CAPSTONE wartime trace

In 1980, the peacetime United States Army Reserve chain of command was overlaid with a wartime trace. In an expansion of the roundout and affiliation programs begun ten years earlier, CAPSTONE purported to align every Army Reserve unit with the active and reserve component units with which they were anticipated to deploy. [James T. Currie and Richard B. Crossland, "Twice The Citizen: A History of the United States Army Reserve, 1908-1995" (2nd revised & expanded edition), Washington, DC: Office of the Chief, Army Reserve (1997), pp. 254-255.] Units maintained lines of communication with the units -- often hundreds or thousands of miles away in peacetime -- who would presumably serve above or below them in the event of mobilisation. This communcication, in some cases, extended to coordinated annual training opportunities.

Despite the commonly held belief that CAPSTONE traces were set in stone, the process of selecting units to mobilise and deploy in 1990 and 1991 in support of Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm. largely ignored CAPSTONE.