America’s Reserve in the All-Volunteer Era: From Strategic to Operational

Adapted from remarks by Maj. Gen. Jeffrey E. Phillips, U.S. (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 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 – 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.

Or any combination of any of them, as I predict is very possible.

U.S. troop strength in Operation Desert Storm reached 540,000. Regular troops were pulled from service in Europe with NATO. What if the North Koreans had decided the time was right to make things sporty?

When I joined the Regular Army, you hardly ever saw an Army Reservist. They did something on one weekend each month and trained for two weeks each summer. We called them weekend warriors. For the most part, those of us in the regular Army rarely gave them a thought.

All that began changing in Operation Desert Shield. Nearly 250,000 reservists were involuntarily activated for the first gulf war. By then, the Army had become largely dependent on the Reserve force for several key functions, notably including logistics and medical.

Gulf War II showed that the U.S. military could no longer go to war without its citizen warriors: at no time since the Korean War, with its 858,000 involuntary activations, has the nation used its reserve components has heavily than since 2003 – to date some 960,000 reservists and guardsmen have been activated.

This massive use of the reserve force reflects its transition from a strategic reserve to the operational reserve of today.

From 1986 to 1989, reserve component usage was about 1 million man-days per year, both voluntary and involuntary, according to DoD. It peaked in 2005, with 68.3 million man-days, and has apparently settled back, with the latest figures, for 2014, at 17.3 million man-days. New laws now exist, however, that enable large-scale mobilization of reservists for training exercises wholly apart from wartime use. And sure enough, if you talk to a reservist, you will hear that busy is the order of the day.

Depending on who you talk to this is good. Or it is not so good.

Imagine you are the chief of one of the military’s reserves. Throughout the Cold War – as long as you can remember – your team was rarely used. It trained a few days each year, was funded at best inadequately and treated sort of like a red-headed stepchild by the regulars.

Your eager young NCOs and officers assumed their chances of getting into a fight were slim to none.

Then, sometime around 1991, your team played first-class ball with the regulars; you were needed, you performed, and your team’s value was recognized.

Over time, money flowed in, your gear was upgraded to match some of the gear the regulars used.

And then in 2003, it was Super Bowl time, and you were on the field.

By most accounts our Guard and Reserve did and are doing a fine job – there’s some criticism that a unit which trains on a “part-time” basis can’t be as good on short notice as a regular unit, which is unsurprising; but with a little time, the difference between them fades.

So, sometime between 2003 and the Surge, the bad old days of the strategic reserve were gone; goodbye weekend warrior, hello operational reserve warrior.

If you are that three-star reserve chief, what’s not to like? For any military leader of any rank worth his or her salt, it’s exhilarating to be in the fight. That’s where you want to be.

In fact, portions of the Reserve and National Guard are now used full time, or are on active duty so frequently that they might as well be. In that case, they aren’t really reserves any more, except in name.

An enterprising reservist who isn’t mobilizing frequently enough can find deploying units to hitch onto for two weeks here, six months there, you get the picture.

As I said, what’s not to like?

Well, as it turns out, to be polite, there is a “floater” in this punch bowl. Or two.

One reserve chief, the Army’s Lt. Gen. Charles Luckey, a soldier’s soldier, has sounded a cautious note concerning the operations tempo confronting his force.

“The Army Reserve has this fundamental imperative to be ready enough for the next fight . . . but not so ready that we can't keep meaningful civilian jobs, and a healthy family lifestyle,” he has said. In fact, General Luckey’s team is fully engaged in the current fight – the Army Reserve is in 30 countries right now; an operational tempo driven by necessity. The Army Reserve is home to more than 50 percent of the Army’s medical, over 60 percent of its logistics.

Some 50 percent of frontline combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have come from the National Guard. By 2004, according to Wikipedia, nearly 40 percent of Air Force aircraft deployed for overseas operations were from the Air National Guard.

So what could go wrong?

My organization, ROA, maintains a library of more than 1,500 law reviews written by the country’s foremost expert on service member employment rights, retired Navy Reserve captain and attorney Sam Wright.

Many of those reviews, perhaps most, deal with employers – many in the federal government – who have failed to support their deployed reservist, firing them, refusing to provide their job back on their return, and so forth.

According to Captain Wright, who helped develop the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act legislation – USERRA for short, “An employer might be reluctant to object to the ‘war’ deployment of Mary Jones to Iraq in 2007, but not reluctant to object to her ‘peace’ deployment in 2019.”

Indeed, in the past year, I’ve spoken with reservists – decorated combat vets – who said the frequent deployments and heavy schedules were causing trouble with their employers and their spouses, and they were considering leaving the service.

General Punaro and I were recently discussing this issue; he agreed that anecdotal evidence of this “employer fatigue” is beginning to appear.

Lo and behold – earlier this month I was talking to a retired Army Reserve major general who told me about a conversation he’d had with a manager in a major, publicly held U.S. corporation.

This manager is also a reservist. And he’s in charge of the company’s efforts to hire and support its employees who are veterans. He was approached recently by a senior manager who anxiously asked him when he would be deployed again. The message was clear . . .

This is what General Luckey is talking about.

Absent World War III or a catastrophe of commensurate degree . . . we aren’t soon returning to the draft or to conscription.

So, in the meantime, what could work?

Casey cited the work of retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, now board chair of Service Year Alliance, which promotes what are called “service years” spent developing citizenship and community-mindedness in organizations such as AmeriCorps, Boys and Girls Clubs, and Habitat for Humanity.

Yet, notwithstanding its benefits, a service year does nothing directly to generate an army. Unless it’s spent in the military.

So, given the lack of public will in the near term to consider an alternative to the AVF, we will continue to rely on the reserve components for rapid military expansion and augmentation.

“OK, but it has worked,” some say – a lot say. It has, for the past twenty or so years of war.

But we are seeing what Carl von Clausewitz called friction – a friction in this case imposed by employers and would-be employers, mothers, guidance counselors, and so forth, whose softening support is undermining our ability to recruit.

General Casey, with his unique perspective as both the commanding general of Multi-National Force-Iraq and then as the Army’s senior officer, offered perspective.

“What hurt us in those early days after September 11,” he explained, “was that we were adapting a very good 20th Century army for the very different security challenges of the 21st Century, and we had to do it while we were at war. It was very hard, because institutionally we were still trying to be a garrison-based force that lived to train for conventional war” instead of being an operational force that rotated.

“The rotational model,” General Casey explained, “is especially important to the reserve components – we owe them a ‘contract’; the reserves are our ability to adapt and increase the Army.”

But rotation does not reduce operational tempo; it regularizes it, makes it more predictable.

That does not help a young captain or staff sergeant whose regular and predictable deployments annoy her employer, especially if these deployments are not even to the war, but to a training exercise in Poland or Ukraine or wherever . . .

The problem is deeper, though: our military’s leadership accepts this high operational tempo. Remember, the active force can’t get by without them, and the reserve force craves relevance.

And Congress readily – perhaps gratefully – takes their word for it . . .

No one can afford to see the problem.

Indeed, senior reserve component leaders understandably bristle at any suggestion they may lose the operational role, and with it the hard-won readiness and relevance.

So, we have “regularized” what I think is overuse of our reserve force. Because I was stationed for two blissful years in South Georgia, I learned that one of life’s most sublime pleasures is shooting bobwhite quail over good hunting dogs.

I also learned that a hunting dog will hunt until it drops dead. You must rest the dog.

And our young warriors will go to the sound of the guns as long as we let them. They may sacrifice marriage and family, they may sacrifice civilian careers, they may sacrifice their education. Ultimately, they may sacrifice their lives.

Unless a leader says “enough,” they will hunt.

At ROA, we are exploring and advocating initiatives that would strengthen the All-Volunteer Force while ensuring equity and resourcing for our reserves.

First, reduce the need. The operational reserve is so busy because it’s so necessary. We must get out of contingency wars and prepare for future challenges. The American College of National Security Leaders, a group of flag officers, ambassadors and senior government executives committed to strengthening our national security, supports ending the war in Afghanistan.

We must better integrate the active and reserve components. A 2019 Rand study found that among the services, the Coast Guard and Navy had integrated their active and reserve components effectively; the Army and Air Force less so.

Vice Admiral John Cotton, while Chief of the Navy Reserve, in 2005 directed a de-emphasis on the use of the word, “Reserve,” and use of just Navy – the Reserve was part of the Navy.

The difference in integration among the services, Rand found, is largely one of top military leadership defining integration as the end state and deliberately planning and resourcing it.

In the military, top leadership translates into active duty four-star flag officers, virtually all of whom have themselves never served in the Reserve or Guard. The deep understanding of the active component among these policymakers may not be matched by an understanding of the particular needs and capabilities of the Reserve Components.

We must make service in our military less administratively burdensome and more professionally attractive to young people.

Among its 95 recommendations, the 2008 Commission on the Guard and Reserve, which was chaired by General Punaro, suggested reducing the administrative nightmare of some 30 duty statuses to just two. This would ease the burden of activating reservists and would ensure they got equitable benefits. Acting DoD Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness James Stewart reports some progress on this initiative, but it requires more than 450 changes in law to fully accomplish. As any employer, teacher, manager or parent knows, today’s youth like options and are leery of commitment. (Actually, that sounds a lot like me at 18.) The current military system, designed somewhere before World War II, no longer fits the country’s needs.

We force a recruit or young officer into either the active or the reserve component, and movement between them is awkward at best; certainly, once a person is in the reserve components, it’s tough to get into the active component. It’s virtually impossible to go back and forth during a career, to accommodate changes in one’s circumstances.

One initiative, sometimes called the continuum of service, would facilitate such movement between the components and is very promising, albeit itself is a huge challenge for the military’s HR managers.

We have heard today that an unfit nation can only qualify less than one-third of its youth for military service. But wait – and I may get shot for saying this – why should a military drone operator or a cyber-defense hacker have a body mass index that rivals that of a professional quarterback?

To enhance support from employers, how about tax credits? It isn’t always easy being the employer of a reservist; imagine if your senior project manager, who returned from a war deployment two years ago, is now on orders to deploy for several months to eastern Europe – where there ostensibly is no war. His absence may wreak havoc with a new contract that’s about to launch. Just how patriotic are you?

As evidenced by ROA’s law reviews, most of which focus on cases of re-employment rights abuse, members of the reserve components not-infrequently experience employment problems associated with their military duty.

Companies are absorbing the cost of replacing service members with temporary employees or increasing overtime to fill vacancies caused by mobilizations. ROA members tell us that they are seeing fewer guardsmen and reservists being hired because of this cost and disruption.

The risk is significant in high-demand specialties such as those in technology, where folks don’t want to risk their civilian job with competing mobilizations.

To help incentivize employers, ROA supports offering tax credits in 26 U.S. Code § 38, “General business credit,” to companies hiring members of the reserve components.

These ideas may enhance the attractiveness of service in the reserve components. Thus, they may indeed help attract more young people into America’s military and preserve some viability for the All-Volunteer Force.

These ideas – and there are others – do not, however, reduce the operational tempo of a portion of our military that was never intended for such heavy and sustained use. And this gets to the heart of the issue: we have, as General Punaro’s commission reported, arrived at an operational reserve “by default.” The limitations of the active component, which, according to him, is as much as 75 percent more expensive than the Reserve and Guard, will continue to drive reserve component use and optempo.

The report addressed this fundamentally important reality, recommending that “Congress and the Department of Defense should explicitly acknowledge the need for, and should create, an operational reserve force that includes portions of the National Guard and Reserves. In order to place the reserve components on a sustainable path as part of that force, Congress and DoD must modify existing laws, policies, and regulations . . .

“These significant changes to law and policy,” the report continued, “are required if the reserve components are to realize their full potential to serve this nation and if existing adverse trends in readiness and capabilities are to be reversed. Moreover, the traditional capabilities of the reserve components to serve as a strategic reserve must be expanded and strengthened.”

If the nation stays with an all-volunteer force and continues its use of the reserve components to operationally augment a very lean active force, we will truly need these citizen warriors – and we will need the support of their families and employers.

We owe it to our citizen-warriors – from whom we implicitly ask the ultimate – to ensure commensurate support as they go forward on our behalf.

We owe it to the nation they so brilliantly serve, to provide an environment that attracts them to service, retains them in service, and preserves them as they serve.

In return, I promise you, the men and women in our All-Volunteer Force will hold up their end of the bargain.

General Phillips spoke in his personal capacity; his views do not necessarily represent the positions of ROA.