The Reserve Policies of Nations: A Comparative Analysis

Authored by Dr. Richard Weitz.

September 2007

184 Pages

Brief Synopsis

Throughout the world, military reserves are changing. National governments are transforming the relationships between their active and reserve components, the allocation of roles and responsibilities among reserve forces, and the way they train, equip, and employ reservists. Nations no longer consider their reservists as primarily a strategic asset for mobilization during major wars. 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 domestic 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 concept of part-time soldiers with full-time civilian jobs. The author analyzes the innovative responses countries have adopted to manage these challenges.

Summary

Throughout the world, military reserves are changing. National governments are transforming the relationships between their active and reserve components; the allocation of roles and responsibilities among reserve forces; and the way they train, equip, and employ reservists. One central precept is driving these changes: Nations no longer consider their reservists as strategic assets suitable primarily for mobilization during major wars. Whereas previously they managed reservists as supplementary forces for use mainly during national emergencies, major governments now increasingly treat reservists as complementary and integral components of their “total” military forces.

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 additional 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 domestic 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 need to 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 compatible with reservist lifestyles. In addition, the major military powers have widely adopted “total force” policies that treat their active and reserve components as integrated if not totally interchangeable elements. They have done so 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—harmonizing their organizational structures, compensation packages, and rules and regulations—as they link the two components more tightly. 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 reararea security and logistics, they have recently 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, for instance, the human resource capabilities present in a country’s civilian economy exceed those readily available in the defense sector. One problem with this approach, however, 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 that they do during their civilian jobs, except in emergencies.

Many countries have decided to retain certain skills predominantly in their reserve components, especially those skills 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—an important societal concern even if 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.

Another noteworthy development in civil-military relations has been reservists’ increasingly important role in ensuring their fellow citizens’ safety and security during domestic emergencies. Governments are expanding the capabilities, authorities, and missions of reservists in order to improve their ability to support civilian first responders following natural disasters, major accidents, and terrorist attacks. Officials increasingly recognize that reserve components can supply unique niche capabilities in the area of homeland security. Reservists can offer emergency responders advance military capabilities and skills without requiring governments to depend on overstretched regular forces, whose use at home could present legal and other problems. In addition, they often exhibit excellent situational awareness given 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.

Providing these new capabilities invariably raises the financial costs of the reserve components at a time when many major military powers are trying to cut 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 only offered 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 benefits.

Governments also confront the increasingly expensive burden of sustaining employers’ support for their reserve employees due to the increasing demands placed upon reservists. 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 by both strengthening (or in some cases introducing for the first time) legal employment protections for reservists and providing greater monetary compensation and other benefits to their employers.

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 predeployment 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 planners often underestimate their active-duty requirements for these skills. Even when adequate aggregate capacity exists, miscalculations have resulted in the frequent mobilization of certain skilled reservists, creating 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 of using reservists 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., specialized 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 considerably more complex.

The overwhelming scale of the transformation in the U.S. reserve components has diverted attention from these equally sweeping adjustments taking place in the reserve policies of other major military powers. Although many of these changes resemble those affecting the U.S. armed forces, national differences persist due to countries’ varying histories, constitutional principles, human resources, economic capabilities, and threat perceptions. Since the United States will continue to engage with these military powers—in cooperation, conflict, or both—the U.S. defense community needs to keep abreast of these developments and differences. In certain cases, American defense planners might wish to adjust their own forces and policies to respond to— or even preemptively influence—changes in foreign countries’ reserve policies.

Contents

Foreword
Summary
1. Introduction—The Reserve Transformation: The Change to Change
2. The United States
3. The United Kingdom
4. France
5. Germany
6. Canada
7. Australia
8. China
9. Japan
10. Israel
11. The Russian Federation
12. Conclusion—The Global Reserve Revolution: Implications for the U.S. Military
Endnotes
About the Author

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