period when crucial training occurs. Our review of premob training plans showed...

The foregoing results imply that units will face considerable personnel turnover—due to many different causes, with no single easy fix. Because we observe the same turnover among leaders, much of the leadership will not be present early on and therefore cannot supervise or train with their subordinates during most of the premob year (although some of the nondeploying leaders will have long tenure and can support training even if they do not deploy).

Is such instability likely to affect RC units’ ability to meet future mission demands? The answer hinges on the match between the timing of such demands...

The empirical data presented above are based on recent experience in RC deployments. However, the Army’s missions are changing as military forces draw down from continuing rotational operations in the Middle East. Current OSD planning guidance (DoD, 2012) suggests a coming reduction in tempo and curtailment of large-scale rotational deployments. That raises two questions: What future missions may require RC units, and how much time might those units have to prepare?

To address those questions, we reviewed OSD planning documents and service force generation constructs pertaining to potential future missions.¹ For RC units, those plans imply the following types of...

The analyses in this report yield two types of results and conclusions. First, we have empirical observations that quantify the extent of personnel turbulence in RC units, its sources, and its effects. Second, we have recommendations about DoD policy: whether turbulence should be regarded as a significant problem or risk, and, if so, how DoD might take steps to mitigate that risk. This chapter reviews information on those two topics and highlights their implications.

RC units approaching mobilization face notable levels of personnel turbulence among both unit leaders and their subordinates. This turbulence is manifested in two main ways.

First,...