The Army's experience in controlling the utilization of manpower during the war is unique in American annals of management and administration. Although there previously was something of a program of manpower control on a nation-wide level, its administration was beset by the lack of enforcement authority, by division of responsibility as among the executive branches, and by the lack of a clear mandate from the Congress. The Army, on the other hand, suffered no such limitations with respect to the body of manpower allocated to it from the nation's resources. Its authority was unquestioned, its responsibility undivided, its mission clear.

Notwithstanding these things, the Army's task in controlling the use of its manpower was exceedingly complex. It involved the training and retraining of millions of individuals for a great variety of unfamiliar jobs, the needs for specific numbers of which could be foreseen with only very rough accuracy. It called for the dispersion and deployment of these individuals to the four corners of the earth, requiring at the same time the maintenance of central control over their use after they had been deployed. It required the shifting of individuals and groups of individuals as among different jobs and types of jobs, and as among various broad tasks or missions. Finally, it called for the orderly withdrawal of these individuals from the military establishment and their return to the civil economy.