Attracting 'Cutting-Edge' Skills Through Reserve Component Participation

摘要

This report focuses on one critical slice of the ways the Reserve Component (RC) makes needed skills available to the Active Component (AC): attracting 'cutting edge' skills. We define cutting-edge skills as those that are complex, therefore time-consuming and expensive to train, generally either not produced in large numbers or, as in information technology (IT) and other engineering fields, subject to 'boom and bust' cycles, periodically making them in scarce supply for the military, primarily developed and used in the civilian world, but less frequently or intermittently used in the military world (for instance, linguists, area specialists, information system designers), generally without a long-term career development path or even requirement within the military, difficult to keep current. For instance, the military is normally a consumer of rapid technological advances but only infrequently a producer; specific language skills are infrequently uses in the military and are hence hard to maintain, often not tightly connected to the combat components of the military and needed quickly in a crisis. The military cannot wait for months or years to obtain such skills when war or international crisis is imminent.