Rethinking the Reserves

Abstract : The United States is now engaged in a different type of war--long-term, low-intensity conflict to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq. In these stability operations, the Dept. of Defense (DoD) has made unprecedented use of its Reserve Components (RC). Forces that had previously been viewed as suitable for strategic missions, what we refer to here as the Strategic Reserve, and called up less than once in a generation, are now being used to manage operational force missions, what we refer here as the operational forces, with an expectation of call-up as much as one year in six and recently, even more frequency.