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WWW.ROA.ORGTHEFFICER ROA NONA is report is a publication of the Defense Education Forum of the Reserve Ocers Association and is intended to advance discussion and scholarship of THEFFICERWWW.ROA.ORG ROA NONA such a force if it is to be eective. Frittering the reserve force away in piecemeal commitments may solve the small problems, but it leaves the commander wide open to the devastating ones.e mission of the reserve is to ensure victory or prevent defeat. In Iraq, the surge was, in eect, the formation and commitment of a strategic reserve into the Iraq war designed to prevent defeat and stabilize the political and military situation. It would have represented the classic use of a formal reserve—if the United States had one. Rather, the surge was a cobbled-together force managed from the individual to the divisional level. Because of this, the surge could not put a sudden and overwhelming force in place at the battle’s center of gravity. e force was committed piecemeal and dispersed to multiple points. Part of that had to do with the nature of enemy deployment, but much of it had to do with the fact that a clearly structured reserve, dedicated to the mission, did not exist. e cost was in time and focus. e outcome is not yet clear.Any consideration of the role of the Reserve and National Guard forces of the United States must begin with the concept of a military reserve. In the end, the Reserves and National Guard are military forces. On the surface, their function logically ought to be to serve as the strategic reserve of the American strategy, to be committed to the theater of operations at the precise time and decisive point at which the battle can be decided. Alternatively, other forces should be regarded as the strategic reserve, and the Reserves and National Guard should be formally designated as simply a pool of replacement forces, deployed as units and individuals, but not having a decisive role on the battleeld. But if we do that, then some other entity must be designated as the national strategic reserve, just as every commander at every level should designate his reserve. ere is deep confusion among policymakers and the military as to what our policy is on the Reserves and National Guard. is confusion is rooted in the deeper issue of how we man our national strategic reserve. How large is it? Where is it based? How is it deployed? Who controls it? How is it shaped? Is it simply units not yet deployed that are notionally designated as a reserve for battle? Without a clearly and formally designated strategic reserve, the United States is in danger of giving the answer that General Maxime Weygand, commander in chief of the French army, gave Winston Churchill aer the German breakthrough when Mr. Churchill asked, “Where is the mass of maneuver [that would seal the gap]?” Gen. Weygand answered elegantly, “ere isn’t one.” Without a doctrine surrounding the principles of a reserve and a clear designation of what constitutes the reserve, the United States is in danger at a critical juncture of giving Gen. Weygand’s reply. We should not forget the signicance and consequences of those few words. e United States thought a great deal about the strategic reserve during the Cold War. e primary battleeld was expected to be the northern European plain, with the Soviets acting as the aggressor force. Overmatched by Soviet armor, the United States conceived of three counters. First was the application of airpower to the battleeld. Second was the automatic commitment of the reserve—Active Duty forces for the most part—stationed in the United States and able to be quickly assembled and airlied to the European battleeld. ird, and the ultimate last resort, was the use of nuclear weapons. It is reasonable to say that the reserve force served two functions. e rst was to stabilize the situation in northern Europe and, by so doing, avoid nuclear war. e reserve had other potential functions, such as reinforcing Korea or carrying out some other unexpected mission. But its primary strategic rationale was defending Europe, and the means to that end were exercises like “REFORGER” (REturn of FORces to GERmany), an annual NATO exercise to ensure a rapid deployment of troops to Germany. Aer the Cold War, the mission of the Untied States military was redened as periodic interventions of various scales in various parts of the world designed to achieve certain political goals. So the intervention in Haiti had as its goal the establishment of a democratic political process, while the intervention in Kosovo had as its goal the protection of Albanians in Kosovo from genocide. ese operations, limited in scope and duration, were carried out by units in the region and units tasked to join operations in the region. Most important, the balance shied between deployed forces and forces in the United States. With the time and place of interventions unknown, the reserve concept became even more important.During the last phase of the Cold War and thereaer, the concept of the reserve force underwent a dual shi. First, many components of the Reserves and National Guard were viewed as “round-out” elements to regular forces being deployed. As the military contracted—particularly the Army but also the Air Force—regular divisions and wings were joined to Reserve and National Guard units that would be mobilized to round-out main Active forces if they were deployed. Second, entire specialties that might be essential to warghting were shied from the regular Army to the Reserves or WWW.ROA.ORGTHEFFICER ROA NONA National Guard. Examples of this were clearest in the Army, where civil aairs and intelligence became primarily Reserve and National Guard functions. is meant that in asymmetric conicts such as the Iraq war, where civil affairs and intelligence are very much at the tip of the spear, that tip had to be drawn from the Reserve force.e national reserve became a component of the regular Army, without which that Army could not deploy. It was not, in other words, a reserve force in the traditional military sense. It actually became part of the regular force. e division or wing was not complete without the round-out units or the specialized capabilities, whether supplied by mobilized battalions or individuals. e Reserves and National Guard were decoupled from the notion of being a strategic reserve. ey became integrated into the operational force.is was a defensible move if the U.S. military had worked to maintain a strategic reserve by other means. However, strategic perceptions and resulting budgeting decisions made that dicult. e strategic assumptions that emerged as early as the late 1980s were that the United States had such a decisive global military superiority that multidivisional warfare was a decreasing probability. As the Soviet Union ceased being the driving factor in dening American strategy, the threat became diuse. e strategic vision of the American armed forces became:A special operations capability designed to shape regional crises through working with local forces and collaborating with Navy and Air Force capabilities to provide intelligence, targeting, and surgical ground capabilities.A Navy that patrolled to the littorals of Eurasia, providing decisive force in limited regions through air power and the Marines. is was the rst responder.An Air Force with global reach that could provide strategic, non-nuclear air support from bases in the United States and a few dispersed bases around the world.An Army, increasingly based in the continental United States, able to respond to critical and intensifying crises anywhere in the world as the sustaining, occupying, and, ultimately, decisive force.In this model, the U.S. Army, taken as a whole, became the national reserve. Its deployment was seen as slow and costly but ultimately as the game-ender. Desert Storm became the model in which a holding operation becomes an oensive operation when the Army is deployed. And once that happened, combined arms could end the conict quickly. In other conicts, such as Kosovo, the intervention concluded at stage three. In still other conicts, escalation ended even earlier; in some cases with the mission accomplished, in other cases, like Somalia, with a decision that success was not worth the price.As the Army became the strategic reserve, the Reserve and National Guard shied their conceptual role. Maintaining a standing Army is expensive. As the Army’s size was cut, the Reserve and National Guard, essentially, became part of the standing Army. e Army, in particular, could not go to war without the Reserve and National Guard. And as the Army became dependent on Reserve and National Guard Components to accomplish its mission, the Reserve and National Guard lost their mission as the strategic reserve.Reality Trumps TheoryAll of this made sense if you assumed that the primary type of war the United States would ght would be short-term interventions in which small slices of the military were deployed in any one place. It made military sense. It also made economic sense. Maintaining a standing force for unknown, marginal contingencies is expensive. Having a large cadre of trained, part-time forces ready for deployment alongside regular forces saved a tremendous amount of money. In these brief wars of intervention, a strategic reserve was not of the essence.e one contingency that this did not take into account was a multiyear, multidivisional commitment of the Army and Marine Corps into extended combat at great distance. Certainly, doctrine held that this might happen, but such a commitment stretching on for ve years or more was not considered a probable scenario. Of course, that is exactly what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, large swathes of the Reserves and National Guard were committed to battle from the rst day. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the Reserves and National Guard were either integral components of the warghting plan from the beginning, rotated in and out like regular Army units, or deployed as individual augmentees depending on their skills.e U.S. strategic reserve was thus frittered away. Many of these units were not Reserve or National Guard units in the truest sense of the term. ey were regarded as part-time components of the regular force, to be deployed with them. Rather than used as a massed, decisive force, the Reserve was committed piecemeal to the battle, precisely in a fashion that the history of war argues against. ey were used as a replacement depot for units and individuals required in the war. When GEN David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he devised the strategy known as the surge. Rather than having an overwhelming reserve force to THEFFICERWWW.ROA.ORG ROA NONA Contributions to the Defense Education Trust Fund are tax deductible under the provisions of Sections 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Defense Education Chairman: COL Richard S Eckstein, USAR. Vice Chairman: Maj Barbara D Manouse, USAFR. Committee: Col Anne F Hamilton, USAFR; CAPT Charles A. Jindrich, II, USNR (Ret.); MajGen Larry S. Taylor, USMCR (Ret.); COL William G Willis, AUS (Ret.); CAPT Henry E. Plimack, USCGR (Ret.), ex-ofcio PAO; Lt Col Judy M Ford, USAFR, ROAL representative; CDR Rafael A. Ortiz, USCGR, ExCom liaison; LTC Terrence J. Benshoof, USAR RET, National Council liaison; LTC Robert Feidler, USAR, staff liaison; LtGen Dennis M. McCarthy, USMC (Ret.), publisher; Eric Minton, editor, ROA National Security Report.Co-Chairs: CAPT Ned Kulp, USCGR (Ret.), and BG Louis Myers, ARNG (Ret.). Committee members: *LTC Nate Allen, AUS (Ret.); CDR John Conant, USNR (Ret.); COL David Davenport, USAR; Maj Joylyn Grant, USAFR; Col Paul Groskreutz, USAFR; Lt Col Judy Larson, USAFR; Col John Loughran, USAF (Ret.); *BG John McAllister, USAR (Ret.); CAPT Robert L. Pendleton, USCGR (Ret.); CAPT Henry Plimack, USCGR (Ret.); CAPT Joe Wielert, USCGR (Ret.); CAPT David. L. Woods, USNR (Ret.); RADM Steve Yusem, USNR (Ret.). call on, able to transform the reality on the battleeld, he had to scrape together a force of 30,000 troops, achieved in part by simply extending the tours of troops already deployed. e outcome of the surge is unclear, but it did represent the application of classic military doctrine in war: hold back your reserve until the decisive moment and then throw it into battle where the force is most needed. e United States, a country of more than a quarter of a billion people, had to struggle to produce a reserve force of 30,000. Part of this had to do with simply underestimating the enemy. e assumption of war planners, particularly civilian war planners, was that sustained enemy resistance was unlikely. When they discovered that this assumption was false, however, they failed to take the most appropriate and obviously necessary steps. First, recognize that the deployed force was insufcient for the mission of pacifying a country of 25 million. Second, increase the size of the force in general, and the Army in particular, by using the Reserves and National Guard in their traditional role beyond the domestic. Instead of using them to relieve existing units, use them as cadres to build new divisions, and then use those divisions to provide an overwhelming surge. Finally, use the existing reserve force not only to supplement the existing regular force but also as a mass of maneuver in its own right. ere are many visions of what the Reserves and National Guard are. But one of the central things they must be is a team of trained and motivated warriors, not thrown into every skirmish that comes along, but held in reserve to provide the overwhelming force necessary to defeat a serious enemy. Operations in Haiti or Kosovo did not require the commitment of a national reserve. e operational tempo imposed on Reserve and National Guard units today represents fundamental strategic error. It was once assumed that the United States was so overwhelmingly powerful that it would not need a strategic reserve. erefore, successive administrations felt comfortable committing them haphazardly and piecemeal. But it turned out that we did need a reserve. And then, as happened in France in 1940, we found that we didn’t have one. Dr. Friedman is the founder and chief executive ocer of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), a leading private intelligence company. e author of numerous articles and books on national security, including America’s Secret Ware Future of War, Dr. Friedman has appeared on major television networks and been featured, along with Stratfor, in such national publications as Timee Wall Street JournalNew York Times Magazine e National Security Report is published in coordination with the Defense Education Forum of the Reserve Ocers Association. Articles are now being accepted for publication as National Security Reports. e articles should be a thesis or essay covering some aspect of national defense or global security, with citations where appropriate. e papers must be original (no reprints) and a maximum of 3,000 words in length, including footnotes. All papers will be reviewed by the DEF director, T Oeditor, and the ROA Communications Advisory Board. Revisions may be requested, or the paper may be rejected outright. Approved articles will be edited for grammar, punctuation, and ROA style guidelines, and will be copytted to the allotted space. Submit your papers to eminton@roa.org.