to be fair, it is pretty rare that Roman centuries were ever deployed at full strength...
Yeah . . . no unit is ever really at institutional/OB/paper strength . . .
The irony is this . . . say you have four battalions assigned to a garrison post. None of them will be at full strength, instead splitting the intake of assigned replacements- either FNGs or transfers- and will in most cases have their full material strength though sometimes they will have weird holes in the TO&E. Preparing to go to Iraq in '03 I was told we would have a pair of M113s or Brads as gun guards for the battery HQ . . . they were not assigned b/c they were not directly related to our normal training, lol we had Humvees as tactical stand ins for the train up. We would also get more squad weapons- machine guns and auto grenade launchers. So non-deployed in garrison they try to keep the units near the same strength levels even if they are all understrength across the board.
Time to deploy? Alright . . . so out of you four battalions, we are going to send three and . . .
theoretically . . . they pick the top three performing battalions. I say theoretically because you got the BS of who plays the game better (Hello Lyrans). No matter what evaluation system for units and individuals is created people eventually figure out how to game the system. For instance, if your OER does not say that you taught Jesus to walk on water, can heal all your troopies hurts, and convinced all the troops to swear off alcohol & whores; then you are a truly suck-tastic officer. Why? Because you get idiots who are what are called point fairies in some circles- they are like Oprah to a 1-5 (5 being best) evaluation scale, 'You get a 5, and you get a 5, and YOU get a 5' rather than really evaluating a troop. Because if the evaluators subordinates merely meet the standard or are
below standard then it reflects negatively on the evaluator's leadership & ability to train.
So what happens when the call comes for 3 of the 4 battalions to deploy? Well, HOPEFULLY their boss knows who really can do the job and who cannot . . . but they get fed bad information from the bottom on up so . . . who knows? Take a guess of who is the best 3 battalions- sometimes its the officer team that is effective and sometimes its the NCOs in spite of the officers, or junior NCOs in spite of a idiot senior NCO (pain, lots of pain). Then the battalion that is remaining on station gets raided for personnel . . . and THAT evaluations is as real as it gets for a simple reason, lives are on the line. In some cases, people are rotated out of the 3 deploying battalions to the remaining BN- broke dicks and losers. You have a medical problem that will not get solved by the departure date? Your now in the stay behind formation. You a 1LT who finally got promoted after your 2LT peers are 1LT or even 1LT promotable- you might be considered substandard even if your evals say otherwise. The stay behind formation might have a handful of good troops who are not medical problems, simply b/c the deploying BNs are already at full strength for that position/rank. They will be on hand to help train the replacements who now all go to the remaining BN. Hopefully along with the medical cases, they can keep the screw ups from ruining the FNGs (well, the book says do it this way . . . but eh, no need to worry about that- it never gets inspected anyway). I have seen officers, NCOs and lower enlisted left behind for the simple reason no one wanted to go into possible combat with a idiot when given a choice. Lol, I know one guy who was going to be taken when there was no choice and left behind twice when there WAS a choice . . . his behavior changed in '03 when folks started making jokes about taking a single use mine detector, disposable LP-OP, and who would be the first unmasking test.
So when a unit deploys from garrison for action, it SHOULD be at full strength unless the personnel system is tapped out.
Which leads to the next logical question . . . why would peacetime/garrison situation have all their units 60%-80% strength? Why not concentrate the troops you have to maintain full strength units and retire the colors for the excess units? Two reasons, you decide which is more important- career path and wartime expansion.
Easiest to explain is when below establishment (paper Order of Battle established manpower) it is USUALLY in the lower enlisted, junior NCOs, and junior officers. Why? What positions are you going to fill when putting the population or at least your recruitment efforts on a wartime footing? Lower enlisted and 90 day wonder junior officers because they are the beginning of the manpower funnel. Junior NCO slots get filled by a sort of domino effect . . . knowing their personnel positions are going to get filled, usually more experienced/capable lower enlisted get promoted to fill the slots rather than have someone transfer in from outside. Usually the new NCO was performing those duties already for various reasons, but it gets made official because its someone the command team knows rather than a question mark coming from somewhere else. Saw it happen plenty of times . . . its considered loyalty to 'your' guys. They would probably have eventually be promoted but it was not something done when command wanted the troop to be doing the job.
And why are the senior NCO and field grade officer slots filled? B/c most professional militaries use 'up or out' as a institutional program. Its how the personnel pipeline narrows to a funnel, weeding out folks as time & grade increase- only a set percentage, as determined by slots of one rank will be promoted to the next. They only have so much time to promote to that next level before personnel would be required to retire/separate from the military (hello merc pathway) if you are retained past that its for a reason and for the career minded you carry a disease! Having more senior NCO & field grade officers than the established paper percentages is justified b/c in a emergency the military service will have trained experienced cadre on hand to form new units and/or expand training programs to increase the influx of junior officers and lower enlisted. But its justification for the military personnel pyramid to be top heavy . . . though it might be said the Lyrans would suffer from a column rather than a rank structure pyramid.
Take what was said and magnify the problems for the pre-AFFC Lyran military.
Now the above two paragraphs are not likely in the BTU to apply to pre-Invasion mechwarriors and certainly not directly to the Clans (though they DO practice the most draconian Up or Out policy) so you are more likely to find it in armor and especially infantry units. This MIGHT have been changing post-Invasion to the mechwarriors as the institutions shifted from family owner-operator nobility to academy graduates piloting state-owned machines.
