Warriors in Peace Operations - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

that never stopped, as the demands always exceeded the
personnel resources. Projected inbounds from the corps
headquarters always looked likely, but rarely, if ever, did all
the soldiers show up. So the S-1 had to talk daily with the
Corps G-1, scrubbing the list to ensure diverted soldiers
were found and/or replaced. This was an essential task that
had to be done every day. Daily conversations or e-mail with
the deployed S-1 decided whether a new soldier would be
sent down to them or stay in one of the Germany-based
units. Eventually a decision was reached, and,as expected,
it normally benefited the deployed units. Those units that
did not deploy always suffered from a significant lack of
personnel. The corps blamed the personnel shortfalls on an
inaccurate Standard Installation Database for Personnel
(SIDPERS), and we spent untold hours purging the system
with our local Personnel Detachment. But in the end we
were something less than successful because external
powers kept adding erroneous data, and we could never
totally clean it up.
Another bane to the daily existence of the S-1 was the
unending number of personnel actions and awards that
kept flowing in. At first, they came not only from the units in
the rear but also from the deployed units. That stopped
when the personnel and finance units finally deployed and
became operational. But the remaining administrative load
quickly overwhelmed the abilities of the S-1 staff. This was
an emotional issue throughout the deployment, as my small
S-1 staff was not able to process all of those personnel
actions in a timely manner. We did the best we could and
eventually eliminated the backlog. But it was not easy, and,
unfortunately, we did not take care of some soldiers the way
they should have been.
Although not a vital position, the administrative
specialist running the S-2 section was kept busy just trying
to verify the security clearances of incoming soldiers to the
brigade and monitoring soldiers who needed to complete
their periodic security clearance updates. This soldier also
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