America's Military Reserve in the All-Volunteer Era: from Strategic To

America’s Military Reserve in the All-Volunteer Era: From Strategic to Operational Adapted from remarks by Maj. Gen. Jeffrey E. Phillips, U.S. Army (Ret.), at the March 28 All- Volunteer Force Forum Conference 2019, Angelo State University, San Angelo, Texas Good afternoon and thank you for the invitation to once again be in my adopted Lone Star State, whose beloved name, as all who have lived here know, is spelled without an “A” – Tex-Iss. My friend Maj. Gen. Denny Laich [who had spoken earlier in the conference] has occupied a leading role in the All-Volunteer Force reality show; his work on the topic defines the argument that the AVF is inadequate for the nation’s future – and that now is the time to seriously explore what we should do about the situation. We owe him our thanks for his dedication to the continued security of our nation and the well- being of those who serve in our military. The Pentagon, in its November 2018 end-of-year report on recruiting and retention, disclosed some deficiencies that reinforce any perception that the all-volunteer force is in trouble. The U.S. Army’s accessions were nearly 7,000 under its already reduced annual goal. Neither the Army National Guard nor the Army Reserve made their recruiting goal – the Army Reserve missing by nearly 30 percent. None of the three made their number. The Air National Guard and the Navy Reserve also failed to make their recruiting goals. DoD officials on a budget conference call earlier this month explained that increased enlistment bonuses, more and better advertising, better coordination of marketing, and more and better recruiting would make the difference. I expressed some doubt . The Pentagon – never an institution to admit defeat – trumpets high retention rates, and retention of quality troops is essential. But retention does not equal recruitment: you retain troops who are seasoned and advancing in rank; yet combat units in the Army and Marine Corps comprise mostly young privates on their first hitch. Retention won’t fill out a rifle squad. But all is not well there, either: the Air Force is in near-crisis retaining pilots and the Army Reserve reports weakness in its backbone core of sergeants first class, a shortage of about 40 percent; within its entire officer and noncommissioned officer corps, a shortage of some 22,000. So here we are with the smallest army since 1930, and we have the most dangerous security challenges in our nation’s history, except perhaps since the darkest days of the Revolution itself. In 2017, the United States Congress passed into law an “independent, non-partisan review of the 2018 National Defense Strategy and issues of U.S. defense strategy and policy.” The resulting National Defense Strategy Commission’s 2018 report was stark: “. due to political dysfunction and decisions made by both major political parties –and particularly due to the effects of the Budget Control Act of 2011 and years of failing to enact timely appropriations –America has significantly weakened its own defense. The convergence of these trends has created a crisis of national security for the United States—what some leading voices in the U.S. national security community have termed an emergency. “. .The U.S. military could suffer unacceptably high casualties and loss of major capital assets in its next conflict. It might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia. The United States is particularly at risk of being overwhelmed should its military be forced to fight on two or more fronts simultaneously.” The Pentagon’s FY 2019 budget helpfully proposes a modest increase in resources, including end strength, to prepare for what we anesthetically call “Great Power Competition.” Yet the commission itself said planned increases are inadequate. Former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director and chairman of the Pentagon’s Reserve Forces Policy Board, retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, called these hikes “not really increases at all” after inflation. So, to quote my platoon sergeant on learning that one of our privates had just stolen an M60A1 tank from our motor pool and was joyriding it around the Federal Republic of Germany . “Sir, we’re in trouble big time.” That was before 0800 on my first day as the platoon leader, and I was tempted to tell my platoon sergeant that it was his private; but, no, it was indeed our private – and this is ourproblem. And that is why we are here today . Former Army Chief of Staff, retired Gen. George Casey, told me he too is concerned about the Army’s weakness in recruiting. Nonetheless, he thinks the need for the kind of “permanent” national call-up we assumed would occur during the Cold War is remote. Today’s Russian army just isn’t that big a threat; its Warsaw Pact ancestor had 225 divisions; ten times its current size. Recognizing the threat of a war on the Korean peninsula, the general saw an “everyone-to-the gates” scenario where the entire U.S. military would be immediately employed. But he does not see the protracted need that would justify conscription. And if such a need arose? Say, if – as the commission suggested is possible – the U.S. must fight on two fronts or handle multiple contingencies more demanding that we have seen recently? The thinking is that, as the general told me, the only way to rapidly expand the force without conscription is to rapidly increase the size of the active component through use of the operational reserve. I thought about what General Casey had said; essentially, the reserve components are the cavalry – which is not dissimilar from what Brookings Institute national security expert Michael O’Hanlon has said in calling for only minor changes in our end strength. The operational reserve has indeed become what I call a proxy for an undersized active component. We are nearly two decades into an undeclared war on two regional fronts in Asia. Iraq and Afghanistan are not major conflicts in the catalog of war; yet they have consumed our military – especially the Army, which has barely kept up with the personnel demands they have generated. Some of us believe that a real war is coming. Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who commanded U.S. Army Europe and is a man of integrity, as I know personally, recently said “I think in 15 years — it’s not inevitable, but it is a very strong likelihood — that we will be at war with China.” General Hodges added, “The United States does not have the capacity to do everything it has to do in Europe and in the Pacific to deal with the Chinese threat.” But the conventional wisdom is that the day of big wars is over; tomorrow robots and drones and cyber-commandos will do the fighting. It was in response to the same species of wisdom (or should I say “specious” wisdom) that General John “Black Jack” Pershing and 140 Great War veterans in 1922 formed the Reserve Officers Association, to preserve a ready reserve; unlike the policy oracles of his day who were dismantling the American army, Pershing foresaw a day when that army would come in handy for a nation aspiring to continued freedom. I recall that by August 1, 1991, tank wars were obsolete. Then on the second of August, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. A few months later, I was coursing over the Arabian wastes in a 1st Cavalry Division Bradley Fighting Vehicle within a sea of American armor that stretched in every direction to the grey desert horizon. And if the Republican Guard had competently used their Soviet tanks, we would indeed have had a very real tank war. As we have seen in operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, wars – even minor ones – require men and women by the tens and hundreds of thousands. “But,” you may say, “we have an army of some 500,000 active duty troops; that is a lot of troops.” Indeed, to quote former Under Secretary of the Army Brad Carson, “a half-million people would seem to be adequate for nearly every kind of imaginable problem that this county might face.” Carson then broke it down to something that instead looks quite different. At any time in that army, 80,000 soldiers are training or transients and thus unavailable to fight. Another 80,000 are in the “generating force,” training, supporting, and equipping the force. Another 20 or 30,000 troops are in national missions such as theater missile defense or security cooperation. Now, since we no longer send troops into combat for the duration; but instead rotate them, of the remaining 300-odd thousand, with a one-to-one ratio of what is called “boots-on-the-ground-to dwell time,” maybe 150,000 are available for combat. A ratio of one-to-two or the desired one- to-three further cuts our combat power. In 2007, I was a brand-new brigadier general, the Army’s deputy chief of public affairs; and I attended regular classified briefings on the situation. And I can tell you that we were worried about what we were doing to the force. We were using it up and we knew it. At the height of Iraqi Freedom that year, we had some 170,000 troops in Iraq. In Afghanistan at the time, we had 25,000. By the summer of 2010, that number would rise to about 100,000. So you see how robust an active force of 500,000 really is . Mind you, these two campaigns of one war were being fought against irregulars; and as campaigns they pale in comparison to anything we might see in, for example, the Korean peninsula, or Eastern Europe – or fighting between India and Pakistan that draws us in, as Michael O’Hanlon predicted was very possible.

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