Free Labor Everywhere but Where it Matters Most
Or, why the Navy Reserve is under-represented in the Indo-Pacific
The Navy Reserve was free labor for the Global War on Terror. We complain about it, but we also rogered up for it. Over 70,000 reservists were mobilized as Individual Augmentees (IAs) to support the GWOT in billets that ran the gamut from staff duty to guarding the front gate. And in the early years that was fine-ish, ground forces needed the manpower, we had it, and there were two wars going on. But the sourcing of augmentees from the Navy became a staggering zombie that dragged on for almost two decades, well past the point at which it made sense to be pulling people away from their careers. Many (I want to say most but I’ll refrain) involuntarily mobilized reservists in recent years have just gone to fill empty staff desks to do jobs not important enough to resource with an active duty individual, hardly a personnel gap that justifies a forced one-year detour out of a reservist’s life.
The good news is that we finally got Navy leaders that cared enough to change it. The Chief of Naval Operations’ “IA to Zero” and Chief of the Navy Reserve’s Fighting Instructions 2020 were great policies aimed at ending the wasteful use of the Navy’s personnel and recapitalizing the workforce to prepare it for *gasp* real Navy work. So mobilizations still exist, but the goal is to get it down to the point where they are available for volunteers, or at least support the Navy’s actual priorities.
The list of available mobilizations gets sent out periodically and I like to peruse it just to remind myself how much I don’t want to take those jobs. But there’s something striking about that list. The jobs are listed by respective Areas of Responsibility (AORs), which the Department of Defense divides by Geographic Combatant Commands (GCCs). As an aside, I apologize on behalf of an entire profession that communicates near-exclusively in acronyms and please feel free to pull me up on it if I ever use one without explaining it.
There’s one GCC conspicuously missing from the list: U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Now, U.S. strategists have publicly identified the Indo-Pacific region (which, as you might gather, combines the Indian Ocean region and Pacific) as the “priority theater” for some time now, but it is the one place without standing requirements for reserve support.
This is because U.S. Code dictates how and when we can use reservists. Without diving too deep on these, they vary by specific criteria - how many can be called up, for how long, and to do what kinds of things. The four categories are: Full Mobilization (10 USC 12301(a)), Partial Mobilization (10 U.S.C. 12302), and Presidential Reserve Call-up (10 U.S.C. 12304). The fourth authority, added in 2011, allows reservists to be activated to support the Combatant Commands for preplanned missions (10 U.S.C. 12304b). Most of the existing mobilizations are actually still being authorized under the Partial Mobilization invoked by President Bush in 2001 for the Global War on Terrorism. There isn’t a named mission or operation for the Pacific. And since the big deal in the Pacific is China, not terrorism, the Pacific is pretty much the only place we can’t shoehorn operational reservists in unless an enterprising staff officer shoulders the administrative burden of locating the resources and the reservists to fill temporary roles.
It’s an interesting problem. Calling up the reserve isn’t necessarily something we need to do in peacetime, it’s something we choose to do in the absence of other funding and personnel that we might wish we had in the active component. This is the difference between an operational reserve (using it to fill personnel gaps whenever we want) and a strategic one (using it to fill personnel gaps created by a war’s requirements, i.e. we need a much bigger navy and people are dying).
In my view, it’s unalloyed good that we’re drawing down our support for 20-year old requirements on land when we should be training to be ready for operations at sea. If we are, however, going to continue mobilizing reservists to active duty, it would be nice if the system had more ways to get them into the priority theater.