By Ann Roosevelt
Public debate is needed to recognize the change that more than seven years of conflict have seen as the National Guard and Reserves are used not so much as a strategic reserve but more as an operational reserve, according to a senior Army leader.
“We’ve used the reserve and the guard in ways that suggest an operational commitment vice a strategic commitment but we’ve never revisited the paradigm,” Gen. Charles Cambpell, commander of U.S. Army Forces Command (FORSCOM), said at a Defense Writers Group breakfast March 19.
“We’ve simply adapted the paradigm over the past six-and-a-half, seven years,” he said. FORSCOM is the service’s largest command that trains, mobilizes, deploys, sustains and reconstitutes Army forces for combatant commanders.
The suggestion that the reserve component should be operationalized because the guard and reserves would be repetitively deployed and mobilized means changing the paradigm, and public discourse.
Campbell said the historical trend is that in every conflict either during that conflict or afterward, the nation revisits the relationship between the standing Army and the citizen-soldier community-based formations that augment it. Invariably that includes a discussion about the size of the standing Army.
Such discussions associated with the Korean War produced the 1952 Armed Forces Act, which established the reserve component as a strategic reserve, he said.
Thus, for 50 years the paradigm was that the reserve and the guard would be mobilized in response to a major combat operation, employed sequentially after the deployment of the active component, after an extended period of mobilization training they would be deployed for the period of the conflict, plus six months.
“That does not comport with how we have used the Reserve and National Guard over the last seven years,” he said.
Ultimately it’s going to have to be a national decision about how to employ the reserve components and how to resource them.
“Because for many years, we’ve equipped, modernized, trained and resourced in ways that reflect the intent to use them as a strategic reserve, and not as an operational force that’s fully integrated with the active Army, Campbell said.
This national discussion must involve the 50 governors and leaders of four territories, though Campbell isn’t sure a consensus could be built.
However, along with an operational reserve goes the presumption that an infusion of resources would be used to bring the kinds of capabilities and levels of readiness required to “be able to predictably access the reserve component and use it in a way that creates synergy with how the active component is being employed,” he said.
It’s in the governor’s best interest to have increased resources. Improved readiness and capability means an increased ability to respond to state missions.
However, that raises questions such as equipping the guard and reserve to what level–the same as the active Army or something else. And how to pay for an increased standing Army and an operational reserve.
Another historical theme is that “as the federal government has infused more resources into the citizen soldier formations…there is a commensurate expectation of greater access and utilization. I think that’s a fair expectation,” Campbell said.
The fundamental problem that defines Campbell’s day is: “We exist in an environment where demand for land force capability exceeds sustainable supply.”
“The fact of the matter is our standing Army is not sufficiently large to meet the demand for land force capabilities that exist today and are likely to exist in the future,” Campbell said. “To meet that demand we’re going to have to continue to be reliant on our reserve component. I mean that’s a reality. That’s been true now for seven years and is likely to be true for another generation.”