Issue Paper: Breaking the Mold. A New Paradigm for the Reserve Components

摘要

Operation Desert Storm and subsequent deployments have made it clear that the Army must be able to deploy its forces rapidly to locations around the world, not just to Europe or Korea. Since then, the Department of Defense has addressed this issue and, indeed, has made substantial progress, procuring new aircraft and ships and bolstering deployment infrastructure. But deployment involves more than ports and planes. It requires trained and ready units, and here the situation provides less cause for optimism. For any major conflict, the United States will require a substantial complement of combat service and combat service support (CS/CSS) units, and the bulk of these units will have to come from the Reserve Components (RC). This Issue Paper argues that these units may not be as ready to deploy as they need to be, offers some observations about why that might be the case, and, by drawing some lessons from the reserve components of the other services, suggests some approaches to improve the readiness of these indispensable units to deploy.