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The Global Reserve Revolution and the US Case
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by César Pintado
10/23/2009
This is an extraction of an uncopyrighted work, The reserve policies of nations: a comparative analysis, by Richard Weitz and published by the Strategic Studies Institute. You can read the full text in http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/.
Several global forces are driving the worldwide changes in military reserve policies. First, the end of the Cold War has reduced the need for mass armies towage protracted military campaigns on a continental scale. Military planners today require forces tailored to combat terrorism, conduct peace operations, and participate in other missions that, if not entirely new, have become increasingly prominent since 1990.
Second, the advent of “post-modern” military organizations— which are more open to females, manned by volunteers rather than conscripts, and less differentiated from their civilian societies—has required considerable adjustments in recruiting, retention, and other human resources practices. Third, despite the demands of the global war on terrorism, inflation-adjusted defense budgets remain well below Cold War levels in most countries. These funding limitations have led national military establishments to reduce their overall force structure substantially and, due to the belief that part time soldiers cost less than regular troops, rely more heavily on their reserve components.
This increased reliance on reserve components presents national defense planners with many challenges. Recruiting and retaining reservists has become more difficult as many individuals have concluded they cannot meet the increased demands of reserve service. Reservists are increasingly deployed on foreign missions at a time when expectations regarding their contributions to the management of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and other national emergencies are growing. Defense planners must also continue to refine the optimal distribution of skills and assets between regular and reserve forces.
Finally, national governments must find the resources to sustain the increased use of reservists without bankrupting their defense budgets or undermining essential employer support for the overall concept of part-time soldiers with full-time civilian jobs. Governments have adopted innovative responses to the complications associated with their growing use of reservists. To ease the pressures resulting from the increased convergence of reserve and active-duty deployment schedules, defense policymakers have tried to make rotation cycles more predictable and conducive to reservist lifestyles. For example, the British Ministry of Defence has formally adopted a policy of “intelligent selection” whereby it generally solicits volunteers for any operation before resorting to compulsory mobilization of reservists. Yet, MOD officials also cite a need to provide reservists with meaningful opportunities for participation in suitable military operations. They have sought to make reserve service more flexible and, by expanding the range of categories of reserve service, allow individuals greater opportunities to define their level of commitment.
Other countries are also seeking to offer individuals a wider range of reserve service options and to facilitate their transfer among the various reserve and active duty components. Defense establishments are struggling to find a happy medium that will enable them to avoid overusing their reserve components while still keeping them “simmering.” The major military powers have widely adopted “total force” policies that treat their active and reserve components as integrated if not totally interchangeable elements—sometimes explicitly, sometimes just in practice, but always with major implications for a wide range of defense policies. National militaries are altering the relationship between their reserve and active-duty forces as they restructure both. Government policies increasingly treat mobilized reservists and regular forces similarly as they link more tightly the two components. They are harmonizing the reserve and active components’ organizational structures, compensation packages, and rules and regulations. This convergence is especially evident in the ground forces, as seen in Australia, with its Hardened and Network Army (HNA) Plan, and in the United Kingdom, with its Future Army Structure initiative.
Reservists now train and fight alongside their full-time colleagues on a daily basis, both at home and on foreign deployments. This integration will likely deepen as defense ministries take steps to facilitate transfers between their active duty and reserve components, whether on a short-term basis or permanently. Nevertheless, many reservists still complain about their perceived second-class status regarding training opportunities, the quantity and quality of their equipment, and their treatment by field commanders when deployed on active duty.
The convergence in the roles and missions of countries’ reserve and active components invariably raises questions over the appropriate distribution of skills between the two. Since part-time soldiers normally find it difficult to match the competencies of full-time professionals, governments have had to decide where the comparative advantages of reservists lie. Although reservists continue to perform traditional defense support functions, such as rear area security and logistics, they have also assumed new responsibilities. These novel tasks often reflect the special skills and assets reservists can bring from their civilian lives to their military roles. In many high-technology fields, the capabilities available in a country’s civilian economy exceed those readily available in the defense sector. For example, Chinese leaders have capitalized on their country’s technology boom by organizing civilian information technology (IT) experts into special reserve information warfare units. Governments are developing databases to draw more effectively on the diverse range of reservists’ skills that might contribute to military operations (e.g., IT experts for post-conflict infrastructure reconstruction missions).
One problem with this approach is that many people join the reserves to pursue an occupation different from that of their civilian jobs. For this reason, several governments have adopted a formal policy of not requiring reservists to perform the same functions when on military duty as they do during their civilian jobs, except in an emergency.
Many countries have decided to keep certain skills predominantly in their reserve components, especially those they find impractical to maintain in sufficient quantity in their regular forces. For example, some medical specialties are rarely needed in peacetime, but become essential in wartime for helping severely wounded soldiers. In several cases, defense planners have assigned certain skills and missions exclusively to reservists. Although this practice helps keep costs down, the result has been a de facto globalization of the Abrams Doctrine: It has become nearly impossible for a country to go to war without mobilizing at least some of its reserve components. Reservists are often seen as providing an essential link between a country’s military profession and its civilian society. According to this view, reservists help transmit values between the two communities and limit undesirable divergences between them (though few people expect the military to try to seize power through coups in the nations under study). One result of this link is that national militaries have become more susceptible to broader societal trends. In most contemporary developed countries, for example, force planners must deal with declining birth rates, a growing population too old for military service, and a decreasing interest in military careers among young adults. Widespread changes in attitudes regarding women, however, have provided military recruiters with a new source of potential enlistees.
The declining size of many national reserve components, combined with an increased tendency for both regular and reserve forces to be drawn predominantly from certain—often disadvantaged— social groups, appears to have weakened the effectiveness of this military-civilian link. In response, foreign governments have restructured their reserve components to expand opportunities for military service. When the French government abolished compulsory military service, it even created a new reserve component, la réserve citoyenne, to sustain the link between the French nation and its armed forces that conscription was thought to have provided.
Another noteworthy development in civil-military relations has been reservists’ increasingly important role in helping ensure their fellow citizens’ safety and security during domestic emergencies. Governments are enhancing the capabilities, authorities, and missions of reservists to support civilian first responders following natural disasters, major accidents, and terrorist incidents. For example, Great Britain has created 14 new Civil Contingency Reaction Forces for use in such emergencies. Officials increasingly recognize that reserve components can supply unique niche capabilities in this area. Reservists can offer emergency responders advanced military capabilities and skills without requiring them to depend on overstretched regular forces, whose use at home could present legal and other problems. In addition, they often have excellent situational awareness due to their close ties to the surrounding civilian communities. As in the United States, however, foreign governments are still defining the proper roles of their militaries in the area of homeland security. The flawed response to Hurricane Katrina stimulated the American debate over the appropriate relationship between the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. In France, China, and Russia, the authorities are also constantly reassessing the optimal division of responsibilities between their armed services and their paramilitary forces (especially the gendarmerie, the People’s Militia, and the various Russian “power agencies”) in managing domestic emergencies.
To ensure the ready availability of reserve units for homeland security and other
priority missions, many countries—including Australia, China, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom—have developed “high-readiness” reserve components. Leaner militaries need to draw on reserves more rapidly than in the past, especially those units that supply HD/LD assets such as advanced IT support and nuclear, biological, and chemical capacities valuable for managing the consequences of WMD attacks. In return for higher financial compensation, these reservists agree to maintain exceptionally high readiness levels, typically by training more than average, and to commit to longer terms of service. Former active-duty service members are particularly valuable in this role given their familiarity with their country’s most recent military doctrine and tactics. Even countries that have thus far resisted using a system of “tiered” or “graduated” readiness for their active-duty forces have been willing to apply this concept to their reserve units.
Providing these new capabilities invariably raises the financial costs of the reserve components at a time when most major military powers are cutting their defense budgets. National military establishments are reducing the size of both their active-duty and reserve components, but the cuts in the regular forces have typically been greater because reservists are thought to be more cost-effective. As governments spend more on training, equipping, and compensating reservists, however, the cost differential between the active and the reserve components decreases. A particularly expensive development has been the extension to reservists of health, education, and other benefits traditionally offered exclusively to regular soldiers. With the roles of reserve and regular forces increasingly indistinguishable on the battlefield, it becomes ever harder, both morally and politically, to deny reservists perquisites enjoyed by active duty soldiers. Overcoming recruitment and retention problems among reservists has also become expensive.
To fill the ranks, governments have had to employ more recruiters, fund additional advertising, and provide more generous salaries and other benefits. Governments also confront the increasingly expensive burden of sustaining employers’ support for the expanding obligations on their reserve employees. On the one hand, the growing time commitment demanded from reservists for training and deployments has made them anxious about potential damage to their civilian careers, especially in terms of job promotion and retention. At the same time, competitive pressures have led even strongly patriotic employers to complain about the costs of supporting their frequently absent reservist employees. Most governments have responded to these pressures by both strengthening (or in some cases introducing for the first time) legal employment protections for reservists and providing much greater monetary compensation and other benefits to their employers. A recent development in some countries has been the formation of institutions like the United Kingdom’s Supporting Britain’s Reservists and Employers (SaBRE) program or France’s Conseil Supérieur de la Réserve Militaire. Both organizations regularly solicit employers’ views about the country’s reserve policies and seek a solution that benefits employers, reservists, and governments alike.
Still another factor that complicates determining the relative cost-effectiveness of reservists is the difficulty of evaluating the tradeoff between the lower average salary of nonmobilized reservists and the various legal and practical restrictions on their use for certain operations (e.g., the typically longer time needed for their pre-deployment training). It is more cost effective to keep certain infrequently needed specialist skills predominately in the reserve components, but recent experience has shown that defense departments often underestimate their requirements for these skills. Even when adequate aggregate capacity exists, miscalculations have resulted in the frequent mobilization of certain skilled reservists, leading to increasing recruitment and retention problems until governments “rebalance” their allocation of skills between the reserve and active components.
Finally, calculating the costs and benefits for the civilian economy is even more complex. When reservists perform their military duty, employers lose their immediate services and incur costs related to hiring replacement workers as well as paying for overtime and temporary coverage. Yet, some personnel expenses decline when the reservists go on leave. In addition, civilian employers often benefit from the tangible (e.g., special training) and intangible (e.g., leadership) skills that reservists acquire from their government-paid training. The net effect of these disparate factors varies depending on each case. Estimating their aggregate effect across the entire national economy is more complex—by an order of magnitude.
These trends have complicated efforts to assess the actual costs of countries’ reserve components, especially since many expenses apply to their national armed forces as a whole. Fundamentally, it has become much more difficult to conduct cost-benefit analyses to determine the optimal active-reserve mix. In addition, limited understanding regarding the economic and other costs of maintaining and using reservists complicates assessing the advantages and disadvantages of possible changes in national reserve policies. For example, it is unclear whether extending additional financial benefits to reservists would improve national military capacity more than allocating those funds to regular active duty units. At present, policymakers and analysts tend to focus on the input side of the equation (e.g., how much is spent on each component) rather than on the outputs (how spending changes affect net military capacity) since evaluating the effectiveness of the latter is much harder.
The ongoing transformation in foreign countries’ reserve forces creates both
challenges and opportunities for U.S. defense planners. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has found itself joining with a much broader range of coalition members in multinational military operations. The National Security Strategy and other core U.S. security documents stress the need to strengthen ties with friendly governments—both to help other countries defend themselves better (including against homeland security threats) and to contribute to the management of common challenges. For example, the 2004 National Military Strategy argues that, to counter the global threat of terrorism, the United States must pursue “actions to shape the security environment in ways that enhance and expand multinational partnerships. Strong alliances and coalitions contribute to mutual security, tend to deter aggression, and help set conditions for success in combat if deterrence fails.” For this reason, the 2005 National Defense Strategy states that the DoD is “working to transform our international partnerships, including the capabilities that we and our partners can use collectively.” The objective is “to increase our partners’ capabilities and their ability to operate together with U.S. forces.” At a minimum, American defense planners will want to keep abreast of how key foreign militaries are changing their reserve components. In some cases, the DoD might consider applying suitable foreign innovations to its own reserve policies.
To improve the effectiveness of these multinational operations, American forces should take steps to enhance their interoperability with a wider range of potential partners. Most foreign governments recognize the value of undertaking multilateral military operations with the United States and should be open to cooperative initiatives embracing their reserve components. If better interoperability were the only concern, the United States and other countries could restructure their militaries to achieve symmetry in form, function, and organization. Realistically, however, the influence of history, geopolitics, threat perceptions, and other more weighty factors means that the basic structures of national militaries are largely fixed in the near future. For this reason, cooperative initiatives should aim for limited improvements that nevertheless could contribute meaningfully to actual military operations.
Reservists can help strengthen technical interoperability, which improves when engineers, weapons designers, and other defense experts work together to research and develop military technologies. More subjective forms of interoperability—such as an appreciation of the other parties’ preferred tactics, techniques, and procedures—typically require close, frequent, and sustained military-to-military contacts. Since other demands on reservists’ time invariably limit their ability to participate in long-term residential exchange programs such as the Army’s Military Personnel Exchange Program, organizing additional opportunities for multinational military exercises, reciprocal visits, and other short-term contacts might prove more practicable. In special cases, resources might become available to fund longer-term exchanges for a few select reserve officers and other personnel. As with other issues, managing the competing time pressures on part-time soldiers requires compromises.
The United States and its traditional allies— NATO in Europe; Australia and Japan in Asia; and Canada closer to home—have made some progress in enhancing military interoperability through joint research and development programs, combined training and education, and other multilateral security cooperation initiatives. These existing activities now need to encompass countries’ reserve components more comprehensively. National defense planners are increasingly assigning important military skills predominantly—and sometimes exclusively—to their reserve components. Even for short operations, commanders of multinational forces will likely need to access at least some of these skills, especially those relating to logistical support, information technology, communications and foreign languages. To sustain enduring peace and post-conflict reconstruction operations, governments will find it even more necessary to mobilize reservists to maintain sufficient manpower. Multinational operations would also benefit from the different perspectives and experiences reservists bring from their civilian careers and their stronger ties with local communities. Their background can prove especially useful in helping with the difficult transition from military- to civilian-led stability operations.
By working with reservists, regular soldiers deepen their understanding of reserve issues and broader societal trends. Involving foreign reserve components more comprehensively in multilateral exercises with U.S. forces would facilitate mutual awareness of national military doctrines, concepts of operations, communications protocols, and other standards. Establishing additional mechanisms for dialogue on reserve issues would broaden opportunities for exchanging information regarding lessons learned, best practices, and future transformation plans.
The 2006 QDR Report notes that, “Recent operations have reinforced the need for U.S forces to have greater language skills and cultural awareness. It is advantageous for U.S. forces to speak the languages of the regions where the enemy will operate.” The DoD Defense Language Transformation Initiative, along with single Service initiatives to enhance cultural and language training among their personnel, aims to enable U.S. forces to work more effectively with foreign militaries. For example, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are strengthening their foreign language training, cultural learning, and Foreign Area Officer program to “form a professional cadre of officers with regional expertise and language skills to provide support to Fleet Commanders, Combatant Commanders, and Joint staffs.” The Navy sees these skills as essential for enabling its personnel to understand the “human terrain” of its international operating environment.
The new U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Mullen, has stressed that
partnerships with foreign navies effectively give the United States access to a “1,000-ship navy.” He told an audience in June 2006: “Imagine the power of having a cadre of foreign area officers who understand the language, build friendships, engender co-operation and undermine the very conditions often exploited by those who wish to fracture the peace.” Ties among American and foreign reservists could help develop international military relations in many areas, especially in those fields where they predominate—logistics, combat support, and intelligence. For example, U.S. reservists responsible for military intelligence (which includes linguists) could take advantage of their foreign counterparts’ geographic expertise to generate insights concerning regional security developments, including data on local terrorist threats. Many U.S. military exchange programs remain focused on traditional allies and have neglected new and potential partners.
The United States needs to deepen defense contacts with foreign militaries that have not historically worked closely with American military forces. Although joint operations with the Chinese PLA are unlikely to happen soon, joint U.S.-Russian operations are more plausible. Both Russia and the United States are contemplating humanitarian relief missions in distant and perhaps nonpermissive environments and even combined operations to secure or destroy WMD assets under risk of terrorist seizure. The International Military Education and Training Program (IMET) already provides training in English for Russian military officers and civilian MOD officials in peacekeeping operations, noncommissioned officer development, civil-military relations, and other topics designed to enhance such interoperability. These programs could be expanded and, with Beijing’s approval, extended to the PLA. The Russian and Chinese armed forces are admittedly difficult military partners. Their lack of transparency, distrust of American intentions, and other long-standing problems continue to complicate U.S. attempts at engagement. The 2006 QDR Report rightly highlights the importance of “shaping the choices of countries at strategic crossroads”—a phrase used to describe Russia and China as well as India.
Despite these difficulties, efforts at cooperation should continue. Although it can take years to reshape former adversaries’ deep-rooted perceptions and practices, delays will only postpone the achievement of this goal even further. The armed forces of China and Russia will remain important national actors for many years given their size, resources, and bureaucratic influence. It is precisely because Russia and China are neither allies nor adversaries of the United States that military to military contacts and other forms of bilateral defense diplomacy are both necessary and possible. Since 1993, many National Guard State Partnership Programs (SPP) have established collaborative defense relationships with former Soviet bloc countries. (The SPPs have since expanded to encompass countries which are new U.S. military partners in Asia and Latin America.) These programs now encompass a range of security cooperation activities including military exchanges, training opportunities, and joint programs to deal with such security threats as narcotrafficking and natural disasters. The activities are coordinated through the appropriate Theater Combatant Commander and U.S. embassy country teams. They aim to promote mutual understanding and trust, enhance participants’ military capabilities, showcase American political and civilian values, and achieve other important objectives. The recent expansion of the military dialogue with China might allow for the establishment of an SSP with China, perhaps using the same informal mechanisms linking the New York National Guard to Russia.
The protracted deployments of American military forces in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq have led the U.S. Government to develop new tools for such post-war occupation missions. In 2004, the Bush administration established the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization in the State Department. The Office aims both to strengthen U.S. civilian planning for stabilization operations and to improve interagency coordination during actual deployments. Its 55-member interagency staff has consisted of personnel on loan from DoD, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other U.S. Government offices as well as career State Department employees. In November 2005, the DoD officially defined “Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations” as a “core U.S. mission” warranting equal priority with combat operations. The directive underscores the importance of promoting foreign language training, regional area expertise, and ties with foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations.
Reservists appear particularly suited for foreign constabulary, peacekeeping, and post-conflict stability operations because these missions tend to require less advanced fighting skills and more civilian-type reconstruction, civil affairs, and related capabilities. To improve the foreign language proficiency and international awareness of U.S. military personnel, DoD will now require recipients of Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarships and Service Academy students to take courses in foreign languages. DoD also plans to create a 1,000-person Civilian Linguist Reserve Corps that would be readily available for military operations. Its members would make excellent candidates for participation in foreign military exchanges. Since these reservists would already know their target language, moreover, they would not need to undertake lengthy language training in foreign countries—an impossibility for most reservists. Through their security cooperation activities with foreign governments, reservists can also promote peacetime efforts to shape regional security environments. The focused Theater Security Cooperation Strategies of the regional combatant commands (e.g., U.S. Pacific Command) should take better advantage of their possible contributions. For the same reason, reservists could also assist with the U.S. Global Peace Operations Initiative designed to increase friendly governments’ military capabilities and their interoperability with U.S. forces. Another way reservists can contribute to strengthening defense relationships between the United States and other countries is to establish liaison arrangements with foreign military headquarters and with foreign government agencies responsible for reserve affairs.
U.S. military exchange programs could also be better coordinated. The Office of the
Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff need to reduce redundancies, eliminate gaps, and exploit synergies in what remain largely individual Service-driven programs. Furthermore, DoD, the National Security Council, and other senior U.S. Government bodies could adopt additional measures to enhance coordination of international security interoperability efforts across the U.S. national security establishment. DoD would also need to devote sufficient resources to entice greater participation in these efforts from both active and reserve members. For example, reservists who join in engagement activities with foreign militaries could receive such tangible benefits as credit for promotion and, where possible, subsequent assignments that utilize their experience and expertise. If American defense planners genuinely appreciate the need to expand contacts with foreign militaries, including their reserve components, they need to show it.
Besides optimizing the participation of reservists in exchanges and other mechanisms to promote military cooperation between the United States and potential coalition partners, DoD should also evaluate certain foreign reserve practices to ascertain if they might profitably be applied, suitably modified, to the U.S. reserve components. Any such application would need to take into account the differences in countries’ military commitments, active/reserve force mix, human and financial resources, and other criteria—including the different implicit “social compact” underpinning the roles of each nation’s citizen soldiers.
First, it might make sense to establish a formal category of “high-readiness” reserves who—in return for greater financial benefits, better training, and more opportunities to serve—would agree to undergo additional mandatory training and deploy immediately if needed. The 2006 QDR Report states that DoD will “[d]evelop select reserve units that train more intensively and require shorter notice for deployment.” The Military Services have already launched several pilot programs to expand the number and types of variable reserve participation at the unit level. More comprehensively, they have restructured reservists’ deployment schedules, making only a selected group of them subject to mobilization during certain time periods. These units undergo concentrated training preparation in order to reduce the time required for mobilization and deployment. Unlike a traditional tiered-readiness system, however, the Service rotation systems for both the active and reserve components anticipate that over time all military personnel will endure periods of high readiness. The DoD should evaluate whether the increase in predictability and preparedness that could result from formally designating certain military personnel as “high-readiness” reservists would outweigh the corresponding monetary costs and the possible invidious effects on other reservists, who now would be seen, even if not formally so labeled, as “low readiness” components. Now that the United States is adjusting the length of its reserve deployments, moreover, perhaps DoD planners should consider the Israeli practice of more frequently rotating reserve units in and out of combat theaters. Such a practice helps ameliorate overuse of reservists, but may prove impractical given the global extent of U.S. military deployments. It is considerably easier for IDF reservists to return to combat zones in neighboring territories than for American reservists based in the United States to move back and forth to overseas operations.
Second, DoD might wish to evaluate in greater detail the applicability of certain foreign innovations to strengthen employer backing for reserve participation. The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), adopted in 1994, has helped achieve its three objectives of facilitating part-time military service by full-time civilian employees, guaranteeing the reemployment of discharged military personnel, and preventing discrimination against individuals because of their military service—primarily by acting as an ombudsman to mediate disputes. Nevertheless, the United States might benefit from adopting certain foreign practices in this area. For example, the United States might want to organize a formal body like France’s CSRM that would periodically arrange large scale conferences of government officials, employers, and other interested parties to discuss the condition of the reserve components and recommend possible improvements. In addition, U.S. entities such as the National Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR)—a DoD staff group that has established a nationwide network of voluntary local support committees—might consider adopting certain elements of Britain’s SaBRE program to help sustain private sector support for reservists and facilitate resolution of employer-employee problems concerning employees’ military obligations.
Finally, although DoD has abandoned plans to establish an insurance scheme designed to compensate reservists or employers who suffer losses from the mobilization of their reserve employees, Israel, Japan, and other countries have acquired several years of experience with such subsidy programs that might provide insights for any future U.S. Government endeavors in this area.
Third, the U.S. Government might also wish to follow Canada, France, and other countries in developing new initiatives to bolster high school recruitment into the reserve components. Since the late 1990s, France has required all French citizens between the ages of 16 and 18 to spend a day at a nearby public facility (often a military base) at the government’s expense to learn about the French defense establishment, including opportunities to serve in the reserve components. Only those who complete the program receive the documents they need to take the national entrance examinations required for higher public education institutions and many government jobs. Although DoD reserve recruiters have a broad range of techniques at their disposal, they might benefit from adopting a more extensive program designed to expose young Americans to career opportunities in the military and its reserve components.
More generally, foreign experience might help U.S. human resource managers as they attempt to apply the “continuum of service” concept to the U.S. military. This concept was advocated most prominently in the December 2002 “Review of Reserve Component Contributions to National Defense” study, mandated by the 2001 QDR. The concept seeks to deemphasize the inflexible binary choices commonly available in the past (active/reserve; full-time/part-time; etc.). Instead, it attempts to offer military personnel expanded opportunities to move into, between, and within active and especially reserve duty categories—with varying time commitments and other obligations in return for corresponding levels of benefits—as their personal interests and circumstances evolve. On the other hand, attempting to copy France’s innovative Citizen Reserve would probably not prove useful given the lack of a conscription tradition in the United States. Furthermore, the United States already has a range of intermediary bodies (think tanks, military associations, etc.) that attempt to maintain a link between U.S. society and its armed forces. In any case, the U.S. National Guard already performs many of the representational and public education functions that the French have assigned to the réserve citoyenne.
Finally, the growing number and prominence of private contractors on the battlefield has complicated the management of American military operations. For example, the higher take-home pay received by many civilian specialists may have led some highly trained military personnel to join these private sector firms rather than the reserves. Another problem associated with the use of civilian contractors is their lesser accountability as compared with mobilized reservists, who fall under the military chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). On several occasions in Iraq, private firms have postponed or abandoned their tasks when their operating environment became excessively dangerous. The rules of engagement for contractors remain unclear, as do the law enforcement mechanisms that apply to them. DoD representatives currently depict private contractors and reservists as two of the four key elements of its Total Force (along with its Active Component and civilian employees).
In October 2005, the Department issued more detailed guidance for some of these questions—such as when military personnel are obliged to defend contractors, what type of armaments contractors can carry, and when private security contractors can guard U.S. or allied facilities or personnel. Thus far, the United States and other governments have relied on a combination of patriotism and bonuses to discourage reservists from joining civilian contractors. The British, however, have established the innovative category of “Sponsored Reserves” to ensure that certain key civilian contractors deploy as reservists in support of foreign military missions. These individuals are liable for mobilization when their skills are required for military operations, such as when their technical expertise is needed to maintain complex weapons systems. U.S. defense planners, who depend more on private contractors than perhaps any other country, have just begun a pilot program to assess how a sponsored reserve scheme might work in the Air Force Reserve in such fields as intelligence, space operations, and U.S.-based logistics.
DoD analysts should comprehensively evaluate the British system, including its possible contribution to other missions. Ideally, sponsored reservists might help secure the presence of essential civilian support assets even in non-permissive environments such as Iraq. Their presence might also allow for the expanded use of private contractors in cases when the nation’s inherently limited number of reservists is needed for more urgent duties—as has increasingly become the case.
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